The world’s lone most pathetic “superpower.”

Bloomberg is out with a Monday report chronicling the sad state of affairs the US military has found itself in – notably trying to lure eligible recruits from Generation Z with a cartoon series dubbed “The Calling,” which will run on YouTube during May and June.

As Bloomberg notes, “The Army—the U.S. military’s largest service—faces a complex set of problems: the eligible recruiting pool into all military services is small; and the newest generation of prospects, Gen Z, has had almost no contact or knowledge of the military, which has largely fought wars abroad since 2001. The Gen Z cohort grew up with technology, the internet, and social media.”

It gets worse.

According to the report, almost 71% of those aged 17 to 24 – roughly 24 million out of 34 million people – are ineligible to join the military because of “obesity, lack of high school diploma, or a criminal record,” according to Pentagon data.

America’s foreign adversaries must be laughing their asses off.

Oh, you can be sure they are—those of them who aren’t licking their chops, drooling with anticipation at the prospect of gnawing the bones and feasting on the mouldering corpse of America That Was. Personally, I find JJ Sefton’s take the funniest:

Iran is pulling a Michael Corleone on Senator Geary, demanding we let them build nukes and kiss their ass in Macy’s window for delaying that cause these past four years. And as thanks for our obsequious apologies they’re once again using armed speedboats against our warships in the Strait of Hormuz knowing full well that the drag-queen junk-tuckers on the bridge of the USS Harvey Milk will shoot nothing but blanks at them.

Heh. Fret not, though; we’ll never get around to anything as uncouth as shooting anybody, with blanks or anything else. If recent history is any guide, those “junk-tuckers” will doubtless have conned the USS Rump Ranger into a hapless freighter or a rocky bluff long before the shooting stage is ever reached.