“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great
interest in questions of eating and drinking. “They lived on treacle,”
said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. “They couldn’t have
done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.” “So
they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”
—Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
The twenty-first century was supposed to
be the new American century. The Soviet Union had been defeated, and
the Western model of liberalism and free markets now stood without any
serious ideological or political challengers. Yet today, a mere quarter
into this once promising century, the wheels are coming off the wagon.
In a remarkably short period of time, America has gone from being the
sole superpower on the planet to facing very serious great power
competition on multiple fronts. The counterinsurgency “forever wars” in
the Middle East, once seen as the future of warfare in the era of global
American dominance, are now remembered only as blunders. The war in
Ukraine has marked a return to very old-fashioned industrial warfare
between large-scale, conscript armies, something which few military
planners in Washington ever saw coming before the fact. To add to these
rising threats, China is now engaged in a process of naval rearmament
that is putting the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century naval
arms races to shame.
While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at
home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked
into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken
together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial
capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even
at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the
U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset
by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor
military leadership have been able to solve.
The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch
of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches
are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem
is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have
serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of
aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major
branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and
update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from
twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least
undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to
alleviate this).
Looming over all of this, of course, is the big elephant in the room:
the budget contraints resulting from America’s massive fiscal deficts.
Interest payments on the federal debt are devouring an increasing share
of total federal revenues with each passing year. America is already
running a World War II–style wartime fiscal deficit in what is
officially a peacetime, near-full-employment economy. Though it’s a
common refrain to bemoan waste and fraud inside the DoD budget, the
simple reality is that a fifty-plus-year-old aircraft carrier hull like
the USS Nimitz cannot be maintained forever. The carrier, just
like every other military platform, requires somewhat regular
replacement due to mechanical wear and tear over time.1 The U.S. military now has a massive backlog of such aging platforms, and there is simply not enough money to replace them.
For every single one of these particular problems, there are think
tank reports and panel discussions aplenty to go around in Washington,
with analysts and speakers often putting in genuine, even inspired,
efforts into proposing solutions. It is probably accurate to say that
the military crisis in America arguably has a costly, sprawling
“solutions industry” of nongovernmental organizations dedicated to
servicing it. Inside this industry, “policy wonks” of all kinds find
ample opportunity to hone their craft: writing proposals for reforming
submarine depot maintenance here, or reducing cruise missile overhead
costs there. Though all of this activity is in some sense impressive,
the uncomfortable reality today is that this “solutions industry” inside
D.C. is doing about as well at tackling the military crisis as
California’s sprawling NGO ecosystem is at ending that state’s
homelessness problem. The “operations” may very well be succeeding, but
the DoD “patient” never actually gets better: in the American national
security forest, every single tree has a detailed fire mitigation plan,
yet the forest as such is still burning down. Why, despite the very real
attempts being made to right the ship, does nothing truly seem to work?
Rather than add to the pile of à la carte policy solutions, this essay
will instead examine why the task of reforming the American military
today has become such a sisyphean endeavor.
The well-known world of civil society NGOs alluded to earlier can
serve as an appropriate starting point for our queries, despite the
obvious differences between liberal NGOs dealing with homelessness or
drug addiction (who consume resources year after year and never seem to
accomplish very much) and the DoD and its surrounding NGO ecosystem.
There are at least two common explanations for the former’s unbroken
record of good intentions, frenetic activity, and abject failure to
accomplish the stated mission. Explanation number one is simple: solving
the homelessness problem is very hard, and so failure is simply to be
expected. To expect success is unrealistic, but even failure is
presumably better than doing nothing. Thus, repeated failure doesn’t
necessarily imply the need for structural reform. Explanation number
two, however, is more subtle, and probably far more relevant to
understanding the challenges facing the national security ecosystem.
This explanation can be summed up by a simple principle: the true purpose of a system is what that system actually does.
What is the purpose of America’s national security apparatus? If one
were to give the “official” answer to that question today, it would
probably be something along the lines of physically defending America.
The uniformed military exists to fight and win wars, the civilian
leadership exists to give that military direction, and the greater
ecosystem of NGOs and think tanks inside the Beltway exists to provide
analysis and policy advice to both.
