For more than a decade, Americans have been assured—ritually and relentlessly—that the United States fields the most powerful military in history. This claim is repeated so often that it has acquired the status of self‑evident truth. It is invoked to reassure allies, deter adversaries, justify global commitments, and quiet domestic doubt. Yet beneath this triumphalist narrative lies a quieter, less comfortable reality: the U.S. military has been steadily shrinking in size, thinning in readiness, bloating at the top, and pricing itself out of mass and endurance. What remains is not a force optimized for sustained combat against a peer adversary, but one optimized for demonstration, reassurance, and bureaucratic self‑preservation. Much has been written about individual failures—procurement debacles, recruiting shortfalls, and readiness crises. But when examined together the problems of the U.S. defense establishment reveal not episodic mismanagement, but a systemic hollowing of capability masked by narrative inflation.
Shrinking force behind expanding claims
The long‑term decline in U.S. force structure is stark. At the height of World War II, the United States fielded thousands of naval vessels, hundreds of thousands of combat aircraft, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles. Today, the U.S. Navy operates fewer ships than it did before World War I, while combat aircraft and armored forces have fallen to a fraction of their Cold War levels.
The usual rejoinder is that modern platforms are so vastly more capable that fewer are needed. This argument collapses under wartime conditions. Precision does not eliminate attrition, software does not replace logistics, and exquisite systems fail just as surely as crude ones—often taking far longer to repair or replace.
WWII B24 bomber production – over 18,000 were built
Readiness: the harsh reality
If total inventories are troubling, readiness is worse. Across naval, air, and ground forces, only about half of nominal platforms are fully mission capable at any given time. The remainder are partially capable or non‑deployable due to maintenance backlogs, parts shortages, or deferred depot work. As a result, the effective operational force of the U.S. military is much smaller than its stated total capacity.
Readiness is increasingly propped up by cannibalization, crew overwork, and heroic maintenance efforts—borrowing capability from the future to meet present commitments. This is not resilience; it is fragility under stress.
Leadership inflation and accountability decay
As force size and readiness have declined, senior leadership density has grown. The ratio of flag officers (generals and admirals) to enlisted personnel has more than tripled since World War II. This reflects bureaucratization and risk aversion rather than operational necessity.
Major weapons program failures rarely end careers. Strategic misjudgments are absorbed into process language and rotational command structures, eroding the principle that authority entails accountability. In World War II, senior commanders were removed or sidelined when performance failed to match strategic need; today, generals linked to major U.S. military debacles advance upward, reflecting a system that rewards conformity and survival rather than results.
Cost explosion and shrinking mass
Modern U.S. combat systems have become catastrophically expensive. Inflation‑adjusted unit costs for ships, aircraft, and armored vehicles have exploded across every era. As unit costs rise, force size must fall—and attrition becomes strategically intolerable. A military that cannot afford to lose its own equipment cannot credibly threaten to fight a war.
F-22 stealth fighter – 750 planned but only 187 built
B-2 stealth bomber – 132 planned but only 21 built
Nuclear forces and the limits of substitution
Some will argue that nuclear forces render conventional force structure less relevant. This reverses the logic of deterrence. Nuclear weapons deter total war precisely because they make conventional miscalculation catastrophic. They do not compensate for weakened conventional forces; they raise the stakes of error when those forces are overextended or misrepresented. A hollow conventional military backed by nuclear weapons is not safer—it is more dangerous, because it narrows decision‑makers’ room for maneuver while increasing the cost of mistakes.
Advanced conventional weapons and the illusion of technological escape
Nor do appeals to advanced conventional technologies—hypersonic weapons, unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, or next‑generation platforms—rescue the prevailing narrative. In many of these areas, the United States has not established decisive technological advantage, and in some cases has fallen behind peer competitors in operational deployment. Hypersonic systems, long‑range precision strike, integrated air defenses, and large‑scale unmanned warfare have moved from experimental concepts to routine force elements elsewhere, while U.S. efforts remain fragmented, delayed, or confined to prototypes. Technological sophistication has thus become less a source of advantage than a compensatory story—one that further increases unit cost, reduces producibility, and deepens intolerance for loss. The result is not dominance, but a narrowing of real capabilities masked by claims of future superiority.
What now?
The natural response to this diagnosis is to ask what should be done. That question, however, assumes the problem is one of policy adjustment rather than structural constraint. In reality, there are only three paths forward—and none are comfortable.
1. Rebuild at scale.
In theory, the United States could attempt to rebuild mass and resilience: accept lower technological ambition, cancel prestige programs, invest in industrial capacity, and prioritize quantity alongside quality. In practice, this would require decades of sustained political commitment, rebuilding of industrial capacity, restructuring of defense procurement, and a willingness to dismantle entrenched institutional incentives. There is no constituency for such a reset.
