by Richard M. Balzano
An inconvenient message recently landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk: the United States may be running short of the materials required to fight the many wars it has volunteered for. The warning came from the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, joined by four-star commanders overseeing various portions of the globe. Prolonged operations against Iran, they warned, could leave American forces dangerously stretched elsewhere. Hegseth—the living embodiment of Axe body spray, gas station ED pills, and testosterone replacement therapy—claims reports of military depletion are overblown. This reassurance was accompanied by the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. This might be less remarkable if the United States weren’t spending roughly a trillion dollars a year on its military. For that kind of money one might expect warehouses in Nebraska stacked floor-to-ceiling with missiles, shells, drones, interceptors and perhaps a Death Star or two still in the shrink wrap. Instead, Ukraine first exposed and Iran is now emphasizing an embarrassing fact: America manufactures sophisticated and profitable ways of killing people, but not necessarily the most advanced, and not enough to keep killing people for very long.
Such are the miracles of the free market. After the Cold War, America’s defense industry consolidated into a cozy handful of giants. These companies discovered that the ideal weapon is not necessarily the one a soldier needs most. The ideal weapon is enormously complicated, takes fifteen years to develop, employs subcontractors in forty congressional districts, requires proprietary replacement parts, and costs enough to bankrupt a nation generations over. Washington latched onto the military-industrial teat and has been suckling ever since.
Russia and China have approached the problem differently. Wars of attrition eventually reduce engineering magnificence to arithmetic: How many missiles can be made? How fast? At what cost? How quickly can Tuesday’s expenditure be replaced? Russia has organized enormous industrial capacity around artillery shells, missiles, drones and replacements, while China has built a defense-industrial base of extraordinary scale. Both have built the capacity to manufacture weapons in quantity and keep doing so when a conflict drags on. That should concern anyone whose Taiwan war plan assumes Amazon Prime delivery from Lockheed Martin.
Our adversaries have us beat in technology where it matters, and hypersonic missiles provide an expensive illustration. Russia and China fielded operational hypersonic weapons while Washington spent years buying whatever goods our elected officials were bribed to keep buying. Hypersonic missiles fly extremely fast and maneuver in ways that make interception extraordinarily difficult. America is developing defenses against them, naturally, because nothing generates a second lucrative weapons market quite like discovering that somebody else’s weapons program is better. Civilization has entered the mature stage in which taxpayers finance a missile, an anti-missile missile, and eventually an anti-anti-missile missile, while being told Social Security is fiscally irresponsible and peace is naive.
China and Russia are ahead of the United States in high-energy military lasers. Both have moved systems into operational use while Washington has spent billions cycling through prototypes and procurement programs. Lasers promise exactly what America needs: a cheap way to destroy drones and missiles without burning through scarce interceptors costing millions apiece. Washington, meanwhile, keeps producing programs to produce programs. Somewhere between the laboratory and the battlefield, American weapons development encounters defense contractors, congressional committees, and quarterly earnings reports, and the most expensive military on Earth discovers that spending the most is not the same thing as having the best weapons.
China’s shipbuilding capacity is roughly 230 times greater than America’s, much of it commercial, but even that distinction is blurry: Beijing requires new container ships, roll-on/roll-off ferries, bulk carriers and other civilian vessels to meet national-defense requirements, while its sprawling dual-use shipyards build commercial ships and warships side by side.
There are plenty of nifty death machines rolling off American assembly lines. Nobody should accuse this country of losing its knack for vaporizing strangers from breathtaking distances. The trouble is that less profitable production systems abroad may be better suited to producing the cheaper, abundant toys required for taking human life on an industrial scale. The MIC, however, has an obligation to its shareholders to convince Congress that every $10,000 problem requires a $100 million solution.
The F-35 may be the purest monument to this arrangement: the most expensive weapons program in history, plagued by cost overruns, maintenance headaches, and chronic readiness problems. The $82 million cost is a cover charge for a weapons program whose lifetime costs run into the trillions. Meanwhile, Russia’s Su-57 lands at about $35 million per plane, and state-run weapons production means no premiums on replacement parts.
America’s Israeli allies have adopted a useful principle of the modern arms business: nothing moves inventory like “battle tested.” Israeli arms, drones, surveillance systems, and security technologies have become successful exports, with manufacturers boasting that their products have been tested under combat conditions. The antiseptic language of the arms bazaar leaves out where much of that testing occurs—Palestinians have served as an involuntary proving ground for technologies later offered around the world. All of this raises an impolite question. The United States has spent decades losing or walking away from wars despite possessing the world’s most expensive military. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan devolved from high-minded rhetoric to quagmires, predictably so to those who keep tabs on history. None was identical, but after a while even the slow student begins wondering whether military spending and military success are synonymous. Perhaps the wrong scoreboard is being used. Victory is ordinarily measured in territory secured, political objectives achieved and wars successfully concluded. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Boeing have another set of metrics. A missile fired is inventory depleted. Inventory depleted is an order. An order is revenue. A prolonged conflict that terrifies Congress into emergency appropriations may be a geopolitical catastrophe, but somewhere else it is a very encouraging earnings call. Eisenhower prophetically warned in 1961 that the combination of a massive permanent arms industry and military establishment could acquire “unwarranted influence” over government and threaten democratic decision-making. Washington spent the next 65 years proving him right.
When generals warn that America is stretched thin on death toys despite spending unprecedented taxpayer dollars on them, perhaps the question shouldn’t be limited to how the system failed. The better question is what the system is designed to do. If its purpose is to win wars quickly, cheaply, and decisively, the record is difficult to explain. If its purpose is to transfer fantastic quantities of public money into private hands while producing enough weaponry to ensure the next war remains possible, the picture clears considerably. The war machine may be running low on missiles, but it has never been healthier.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.