In reality, however, the ability of the U.S. military to wage
physical warfare against peer competitors is in very serious doubt, and
readiness and capability across all branches, across a wide variety of
metrics, is in serious decline. Moreover, both the civilian and military
leadership inside Washington have picked up some institutional habits
that are either completely orthogonal to the purpose of kinetic warfare,
or entirely harmful to it. Yet the habitual error of Washington’s
reform-minded policy wonk is to continue to accept the official story
about these institutions as simply true, and to treat the (increasingly
numerous) cases that go against this story as either oddities, mistakes,
or “bugs in the system” that can and should be “fixed.”
Waiting for Godot
Perhaps the most illustrative example of this mismatch can be found
inside the Navy and its spectacularly dysfunctional shipbuilding
programs. For several decades, the Navy has had an extremely long string
of very bad luck, coupled with even worse decision-making. The larger
history of the Navy’s erratic struggle to find its identity in the era
after the Cold War is sadly beyond the scope of this essay, but it is
probably useful to say that many of the Navy’s current problems at least
partially flow from a real confusion as to what its purpose after 1991
would actually be. Both the Zumwalt destroyer program and the Littoral
Combat Ship (LCS) program were once—for their own specific reasons—seen
as natural steps toward a “new” Navy in the age of nation‑building and
counterinsurgency warfare. Yet both these programs have been
catastrophic failures and have produced ship hulls that arguably cannot
be used in combat. The Ford class of fleet carriers is so plagued with
habitual delays, cost overruns, and reliability issues that they put the
sustainability of the current number of carrier groups in question, and
the various issues with the Navy’s submarines are also well known at
this point.2
On top of this, the Navy is probably the worst hit among the services
by the deeper structural problems facing America today, both in terms of
the lack of industrial capacity and the ongoing recruitment crisis.3
The issues of the Navy, in other words, go both wide and deep: some
of the issues might even be close to unfixable. Yet there is at least
one serious issue plaguing the Navy that seems both genuinely irrational
and extremely easy to fix, which is why it has garnered the attention
of many reform-minded people inside Washington. This is the Navy’s
incredibly costly and disruptive habit of ordering ships without working
out the full design specs in advance, and then changing the specs in
the middle of the process of constructing a hull. Most recently, this
unfortunate habit has seriously compromised the Constellation class
frigate program, meant to address the fact that the Navy at present
lacks a modern, high-performance frigate design. Here, the Navy started
with an already existing frigate, the Franco-Italian fremm
(European Multi-Mission Frigate), which is a proven and reliable design
at a reasonable price point. But rather than leaning into the benefits
of working off an already proven design, Navy leadership quickly began
making major and wide-ranging changes to it: at the time of writing, the
current specs for the Constellation class share around 15 percent
design commonality with the original fremm
design. Rather than getting a proven ship on time and on budget, the
Navy chose to monkey-wrench enough new design considerations into the fremm
to turn it into a wholly new ship, arguably at greater cost and
complexity than it would have required to design a ship from the ground
up. As an added pinch of salt in the proverbial wound, the Navy has kept
tinkering with the Constellation design even as the first hulls are
being built, meaning it is now committed to either retrofitting the
first batch of hulls into whatever the final design ends up being, or
living with the added costs of having to operate several
noninterchangeable designs. This model of continuously developing a
platform after the start of serial production—so-called concurrency—has
involved catastrophic drawbacks in the case of the F-35 program, and so
it is remarkable that the Navy would want to incorporate this
particularly troublesome “feature” into its own programs.
At first glance, this seems like an eminently fixable problem for the
Navy and for reformers inside the Beltway. The problem appears as both
self-inflicted and deeply irrational when compared to the official goal
of the Navy as an institution: fighting and winning kinetic wars.
Finalizing a ship design before building it does not make the Navy worse
at this task; in fact all recent evidence shows the exact opposite:
concurrency costs money and delivers worse products for the DoD than the
alternative. In theory, getting rid of this counterproductive habit
should be as easy as waving a proverbial magical wand, because there is
no reason for the habit to actually exist in the first place.
But how true is this really? Rather than sigh in relief that at least this
problem seems easily fixable, the observant military reformer or
analyst should here take a step back. What actually needs to be
explained here is how this situation even occurred in the first place,
and that requires some very serious questions about the nature of the
Navy as an institution. If the Navy is habitually doing something that
so obviously flies in the face of the logic that supposedly drives it
(fighting and winning wars), and that problem seems so obviously and
easily fixable, why isn’t the impetus for reform coming from inside the institution itself?
