The U.S. Should Divest Its Tanks

The best use of the M1 Abrams tanks currently in the U.S. military arsenal would be to give them away to Taiwan, South Korea, and Ukraine. We would not be able to get additional tanks to Taiwan in the event of an invasion by the People's Republic of China, or South Korea in the event of a North Korean invasion, in time to make a difference. Ukraine would welcome anything we can provide it.

Note that Australia is sending its M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.

The M1 Abrams tank is also ill-suited for the conflicts we could conceivably fight, as the U.S. Marine Corps has already realized. The U.S. military is an expeditionary one. All of the near peer conflicts it would fight are overseas and it is very challenging to get its 70 ton plus mass to the front. They are too heavy to cross bridges, or to be carried on trains over rail bridges, in much of the world. They destroy roads and leave a clear trail of where they have been. They are noisy. They are the opposite of stealthy. They have poor situational awareness outside of a flat plain or desert.

The Ukraine War has shown how vulnerable they are to FPV drones and other modern anti-tank weapons despite their extremely heavy armor. Thousands upon thousands of tanks and heavy armored vehicles on each side have been defeated. 

Tanks very rarely destroy other tanks in modern warfare, greatly reducing the utility of their main guns. Their main guns have a shorter range than the anti-tank missiles and artillery rounds that can be used against them. 

They are slow at a peak speed on roads of 45 mph or so, and are slower off road (even though they are much more competitive in speed off road), and the experience of other modern wars have shown that off road warfare is very much the exception rather than the rule. They require an immense amount of fuel and mechanical support to keep running, and those support units generally can't go off road and lack the heavy armor of the tanks. 

They are too wide for urban warfare on narrow streets or in mountain passes or dense forests. Their limited angle of fire makes them ineffective against opponents on top of buildings. Drive a heavy tank into a building with a basement and it will fall into it.

It isn't that armored military vehicles are obsolete entirely. 

An armored vehicles is a formidable adversary to a force without anti-tank weapons that has only small arms. It can ignore the small arms with impunity, and if it has appropriate weapons to engage infantry and more lightly armored vehicles than other tanks (which doesn't require a heavy main tank gun), it can very effectively take on these adversaries. But armored vehicles only make sense in an environment where the force using them has air superiority, has taken out all enemy artillery within range, where the enemy doesn't have modern anti-tank weapons and is unable to place effective anti-tank mines or IEDs. 

There is a niche for armored military vehicles in those conditions, but a huge main gun with a couple of light machine guns added as after thoughts doesn't fill that niche. If one needs the power of a tank round now and then, it can be supplied with a missile or large recoilless rifle round, at a fraction of the weight.

If an adversary has anti-tank weapons or the adversary can attack with ground attack fighters or attack helicopters, the solution is not more armor beyond what is necessary to stop small arms, it is to use active defenses instead. This is a lesson which the U.S. Navy has already learned, but which the U.S. Army continues to ignore.

The Imperfect Case That The Army Is Too Light

An argument that the Army is too light gets some points right, but others deeply wrong. 

How can we have forgotten the terrible lessons of the early 2000s, when losses in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted a scramble to deploy up-armored HMMWVs and Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles? Today’s Army, far lighter than the one that took such damage in so-called “low-intensity combat,” is ill-equipped to deter or contend with the likes of China or Russia.

Let’s take roll of the Army’s 31 active maneuver brigades. Eleven are heavy brigades equipped with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles—well-protected platforms suited to modern war.

Another six brigades are Stryker formations equipped with their eponymous lightly armored, wheeled infantry carriers. Originally called the “interim armored vehicle,” the Stryker was intended to serve only until the arrival of the Future Combat Systems, which imploded instead. From conception, Stryker units have suffered from doctrinal and conceptual confusion. Stryker units carry more dismounted troops than Bradley units, which are intended to fight primarily mounted. But they are infantry carriers, not infantry fighting vehicles. With poor off-road mobility, they are vulnerable to hand-held anti-armor systems, and their units have towed rather than self-propelled artillery. Repeated National Training Center rotations show they cannot survive when employed against armor.

The remaining 14 active maneuver brigades are light infantry formations, cheaper and easier to deploy but, realistically, unable to compete with today’s threat. Under current guidance, they go to war in “infantry squad vehicles”—essentially, unarmored dune buggies without heavy weapons.