In reality, it is somewhat of an open secret that the Navy today has more than one purpose, and that warfighting is neither the only—nor perhaps even the most important—of
its institutional imperatives. The underlying issue that Navy leadership
has to deal with is that the main scenario the Navy is supposed to
prepare for—a kinetic war against China—is
actually completely nonsensical, or at least it would have appeared as
such to mid-twentieth century military planners. The Pentagon itself
estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity today is roughly 230 times
greater than America’s. Many Japanese elites, most notably Admiral
Yamamoto himself, were extremely skeptical of the idea that any sort of
combination of tactics and strategy could make up for the gulf in
industrial potential between Imperial Japan and America, and yet that
advantage was an order of magnitude less than the advantage enjoyed by
China today; it was far closer to ten to one than a hundred to one. To
add insult to injury, one of the central themes of the ultimately
disastrous Japanese doctrine of Kantai Kessen—decisive naval battle doctrine—was
to leverage the vast size of the Pacific Ocean itself to partially make
up for the difference in industrial capacity. The (ultimately vain)
Japanese hope was that America would have to stretch its supply lines to
the point where the Imperial Japanese Navy could still hope to engage
in set piece battles under locally favorable conditions. The
Japanese imagined themselves using the tyranny of distance to draw
America into one or several confrontations in the mold of the battle of
Tsushima, after which the American public or its military planners would
hopefully conclude that a protracted war in the Pacific simply
wasn’t worth it, resulting in a negotiated settlement where both sides
recognized the other’s sphere of influence. The disastrous failure of
many of the assumptions underpinning this doctrine would end up dooming
the Japanese Empire, but at least the Japanese doctrine made some
measure of basic sense. No Japanese planner, no matter how optimistic
they were about Japan’s chances, even considered for a second the idea
that a war with America was somehow going to be winnable if it had to be
fought off the Californian coast.
Today, the Navy is fairly candid about the fact that it lacks enough
vessels to actually escort sealift ships across the Pacific.4
For its part, Military Sealift Command is equally candid about the fact
that there aren’t enough ships to actually resupply American forces
anyway. Darkening the picture even further, the closure of the Red Hill
Underground Fuel Storage Facility at Honolulu has left a large hole in
America’s Pacific-facing logistical network, with no realistic
replacement seemingly in the pipeline. Pacific wargame scenarios
regularly have the American side running out of precision weapons weeks
or days into the fighting, with almost no capacity to replenish stocks.
This admitted inability to actually sustain munition logistics for the
long haul probably doesn’t even matter, however, as American defense
companies likely cannot source replacements to Chinese subcomponents and
materials at anything approaching necessary scale.
In addition to these problems, the Navy today cannot even keep up
with peacetime repair and maintenance demand on its vessels. With surge
capacity and spare drydocks already close to nonexistent, the capacity
to repair any significant number of vessels damaged in combat
is simply beyond American capabilities at present. It is often said that
wars are won through logistics, and this is doubly true when those wars
are supposed to take place thousands of miles of open ocean away. Yet
before the first shot has been fired in anger across the Taiwan strait,
the American military has already admitted that it cannot build enough
ships, cannot staff the ships that are being built, cannot repair ships
that get damaged, cannot protect seaborne logistics, and cannot source
enough sealift vessels for those seaborne logistics to matter, and in
any case it currently lacks the sailors for those ships anyway. All of
these points are not actually controversial in and of themselves: they
are all regularly discussed inside the Beltway establishment. What is
controversial and in fact incredibly sensitive, however, is to combine
all these points of incontrovertible data into the kind of military
conclusion that would have appeared as natural and indeed fully inevitable to any sane American or Japanese war planner in the 1930s.
Thus, what appears as a basic kind of “irrationality” inside the
Constellation program actually makes a good deal of logical sense. The
official premise of the Navy’s activity—preparing to fight China on the other side of the Pacific Ocean—is openly nonsensical and cannot realistically be achieved no matter what Navy leadership does or does not do. The fremm frigate design might be cheap, proven, and effective, but it is just a ship. The moment it is commissioned, it is a known quantity. For every fremm-like
frigate America can roll out, China can realistically roll out ten,
fifty, or even a hundred equivalents. On the most basic level of
military analysis, it essentially doesn’t matter whether the Navy builds
another frigate or not, because the math of the situation is simply too
overwhelming. On top of that, some of the Navy’s obvious lack of
urgency when it comes to getting more ships on the line as quickly as
possible likely stems from the fact that it has its hands full just
trying to find enough sailors and dry dock time for the ships it already
has.
If one considers that the stated purpose of the Navy today is to
build ships and win wars, the Constellation program is a disaster in the
making. If, however, one considers that the actual purpose of the Navy
is to project an image of credibility, then non-finalized,
concurrent, ever-shifting designs that never get done and always seem to
be just around the corner, just waiting for the inclusion of some “game
changer” bit of technology, is actually rational and reasonable. The
constant, obsessive fixation with various illusory “game changers” was
never in much evidence in America in the 1930s and ’40s, when it enjoyed
true industrial supremacy. Now, it is endemic to every branch of the
U.S. military, and it makes complete sense given the institutional and
ideological pressures that military leadership faces. For its part,
given the impossibility of the military math it is faced with, Navy
leadership is increasingly standing under the leafless tree and waiting
for Godot. Sacrificing the ability to actually build ships on time is
not such a great loss, after all, because no ships that can be built
today have the power to upend a basic 200:1 ratio in favor of the enemy.
Maintaining a narrative that the next American ship (whenever it
appears) will have some sort of radical capability that will transform
the basic calculus of war actually carries with it demonstrable benefits
and a low amount of drawbacks, compared to all the other alternatives.
Especially if the careers and self-image of people in Navy leadership
are to be considered, it represents the safest and most reliable choice.
Mission: Impossible
This is hardly a point limited to the issue of shipbuilding
contracts, or even to the Navy itself. In point of fact, the entire U.S.
military today is mired in the same deadlock between an increasingly
nonsensical and unfeasible “official” institutional purpose and the
implicit demands placed on these institutions: the need to maintain
ideological credibility, projecting an image of strength vis- à vis any
peer competitor. The suicide epidemic inside the U.S. Army is just one
good case study among many with regard to the costs of maintaining this
front: it is no coincidence that the most suicide-prone units inside the
Army today are the armor units. Both the Army Times and the New York Times
have published reports depicting the massive strain these armor units
are under today, as they are constantly rotated around the world in an
effort to demonstrate that the U.S. military is ready and able to fight
whenever and wherever it is called upon.5
Using increasingly ancient equipment that is prone to mechanical
breakdown, with spotty and sometimes insufficient supplies of spare
parts, the soldiers inside armor units regularly work truly nightmarish
hours. This has predictable effects on these soldiers’ families, as well
their own physical and mental health. The constant churn of
deployments, exercises, and endless maintenance is rapidly wearing down
both the vehicles and men inside units like the 66th Armor Regiment:
this is not just a problem of growing malaise and bitterness among the
soldiers, but one that has real implications for current and future Army
retention.
Yet again, with respect to the official purpose of the Army, this
habit of back-breaking, counterproductive exercise and deployment
schedules seems like an irrational state of affairs. As long as we only
consider the practical warfighting aspect of this situation, the
“problem” seems entirely self-inflicted, and the “fix” is both obvious,
simple, and free. If the grueling tempo of your exercises and rotations
(ostensibly meant to improve or at least demonstrate unit readiness) is
actually having a negative effect on your ability to fight, simply do
fewer exercises and relax the operational tempo. But the point of an
institution is what it actually does; for the Army, this means that it is more concerned with convincing the American public—and a gerontocratic, increasingly senile American leadership class—that
it is still the same army as it was back in the good old days. Today,
that adage is increasingly only true for the wrong reasons: M1A1 tank
production ended all the way back in 1992, but the image of the high
tech, cutting edge, materially superior U.S. military has carried on for
decades. In 2025, nineteen-year-old mechanics are trying to keep
thirty- or forty-year-old tanks running for yet another “show of force”
deployment overseas, but the American political class is very obviously
still stuck in their own timeless Neverland, still imagining that what
was new in 1992 or 1978 is just as new and groundbreaking today. This
outdated ideological belief, together with the reality of aging
equipment and the changing requirements of warfare, means that all the
services are now trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, by the curse of the
Red Queen’s mirror: in order to stay in the same place and not move an
inch, they must run faster and faster every year. The Air Force is
saddled with maintaining bomber airframes whose production lines ended
decades ago; the Army is cannibalizing its own motor pools and driving
its own soldiers to quit the service or take their own lives in order to
keep appearances going. The Navy now has fewer than three hundred total
vessels in the fleet, but it is still being given the same amount of
forward presence missions as when it had twice that number. It still
deploys its carrier strike groups regularly across the world, but the
actual number of ships deployed in those strike groups has shrunk
dramatically since the 1990s.