Compounding the problem, the commanders of these light brigades have dramatically less firepower than they used to. The recent decision to eliminate the air cavalry squadron from the aviation brigade in Army divisions removes half of each division’s 48 AH-64E attack helicopters, a massive reduction in combat power. Only slightly less dangerous was the Army’s recent decision to deactivate the cavalry squadron in Stryker and light infantry brigades, with their many wheeled vehicles and heavy weapons. The same directive stripped light infantry battalions of their antiarmor/heavy weapons companies: mounted formations armed with automatic grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and heavy antitank systems. These actions removed much of the brigade’s available firepower.

Meanwhile, light artillery battalions still use the venerable M119 105mm towed howitzer, which has a lower rate of fire, shorter range, and weaker weapons effects than the 122mm and 152mm systems used by Russian and Chinese brigades. They are also slower to displace than self-propelled systems, making them far more vulnerable to counter-battery fire and drone attacks.

Promises to offset all these reductions with “Unmanned Systems and Ground/Air launched effects” raise serious questions, given the lack of specifics provided and DoD’s poor acquisition track record.

A quick look at adversary force structure illuminates the challenge. Russian maneuver brigades (tank, motor rifle, airborne/air assault, naval infantry) are remarkably similar. All include four maneuver battalions; three artillery battalions (both tubed and rocket); anti-tank, air defense and reconnaissance battalions; and an electronic warfare company. Chinese brigades have four maneuver battalions supported by strong artillery, air defense and EW units. U.S. brigades have three maneuver battalions, a single artillery battalion, and no dedicated anti-tank, air defense, or EW units. At higher echelons, adversary artillery, air defense and EW continues to outmatch U.S. capabilities, and both the Russian and Chinese militaries have evinced strong commitments to advance their drones and unmanned systems. Overall, their forces are clearly stronger, a dilemma only exacerbated by repeated moves to lighten or weaken U.S. ground forces.

What should the U.S. Army do? Several things: re-equip light brigades with protected, wheeled transport mounting heavy weapons, as before; restore their antiarmor companies; increase the density of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger air defense systems across light formations; replace towed light artillery with wheeled, 155mm systems like the French Caesar or German RCH-155; reverse the deactivation of divisional air cavalry squadrons; and arm divisional UH-60 assault helos with the Hellfire antitank missile system.

Stryker brigades should be converted into true heavy brigades, perhaps with reconditioned M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley fighting vehicles that are now in storage. Hundreds of earlier variants of the M1, M2, and M109 self-propelled howitzer are stored at Sierra Army Depot in Nevada. Should Stryker brigades be retained, they should include an armor battalion, similar to Russian motor rifle brigades. Heavy brigades should be upgraded with the M1A3 Main Battle Tank and M2A4 Infantry Fighting Vehicle as soon as possible.

Army divisions should field a general support 155mm artillery battalion in addition to the artillery battalions providing direct support to the maneuver brigades. All brigades and divisions should include air defense and electronic warfare units, as well as dedicated drone formations with trained operators at every echelon from company to division.

America has not fought a high-intensity war against heavy forces since the Gulf War, when it enjoyed crushing superiority in all domains. Today that superiority now longer exists.

Touted as a move away from a GWOT-focused Army to one more focused on “lethality” and better suited to the Indo-Pacific region, current changes in fact cut deeply into the Army’s ability to hit hard and mass combat power. An America optimized to fight in only one theater is an America content to be a regional but not a global power—a recipe for decline. In the real world, challenges erupt suddenly and unexpectedly (think December 1941, June 1950, October 1963, August 1990 and September 2001). True national security requires a flexible and adaptive Army trained and equipped for sustained, intense combat at the high end of the spectrum of conflict. This means mobility, protection and firepower in all Army formations.

In a word, light is not lethal. It’s time for a rethink.

From Defense One.

What does this analysis get right?

Sufficient armor to protect troops against small arms fire and IEDs does make sense. The “infantry squad vehicles”—essentially, unarmored dune buggies without heavy weapons, indeed don't make sense. They utterly unprotected against even rain or hail or dust or snow or children throwing rocks. They have no weapons of their own and don't have storage capacity to carry squad scale heavy weapons or medical supplies. And, they concentrate a whole squad in a tiny space where a single grenade or volley of automatic weapons fire or IED can kill all of them in one blow. It isn't particularly capable off-road (unlike, for example, the Humvee). The only thing that recommends an infantry squad vehicle at all is that it is faster than walking. Using that as the core model for 14 of 31 Army Brigades is indeed nuts. Maybe one or two brigades of them for paratrooper type deployments into very lightly armed theaters might make sense, but these are, indeed, far too light for almost any conceivable conflict. 