Faced with this creeping crisis inside the military, the political
class in Washington seems happy to contribute to it further by issuing
increasingly out-of-touch demands and edicts. For example, the 2023
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) carried with it a new
statutory requirement that the Navy maintain at least thirty-one
“operational” amphibious warfare ships. Of course, this statutory demand
arrives when the readiness of the Navy’s fleet of amphibious ships is
already in steep decline.6
The likely result of Congress simply mandating a thirty-one
“operational” ship requirement at a time when the Navy lacks the
practical capacity to actually fulfill it is a situation often mocked in
old jokes about the most dysfunctional parts of the Soviet Union. Going
forward, the Navy will in all likelihood simply lie and pretend that
non-seaworthy, de facto mothballed ships are actually “operational,” and
Congress will mostly go along by pretending to actually believe the
lie. Yet an even more glaring illustration of the gap between
ideological projections and reality came more recently in the form of
the military’s embarrassing and ultimately fruitless attempts at
constructing an aid pier in Gaza.
Most coverage of that event focused on the political issues
surrounding the pier, and the general geopolitical context of the Gaza
crisis that the U.S. military was recklessly being thrust into. What
fewer people picked up on, however, was that the mission was doomed to
fail from the start, purely due to technical reasons: the Joint
Logistics Over-the-Shore (jlots) system
being put in place was simply not rated to handle the regular sea states
in the area. The almost immediate scuttling of the Gaza pier due to
damage from rough seas was not a freak accident, or attributable to some
sequence of bad luck: it was a completely foreseeable and indeed
inevitable outcome. The relevant point that needs to be made regarding
the Gaza pier has nothing to do with the Gaza crisis itself; rather, it
is that the military was made to expend real logistical assets (assets
which are in increasingly short supply) on a mission that could not work
even on paper. No one with relevant experience inside the military
would have been ignorant of something so basic as looking up a sea state
chart; yet at no point was the practical impossibility of the mission
allowed to prevent it from going forward. To put it bluntly, the
military was given a deeply ideological mission, one that would
assuredly result both in failure and damage to or destruction of
limited logistical assets. Military leadership, knowing which side their
bread was actually buttered on, complied: the mission duly failed, and
the limited equipment was damaged and destroyed.
The amount of fraud and deception that goes into maintaining this
ideological, implicit institutional purpose of the American military is
difficult to overstate. Nor is it even a real secret: as far back as
2015, the Army War College published a report on this very issue, in
which the authors laid out their findings of widespread juking of stats
and lying about requirements, personnel levels, and so on.7 This widespread epidemic of lying—already serious enough back in 2015—was
not due to individual moral failings, nor “bugs in the system”; more
ominously, most of the lying actually formed a sort of institutional
grease that was increasingly becoming required just to keep the wheels
turning. The more recent New York Times article on military
suicides gives a particularly macabre example of how this works in
practice: here, a unit commander compels a soldier with acute suicidal
ideation to deploy overseas just so he can include that soldier in the
readiness statistics. Once he arrives, he is then immediately sent back
stateside again, as he cannot actually legally participate in the
exercise or even be trusted in the presence of any loaded firearms.
Yet again, from a warfighting perspective, this behavior shouldn’t actually be happening. But it is happening, because within the institutional setting of the military—which is heavily shaped by the expectations set by a deeply ideological civilian and uniformed leadership—this
sort of behavior not only makes sense, it is often required. To
buttress this point with a non-Army example, a major theme covered in
the reporting of the 2010s USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain
collisions (which together led to the loss of seventeen sailors and
constitute two of the most serious disasters the Navy has ever suffered
in peacetime) was that ship captains were expected to sail even if their
personnel situation or maintenance backlogs should not have allowed it;
captains lied to their admirals who in turn lied to their political
superiors. Rather than grapple with how lying had become an
institutional requirement inside the Seventh Fleet, the Navy instead
chose to blame these accidents on the ship captains themselves, even
though the captains had repeatedly issued warnings to their superiors
about the risk of serious accidents.8
A Fading Wonderland
Here, we must finally make a very basic critique of the entire
national security establishment in America, and particularly of the
people intending to bring about reform. No thinker, no policy wonk or
international relations buff inside the Beltway, would have any problem
whatsoever with the suggestion that the military apparatus inside a
rival country like Russia, China, or Iran was in fact not a “pure”
kinetic instrument but also a tool of ideology. Indeed, the suggestion
that modern-day Russia possesses a “pure” military, completely shorn of
any function as a tool of regime legitimacy and regime ideology, would
typically be dismissed inside the Beltway. Of course the
Russian military faces a steady flow of demands on its behavior
conditioned by the Kremlin’s desire to appear credible and tough; of course
this happens even in cases where this competes with the practical
demands of warfighting. This dual nature of the Russian or Chinese militaries—both tools of kinetic warfare and tools of ideology—is
simply accepted without argument in D.C., just as everyone willingly
accepts, without the need for any particular evidence, that the tension
between these two functions often results in a meaningful degradation of
capability and readiness for these militaries. Yet for all this casual
acceptance of the very real nature of this dangerous and destructive
institutional dynamic abroad, America’s most serious thinkers generally
display a shocking naïveté and lack of awareness about how this same
sort of dynamic plays out inside America itself.