These units aren't even really heavy enough to take on civilian drug cartels (as President Trump has urged the Army to make a priority). U.S. police SWAT teams routinely use more armor and heavier weapons to take on tiny domestic drug dealing gangs in U.S. cities, and protesters without firearms, or a single violent boyfriend and husband or mass shooter with a handful of small arms none of which is more than 0.45 caliber.

Cutting close air support from helicopters with missiles doesn't make much sense either.

But, how can you think that the future of near peer ground warfare lies with heavy tracked tanks and infantry fighting vehicles after having seen how the Ukraine War has played out. The author of this piece forgets that the U.S. Army deliberate fielded few main battle tanks in Kosovo due to its mountains, and that it took many critical weeks to ship them by boat and train to the front in all of the conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved since the Gulf War, despite the fact that the pace of modern warfare has not gotten slower.

Strykers and MRAPs were adequate in the main U.S. wars since the 2000s, the firepower of the main M1 Abrams tank has not been very useful, tank v. tank warfare is basically no longer a thing, and guided missiles like anti-tank Javelin missiles, Hellfire missiles, and TOW missiles have all delivered much more firepower per pound, with greater precision, at equivalent or longer ranges than the main guns of tanks. Traditional tanks like the existing Abrams and traditional infantry fighting vehicles like the Bradley, have no air defenses and no anti-drone weapons, are challenging to operate in tight urban warfare and mountain warfare settings, and aren't particularly mine resistant.

Another lesson of the wars that the U.S. has fought in the last 25 years is that off-road capabilities, where tracked vehicles are a bit faster than off-road capable wheeled vehicles, are rarely used in practice. But the tracks vehicles slow down their entire units, and because they are profoundly less fuel efficient, require more, completely vulnerable fuel tanker trucks to be sent to supply them (and those tanker trucks can't go to the off-road places that the tracked vehicles can). In wars where the front lines are often ill-defined, this is a huge problem.

As for howitzers, either towed or self-propelled, tracked or wheeled, there are also problems. Their range is only 12-24 miles. They are very heavy relative to their firepower. And, they aren't very accurate, so its takes multiple rounds to destroy a target. Mortar systems are even worse in basically every respect. Guided missile systems like HIMARs, or like or Hellfire and Javelin and TOW missiles, produce equal or greater results, with much more accuracy, at longer ranges which enemy artillery can't reach.

We need a middle ground. Yes, Army units should have heavy and lethal weapons like grenade launchers/canons, heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles. But, for just about anything more than 50mm rounds, guided missiles or handheld recoilless rifles (e.g. for breaching bunkers or fortifications) are superior to tank shells and artillery shells.

Also, yes, they should mostly have sufficient armor to protect against shrapnel and small arms fire, and provide force protection to resist land mines and IEDs. But trying to use heavy armor to protect military vehicles against dedicated anti-armor weapons is generally futile. In Ukraine, every single type of armored tank or infantry fighting vehicle, former Soviet and Western alike, has taken extremely heavy losses no matter how strong their armor was. Against these threats, the options are to either run and hide so as not to get hit, or to employ active defenses like Israel's Trophy system, or lasers, or ground based versions of the Navy's Phalanx close in weapons system, or electronic warfare tools that disrupt the guidance systems of cruise missiles and drones.

And, finally, except in extremely niche roles in very small numbers, wheeled vehicles are superior to tracked vehicles. They are lighter. They can still handle many off-road condition. They are much faster. And, they are much more fuel efficient.

A new off the shelf JTLV, which weighs about half of the original M2 Bradley (which means that you can deploy them in twice the numbers in the same time and with C-130 aircraft that can't transport a Bradley), has about the same fire power as the Bradley, and is similarly or more protective against forces without anti-armor weapons. Both are equally vulnerable to forces with anti-armor weapons. And, the JTLV is 50% faster and has a much lighter logistics trail (it needs much less fuel per mile than a tank or a tracked infantry fighting vehicle) and is cheaper. Yes, it carries fewer infantry to dismount, but this is made up for by allowing units to field twice as many of them.

Looking at how Strykers perform against armor is a straw man argument. Strykers aren't meant to primarily be tank destroyers, any more than it makes sense to send masses of dismounted infantry up against a machine gun nest for no cover. Their carried soldiers need anti-armor weapons (like the Javelin missile, or TOW missiles) that have a range longer than the range of a tank, or other systems to support them, like helicopters or drones armed with anti-tank weapons need to be deployed as tank destroyers.

Current U.S. military doctrine is based upon the assumption that U.S. forces will quickly gain air superiority, and will then use that air superiority to destroy enemy armor and artillery, before U.S. ground forces move in. Strykers aren't supposed to enter the field of battle until the armor, that they indeed don't fare well against head to head, are dispatched, and especially not a close range without at least anti-tank weapons for their dismounted infantry.

The Ukraine War, Houthi attacks on shipping, and recent clashes between Israel and Iran, however, have demonstrated that gaining air superiority and dominance may not be possible in every case, particularly against longer range guided missiles and one way armed drones. Traditional anti-aircraft weapons, meanwhile, are optimized against manned helicopters and fixed wing attack aircraft, not numerous cheap, deadline guided munitions that blur the line between armed drones and guided missiles. Against a "near peer" force, slow and heavy main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, with big, vulnerable logistics trains are targets and not assets.

The U.S. Army does need to increase air defenses and drone defenses across the force. And, the U.S. military should seriously consider switching out more vulnerable and slower attack helicopters as close air support providers, for more robust and faster dedicated close air support aircraft to replace the A-10, and drones, in addition to traditional fighter aircraft designed primarily for air to air combat, and bomber aircraft, at high altitudes, dropping "smart" bombs.

The U.S. Marine Corps has learned these lessons. It has ditched its tanks and howitzers, but kept integrated fixed wing fighter aircraft and armed helicopters to support them. 

The U.S. Army hasn't yet fully woken up to these realities and is still trying to fight World War II and the Korean War.

The Foreseeable Conflicts

It also bears noting that wars against China and Russia, which the author identified as the threats against which the U.S. Army needs to be prepared, are two very different things. 

Plausible Russian Scenarios

The Ukraine War has given us a sneak preview of what a war in Europe with Russia would look like. The Ukraine War also means that Russia's resources to fight a large scale conventional war will have been profoundly reduced. And, any plausible conflict with Russia would be fought not by the U.S. alone, but with all of its European NATO allies. 

Tanks have been destroyed at high rates by both sides in that conflict and their main guns have been very unimportant in that fight. 

Conventional howitzers received heavy use early on, because that is what was available to Russia and Ukraine at first. But now, 70%-80% of the damage is done with armed drones, missiles, snipers, and machine guns do a fair amount of the rest of the damage, and while artillery does still play a significant role in that conflict (because the supply of drones and guided missiles is more limited) it is steadily decreasing as artillery batteries are destroyed (the Russian's have lost more than two-thirds of their's so far and lose more almost every day), while supplies of drones are being replenished (since replacing lost howitzers is much more difficult). Further, artillery resources have not given either side enough of an edge to budget the current territorial front lines for years. 

And, if the U.S. and NATO, unlike Ukraine, were able to overwhelm and defeat Russian air defenses (which their guided munitions, satellite intelligence, stealth aircraft, and medium range artillery missiles would all help facilitate), Russia would be in a much worse position in terms of conventional warfare. Still, one might try to argue despite this for heavier U.S. Army forces.

Plausible Chinese Scenarios Don't Heavily Implicate The Army

In contrast, there is no sensible scenario in which U.S. forces invade any significant part of mainland China with a plan to hold it and rule it for any significant length of time.

The U.S. missions in the Indo-Pacific theater, vis-a-vis China, are to (1) protect Taiwan from being invaded, (2) protect the Philippines from maritime harassment or subjection by China, (3) to protect Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories in the Pacific (e.g. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands) from invasion or embargoes, and (4) to protect Japan and South Korea and other allies in the region from Chinese attacks or intimidation.

A threatened invasion of Taiwan is the dominant concern among those possibilities. And, mostly, the U.S. role would to be employ the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. naval aviation, U.S. surface combatants with anti-ship missiles, U.S. attack submarines, and naval and air force resources from Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and possibly other U.S. and Taiwanese allies, to sink as many invading Chinese ships and destroy as many Chinese aircraft as possible, in support of Taiwanese forces on the ground, and to destroy the facilities on the coast of China from which those forces are deployed without occupying them on a medium or long term basis. 