The purpose of an institution is what that institution actually does.
The Army and Navy today both prepare for war, and also sacrifice their
own resources and cannibalize their own readiness in order to maintain a
Potemkin village of capability for public and congressional
consumption. In the case where these two demands intersect, narrative
maintenance tends to win over practical warfighting concerns. The Army
unit commander who sends a suicidal soldier to Poland or Romania for
thirty-eight hours in order to juke the stats is only punished if the
media get ahold of the story; the commander who refuses to do so and
voluntarily files poor readiness reports to his superiors is punished by
default. America’s military brass regularly respond to impractical or
nonsensical demands from the political leadership through lying or
juking the stats. Army unit commanders and Navy ship captains, faced
with similarly impossible requirements, lie to their superiors. Their
subordinates, in turn, lie to their commanders, and so on it goes all
the way down through the ranks. In this context, reform is impossible
without first addressing why this entire sprawling network of institutionalized lying has come into being in the first place.
Criticizing the logic of the Navy endlessly waiting for Godot in
terms of frigate design without ever examining the even more lopsided
logic of how the Navy is supposed to use that frigate is self-defeating.
Currently, the idea is that the Navy will use said frigate to fight a
war on the other side of the Pacific, against an industrially superior
power, while lacking the capacity to sustain logistics, replace
casualties, or repair combat damage. No serious American military
planner from the mid-twentieth century (back when the United States
enjoyed a massive industrial advantage compared to the rest of the
world) would consider this to be a coherent or practical goal to begin
with. Let us thus put the real nature of the issue at stake in the most
blunt terms possible: the Navy is being asked to maintain the dream of the American empire.
Lacking a political class willing to seriously acknowledge or address
the very real crisis this empire now faces, the burden of that political
crisis is being shifted onto the shoulders of admirals and generals who
were never intended to take on that role in the first place, nor do
they have the capability to do so. Yet even so, by promising some
unspecified, undefinable capability at some hazy point in the future,
the Navy is, in its own peculiar way, doing the best job it can with the
hand it has been dealt. This job cannot be done by delivering a handful
of unremarkable Italian frigates, frigates the Navy cannot
realistically repair in wartime nor fully crew in peacetime in any case.
The Navy is not just building ships; it is trying to shield an
increasingly fragile American leadership class from reality, and like
the other services, it is paying a ruinous cost to do so.
The task facing the serious military reformer in 2025 is not actually
to look for points of “irrationality” inside the Pentagon that can then
be treated with various “quick fixes.” While there is much inside the
American national security apparatus that is broken and in need of
repair, efforts to do so will come to nothing unless the most basic
question of all is answered first: what is the intended point of the U.S. military?
Is it to fight wars and physically protect America? Is it to protect
the ideological credibility and legitimacy of the current American
political class? Is it some possible mix of the two? If you cannot
answer which one of these purposes your “fixes” to the military are
meant to address, your efforts at reform will invariably be defeated by
institutional pressures for which you have no answer.
Additionally, “credibility” or “regime legitimacy” are in no way
frivolous or unnecessary requirements. In the years leading up to the
bankruptcy that sparked the French revolution, the controller-general of
finances to Louis XVI consciously did not try to cut back on
“frivolous” spending at Versailles, reasoning (probably quite correctly)
that cutting this very obvious waste would cost more money than it
would save, as it would likely signal to creditors that France had
passed the financial point of no return. For the American empire, facing
a recruitment crisis, a hollowed out defense industrial base, and
looming fiscal ruin, ideological credibility may be just as important as
physical capability.