The U.S. Marine Corps, based in places like Okinawa and Guam would play the leading role in reinforcing Taiwanese ground troops on the island of Formosa and nearby islands. In part, this is because the U.S. Army with the help of U.S. Air Force  and allied transport planes going into a contested airspace, and painfully slow U.S. Navy transport ships going into a contested maritime space, wouldn't be able to arrive in meaningful numbers in sufficient time to make a difference (especially their heavier forces which would have to come from South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, and the West Coast of the mainland U.S.). 

And, invading Chinese forces that did manage to make it to Taiwan, would most likely be light infantry, because all or almost all of the ferries carrying heavy Chinese armor would likely be sunk by a barrage of air, sea, and land sources missiles, torpedos, and sea mines while crossing the 100 mile straight to Formosa from the Chinese mainland. U.S. special forces or Marines might briefly set foot on the Chinese mainland to destroy an airport or a port or a military base or to disrupt the supply chain of the Chinese forces, but they would most likely bug out as soon as their narrow and destructive mission was accomplished.

Taiwanese forces would be doing the heavy lifting to fight any Chinese forces that managed to cross the straight and in dealing with inbound Chinese missiles and armed drone with whatever anti-drone and anti-missile defenses they could muster. In any conflict where U.S. Army ground troops were doing more than just tipping the balance slightly in an evenly matched fight between invading PLA troops and Taiwanese defenders, their role would be a lost cause, and would need to happen in a matter of days, before PLA victory became a fait accompli. Artillery or tank duels between the U.S. Army and the PLA are highly unlikely.

All of which is to say that the Army's case that its forces need to be heavy armored forces to engage in a ground war with China doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. Even if the Army is able to secure the long range fires with a 1,000 mile range that it is seeking in defense procurement fights, that wouldn't matter. Hawaii is about 5,250 miles away from Taiwan. Alaska and the U.S. mainland are farther away. 

South Korea is about 830 miles away from Taiwan (about 28 hours or more by U.S. Navy transport ships once at sea through highly contested waters) and this distance would put it barely within striking distance with missiles with ranges almost three times as great as its current longest range option (which is in short supply). This is also too far for the Army to deliver its troops by helicopter without midair refueling in the face of very vigorous Chinese air defenses.

Okinawa, which has mostly Marines and Air Force and Navy personnel, is 400 miles away from Taiwan (which is still 13 hours away on an amphibious assault ship through hotly contested waters). Guam is about 2,750 miles from mainland China and has naval and air bases, but no meaningful Army or Marine Corps presence.

There are no U.S. military based on Taiwan itself, so it has almost no prepositioned troops or heavy military equipment there, and it doesn't have the depth of a relationship with local military forces that it does in Japan and South Korea either.

Plausible Scenarios Against North Korea

Really, the only plausible scenario in which U.S. Army forces would be engaged in ground combat with heavy opposing forces in Asia would be in North Korea, defending South Korea together with its own forces and with support from Japan and from other branches of the U.S. military. This would be a profoundly different kind of conflict than the conflicts against China or Russia that the author references.

North Korea may be armed to the hilt, but it is still a small country and its forces are hollow. And, it would be facing adversaries who had been planning for this moment for decades.

The Second Division of the U.S. Army, which is the main U.S. combat force stationed in South Korea (in addition to about 8,000 airmen), is divided between an artillery brigade with armored, tracked M270 multiple rocket launchers, and a combat aviation brigade with a mix of Apache AH-64 gunships, an assault regiment of troops deployed in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, and a regiment of general support transport helicopters, as well as some larger reconnaissance and armed drones.

The Seventh Air Force stationed in South Korea consists of two fighter wings with three squadrons of F-16 fighter aircraft and one squadron of A-10 attack aircraft.

There are about 300 sailors at a U.S. naval base in Busan, which is about 4,860 miles from Hawaii (about 162 hours by naval transport ship, in addition to time to travel from Busan to the DMZ over land). So, it would take more than a week to get more U.S. Army soldiers and equipment to South Korea that could not be air lifted (although the Marines in Okinawa would be much closer, about 25 hours by ship to Busan plus addition time to the front over land).

There are about 100 Marines and about 100 special operations forces and 20 Space Force "guardians" at the Army base there (Camp Humphreys) that also houses the 20,000 U.S. Army soldiers who are not special forces, and the U.S. Air Force base with 8,000 airmen.

Camp Humphreys is 40 miles (64 km) south of the former base in Seoul and about 60 miles (97 km) from the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea. That puts the base about twice as far from North Korea as its predecessor, one of the main reasons for the move. While the new location moves the bulk of U.S. troops out of the range of North Korean artillery, the North Korean military has developed large caliber rockets and ballistic missiles, as well as a nuclear capability, capable of reaching Camp Humphreys.

Camp Humphreys is 143 miles from Busan Naval Base, which is less than three hours away for wheeled vehicles (or by train) and less than four hours away for tracked vehicles by road. It would take another hour to the DMZ for wheeled vehicles and another hour and twenty minutes for tracked vehicles by road. So, it would be a full seven days of travel from Hawaii to the front by sea, assuming that no detours were necessary to avoid attacks in contested maritime waters, and however long it took to load and unload the forces onto their sealift, to make sealift arrangements, and to decide to deploy them. 

The Marines from Okinawa make take a couple of day to arrive by sea with heavy equipment and reach the front.

Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

Enforcing Noblesse Oblige

La noblesse oblige literally "nobility obliges") is a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities; the term retains the same meaning in English. For example, a primary obligation of a nobleman could include generosity towards those around him. As those who lived on the nobles' land had obligations to the nobility, the nobility had obligations to their people, including protection at the least.

- Wikipedia, Noblesse Oblige.

The American system of representative democracy is profoundly anti-elitist. In its ideal form, which it somewhat approximates, all adults can vote for candidates who are not meaningfully screened for qualifications to do the jobs for which they are elected.

Most other parts of our society don't work that way. 

Typically, when a business or government needs an employee, or an individual or firm or government wants to hire a contractor to do something, the business or person seeking a contractor tries to do so on a meritocratic basis consistent with what they can afford. For many kinds of tasks, a government license awarded on the basis of a meritocratic examination process that can be revoked for various kinds of professional or personal misconduct is required to even be considered for doing that task.

Most of the time, competence and qualifications are considered to some extent in the process of electing representatives to oversee the government on behalf of the voting public by the voters who are given the authority to elect them. But that isn't hard wired into the system (although some more specialized state and local elected offices like sheriffs and surveyors and judges and prosecutors sometimes do have some minimal professional qualifications that are required of candidates).

Unlike elected officials, civil service employees of governments are appointed on a formally meritocratic basis with only minimal political input by supervising officers for the prospective employees who are well-informed about the candidates' qualifications and are generally highly trained and qualified themselves.

Why do we have a system that allows ill-informed voters, no matter how uneducated they may be, choose people to run the system from among a group of minimally screened candidates with no obligation, even an unenforceable and theoretical one, to choose from among those candidates on a meritocratic basis?

The political theory behind a system with minimal screening of candidates and a very broad franchise is that the desire to win elections gives politicians an incentive to care about the best interests of the people who are entitled to vote, rather than caring only about their own personal interests and desires.

The ill-treatment that American society affords to people who can't vote at some or all levels of our political system, like children, non-citizens, prison inmates, institutionalized mentally ill people, people in places like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and people who live outside the territory of the governmental body whose voters select those elected officials, supports the conclusion that including someone in the franchise tends to produce political outcomes that benefit people who can vote. 

Likewise, policies that meet the interests and desires of people who vote more consistently, like older people, educated people, and Evangelical Christians, are more frequently translated into government policy than the interests and desires of people who vote less often, like younger people and less educated people, even when they have a right to vote.

The American political system has made a calculated choice that having politicians who care about the needs and desires of as many people as can legitimately be permitted to vote is so important that it is worth the risk that in the cases where these voters will make bad choices, especially when they are ill-informed and are not very good decision makers about anything.

The political theory, in other words, is that a franchise that is as broad as possible with minimally screened candidates will enforce noblesse oblige upon the class of politicians who are elected in this system, and that having politicians who are incentivized to display noblesse oblige in their decision making is worth the price that society pays in choosing less qualified leaders because a greater share of the decision makers are ill-informed and bad at making decisions than they would be if the franchise was narrower. The political system of American representative democracy enshrines equality in order to create no incentives to make as few people as possible strangers of the law.