Today, the most earnest policy wonk in D.C. finds himself tumbling,
like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a strange world where the rules
make no sense, and where things are all out of place. Fixes are
proposed; panels are held; good, sensible reforms are constantly
suggested: yet nothing works, everything keeps getting worse, and there
seems to be no way out of the crisis. But the strangeness of this world
is all an illusion; an effect of the blindfolds put on by those inside
it. To the average American war planner of the early twentieth century,
the things that are being spoken of as normal today would have appeared
as truly insane. Yet the people inside the Beltway today are no more
“mad” than their more confident twentieth-century predecessors; they are
simply acting rationally in the context of a very different set of
institutional pressures.
The missing link inside the American policy establishment today is a
basic discussion about the future and sustainability of the empire in
light of America’s industrial weakness and cultural confusion. Powerful
ideological and political constraints, however, currently make such
discussions not just impossible but also career-ending for any
individual who would dare to attempt them. The result of this chronic
unwillingness to even acknowledge basic first principles inside
Washington is to trap the Navy, Army, and all the other branches of the
U.S. military on the far side of the Red Queen’s magic mirror: forcing
them to constantly make impossible trade-offs and sacrifices just to
postpone necessary discussions a little bit into the future, dooming
them to running faster and faster just so that America’s leadership
class won’t ever have to move an inch. In this clash between ideology
and reality, ideology is almost always the victor. And it is winning at
the cost of destroying the U.S. military itself.
To a student of human history, the woeful state of America’s national
security establishment does not appear as some sort of great mystery.
It is far from unique; in fact, it might not even be noteworthy.
It is just the normal stuff of human history, going back thousands of
years. The USSR is still very much in living memory; what went on in
that empire in its final decade wasn’t all that different from what is
happening in America today. Despite all the hype, America’s empire is
not actually very exceptional; it is far more similar to than different
from history’s many other empires that have all risen to wealth and
glory only to then fall away. The cancer eating away at the U.S.
military is of a similar genus to that which once ate away at the Red
Army; the oblivious and out-of-touch responses coming from elites inside
Washington aren’t particularly different from the attitudes of Soviet
elites of days past. Having foolishly succumbed to the slow-acting
poison of an ideology that proclaims that America possesses the first
and only nonideological military in the world, America’s civilian and
military elites now find themselves trapped in a grim and decaying
Wonderland of their own making.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 213–27.
Notes
Photo credit: U.S. Naval Institute.
1 To get a sense of how massive this
problem actually is, the 2022 Government Accountability Office report on
weapon system sustainment for airframes is a good starting point.
Almost every airframe type used by the services has growing and very
serious sustainment bottlenecks. U.S. Government Accountability Office,
“Weapon System Sustainment: Aircraft Mission Capable Goals Were
Generally Not Met and Sustainment Costs Varied by Aircraft,” November
2022.
2 See, for example, Jerry Hendrix, “Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base,” American Affairs 8,
no. 2 (Summer 2024): 22–34; U.S. Government Accountability Office,
“Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Address Costly Maintenance Delays
Facing the Attack Submarine Fleet,” November 2018.
3 Though it is beyond the scope of this essay, it should
nevertheless be noted that the extent of the current recruitment crisis
is often severely understated in the media. The debates around this
issue tend to focus on the military’s struggles to meet its on-paper
authorized strength and its peacetime commitments. What’s less often
talked about is that the U.S. military at present has essentially no
realistic way to absorb and replace any casualties in real warfare:
Katie Crombe and John A. Nagle, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine
for the Future Force,” US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters 53, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 21–31.
4 See, for example, David B. Larter, “‘You’re on Your Own’: US Sealift Can’t Count on Navy Escorts in the Next Big War,” DefenseNews, October 10, 2018.
5 Davis Winkie, “Broken Track: Why the Iron Knights Chose to Speak Out about Suicides,” Army Times, March 12, 2024; Janet Reitman, “A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making,” New York Times, June 19, 2024.
6 Sam Lagrone, “‘Poor Material Condition’ of Navy Amphib
Fleet Prevent Marine Deployments, Training, Says GAO,” USNI News,
December 3, 2024.
7 Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession (Carlisle, Penn.: U.S. Army War College Press, 2015).
8 For those unfamiliar with this controversy inside the
mid-2010s Navy, the award-winning ProPublica investigation is a good
entry point: T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi,
“Fight the Ship,” ProPublica, February 6, 2019.