It is a political theory that leans heavily on formal political institutions to cause this to happen rather than alternative means.

Not every political system in history as relied upon this strategy.

Confucianism, in contrast, focuses on securing noblesse oblige by instilling a political culture infused in it.

In Confucianism, almost every important interact in life in characterized as being unequal and hierarchical. Subordinates have a duty to obey and defer to their superiors. Superiors have a duty to look out for the bests interests of their subordinates in a spirit of reciprocity and fiduciary-like duty. Confucianism calls for people to be promoted to higher positions of authority on the basis of merit, which is viewed as a balanced mix of competence and good character in the sense of upholding confucian values.

Modern cultures with strong Confucian values display pros and cons. They tend to be well ordered, to be law abiding, to have people who are good at self-organization and cooperation in times of need, and to have relatively few people who are just cast away and neglected. But these are prone to abuse of authority and bullying by people higher up in the hierarchy, tend to ignore positive or urgent input from people low in the hierarchy, tend to force subordinates to sacrifice their own well-being and desires for the demands of their superiors, and are reliant on the people at the top to be innovative because those at the bottom are not permitted to innovate. Confucianism, focused as it is on a system rooted in good men, rather than good laws, also tends to be vulnerable to corruption and not very focused on the consistent rule of law.

Of course, different modern Confucian influenced societies address the "natural" shortcomings of Confucianism in different ways. 

Japan has done a relatively good job at curbing the selfishness of people like senior executives in positions of power, and has begun to temper Confucian values with respect for personal self-actualization as it has become a more affluent society with the luxury of doing so. 

South Korea has been less successful at curbing excesses and abuses by superiors, and has likewise been somewhat less successful at fulfilling the obligation to look out for subordinates. But it has also been better, on balance, at allowing self-actualization in lieu of subordination of one's own desires to the will of those superior in the hierarchy.

China has done a poor job indeed of curbing kleptocracy by those in power, but has done a good job at having the older generation cede power to the younger generation, in a manner that has fostered a class of relatively young, powerful, innovative change makers that have kept its society from becoming too static and tradition bound. But China has done a particularly poor job of respecting individual self-actualization, or listening to the voices of subordinates with valuable input that could be offered in decision-making. China has also suffered mightily from corruption and is deeply immersed in a social and intellectual climate of dishonesty and censorship of the truth.

Feudalism, the political culture that produced the concept of noblesse oblige in the West was similar, but unlike Confucianism, awarded positions of authority based primarily on the hereditary principal, rather than based upon meritocratic selection. Also, feudalism tied the sense that superiors should look out for the well-being of their subordinates to the pride, ego, and greed associated with ownership. In a feudal context, you basically owned your subordinates, and your sense of noblesse oblige was related to your desire to have your property be the best that it can be for your own person benefit since this would make you rich in the process.

Saudi Arabian style monarchies, while hardly meritocratic or democratic, have at least tamed the hereditary principle, by having large, polygamous royal families in which the current ruler can choose the most qualified person within this large royal family to be their successor. This mitigates the risk that a hereditary successor will be profoundly incompetent or immoral, and creates an incentive for its many princes to distinguish themselves in competence and loyalty in connection with the competition to be a successor to the reigning monarch or at least a member of the reigning monarch's inner circle.

Saudi Arabian monarchies do show outstanding noblesse oblige in terms of using their wealth to benefit the actual citizens of their kingdoms, but like most absolute monarchies, are also highly repressive and authoritarian, and treat people who are not their permanent subjects and property as disposable and care for their well-being only to the extent that it is transactionally necessary.

Returning to the question of the American political system, the question is really how we can secure noblesse oblige on a broad based basis, without sacrificing competence, rule of law, and freedom from corruption motivated by partisanship, to the extent that the MAGA movement does today. 

While there is a place to recognize political motives rooted in a desire to satisfy a broad grass roots of society rather than only its elites, not all choices which we have vested politicians with making are equally valid. There may not be one right choice, but there are many choices which are objectively worse across the value systems that are intersubjectively shared by broad swaths of our society. And, a system that makes objectively bad choices because swaths ignorant people in the grass roots don't understand that these are bad choices is broken.

Furthermore, the American political system has slipped away from securing noblesse oblige on a broad based basis from its political leaders, because its electoral and legislative processes and procedures have created incentives to further the well-being and desires of minimal winning coalitions while neglecting or actively harming those outside the winning coalition. 

Also, deep rooted flaws in the design of the American political system that arose because the Founders who designed it didn't have the benefit of the lessons of two and a half centuries of global democratic government's successes and failures, prevent the American political system from accurately translating the needs and desires of its people as a whole into appropriate action. It is a political system that is too gridlocked to promptly change to reflect new knowledge and needs, and is too biased towards rural white Christian interests and the interests of the ultra-rich, and against urban, non-Christian and non-white people's interests, and people who are not ultra-rich.

The inability of our gridlocked political system to address urgent needs and desires, especially those of the working class has been toxic for the American political culture. It has undermined faith in the belief that politicians can be in good faith about wanting change. It has washed away concern about the good character or competence of its political leaders. It has fueled the search for scapegoats to lash out against like immigration and free trade and non-Christians and LGBT people and women's rights and racial minorities. It has encouraged thoughtless and radical anti-government attitudes, conspiracy theories, anti-science ideologies, and distrust of intellectual elites.

Working class needs and desires have been neglected, in part, because they don't vote as consistently as more educated and affluent people do, and, in part, because the economy is changing but political gridlock has preventing timely and competent responses to these changes. This is led to the conventional wisdom that political changes have not occurred because bipartisan political elites are conspiring against them, even though this is more untrue than not and the primary reason that the current political system has not addressed their needs is that  the current system makes it too hard for well-intentioned political elites to secure effective change.

Returning to the question of the American economic system, there, the question is mostly, how we can cause the people at the top of economic hierarchies to display more noblesse oblige to their subordinates and to the larger society at a time when they have gone too far in milking the system for their own personal benefit at the expense of the rest of society. American economic elites generally are very competent, and are certainly much less corrupt the American political elites. But they also have far too weak incentives to refrain from causing externalities or exploiting subordinates and third-parties for their own personal benefit. The American political system's job is, in substantial part, to reign in the excesses of American economic elites, and the American political system has done a fairly shoddy job of doing so, in part, because the system in designed in such a way that this kind of regulation of American economic elites is too difficult to secure in a system that takes an unreasonably wide consensus to act.

Impeachment in South Korea And Political Prosecutions In Spain

In South Korea, the impeachments are tried not by an upper house of a legislature, but by the Constitutional Court, which must convicted by a six votes out of nine in the case of the President (it currently has three vacancies, so a unanimous vote is required) and by five votes out of nine in other cases. Specifically:

For passage, the [impeachment] motion must receive the support of a two-thirds majority if it concerns the president and a simple majority for any other office. Once the impeachment motion passes the National Assembly, the Constitutional Court adjudicates the impeachment, and until the Constitutional Court renders a decision, the impeached official is suspended from office and unable to exercise power.

The person facing impeachment is suspended from office once the National Assembly votes to impeach.

According to Article 65 Clause 1, if the President, Prime Minister, or other state council members violate the Constitution or other laws of official duty, the National Assembly can impeach them.

Clause 2 states the impeachment bill must be proposed by one third and approved by a majority of members of the National Assembly for passage.

By the Constitutional Court Act, the Constitutional Court must make a final decision within 180 days after it receives any case for adjudication, including impeachment cases.

From here.

While this system potentially has its own problems, it is better than the partisan vote in the Senate that is used in the U.S.

This is why many countries follow this practice:

Constitutions in 9 democracies give a court—often the country's constitutional court—the power to begin an impeachment; another 61 constitutions place the court at the end of the process.

Indeed, while bicameral national legislatures aren't uncommon, in many countries, unlike the U.S., they aren't co-equal. The lower house can overrule objections of the upper house, for example, in the case of the U.K. House of Lords, and in the case of the Canadian Senate. 

Meanwhile, "in Spain, possible criminal cases against protected people (aforados) are sent immediately to a higher tribunal (Tribunal Suprempo) in order to minimize rogue judges moving baseless cases forward. If that tribunal does actually charge the aforado, then it asks the Parliament to remove the immunity, and the affected person has the opportunity to make his case before the Parliament and try to convince it that immunity should not be lifted because the case is just a political witch hunt."

I'm not a huge fan of Spain's approach, but it does at least, insure that a politician's immunity is not absolute.