2. Shrink commitments to match capacity.
A second option is to reduce global commitments to align with actual force structure: fewer forward deployments, explicit prioritization of theaters, and abandonment of universal deterrence. This approach is strategically rational but politically toxic. It looks like decline, offends allies accustomed to U.S. guarantees, and contradicts elite identity narratives. Yet it is the only option that genuinely reconciles ends with means.
3. Continue as we are.
The third path requires no decision—and is therefore the most likely. It entails ever-greater rhetorical inflation, thinner operational margins, rising escalation risk, and increasing reliance on bluff. It does not end in sudden collapse, but in a steadily rising probability of catastrophic miscalculation.
The need for military pragmatism and accountability
The problem described here is not the result of a single bad program, administration, or strategic choice. It is the cumulative outcome of decades of incentives that reward technological ambition over producibility, narrative reassurance over empirical accounting, and career continuity over accountability. The result is a military optimized to deter on paper, posture symbolically, and reassure rhetorically, while quietly losing the capacity to deliver effective defensive and offensive capability. At this point, the realistic task is not rebuilding dominance, but governing risk under conditions of over-extension and illusion. That requires truthful force accounting rather than readiness theater; realistic prioritization rather than universal commitments; humility about escalation control; real accountability within the military institution; and narrative restraint in place of triumphalist reassurance.
Conclusion
The danger of shrinking military capability is not merely that the United States might lose a future war. It is that decision-makers, allies, and adversaries alike are being conditioned to believe that reserves of power and resilience exist where they no longer do. In such an environment, escalation becomes easier, restraint appears unnecessary, and risk is systematically mispriced. Nuclear weapons and advanced technologies do not mitigate this danger; they magnify it by raising the stakes of miscalculation while narrowing the space for recovery. History offers little mercy to great powers that substitute boastful narrative for material readiness. A military system that cannot tell itself the truth risks misuse and operational failure. A nation that mistakes posturing for power courts disaster.
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Excellent write up. Perhaps ‘they’ will conclude it is better to strike now and take a chance before it gets worse. Of course there are other paths that could be taken, but those seem to be pretty much off the table.
The reason Mr Trump is asking for $ 1.5 trillion defence budget is that it is needed. The normal $ 1 trillion just keeps the Empire ticking over, action requires more. They are going to spend themselves into oblivion a la the USSR.
During the week details of the MIG 41 engine leaked out, the so called plane will operate at over Mach 4, meaning humans can’t survive turns and with hypersonic missiles on board actions will only last an instant, no place for human decision making left here. A brave new world.
…the so called plane will operate at over Mach 4, meaning humans can’t survive turns and…
That’s not how that works:
https://www.grupooneair.com/what-is-g-force/
There is a law Nunn McCurdy originally passed in 1982, still on the books.
It requires a 15% overrun over “approved” baseline (cost, schedule and specified performance) to be reported to congress, a 25% would be terminated! What they put PERT/CPM on Honeywell computers to track.
F-35 which is unilateral disarmament for Lockheed profit had a 99% overrun on baseline, got new life and the specification/performance baseline is yet to be achieved, maybe block 80 will deliver original baseline performance. Each block billed as new capability!
No one in the pentagon delivers baseline at cost! Why only Marines pass audit. The do very few baseline acquisitions!
There is another law: Beyond LRIP law. It states a system cannot buy more than 10% of its planned units until the DoW Director of Operational Test certifies the system effective and efficient after suitable operational tests performed by the real operators and support personnel.
Note unilateral disarmament F-35 was about 50% units built and a classified BLRIP was submitted to congress in Feb 2024. At that time USAF had refused to accept any F-35 deliveries until a SW upgrade to support some a new block was installed. The baseline and sustainment requirements keep shifting!
Making poor performance information sensitive keeps the public in the dark about waste fraud and abuse.
Coincidently, obscure baselines are a reason auditor fail the DoW.
“We know the enemy and it is US”.
It’s a stupid question, but what exactly is a “block”? I mean, if you have an F16 block 50 vs block 40, say, how much is actually changed, and more important, what does it signify in the procurement process? (ie is it just a gloss to cover minimal change in the moving parts to justify dancing around whatever bureaucratic requirements there are?)
It can be as simple as a new order. So first block can be an order for 100. Second block for another 100. And no need for any changes between them. In reality there are often at least small changes that have been learned during operation and production of previous blocks. On some occasions it can be huge.
For example the first batch of Ticonderoga class cruisers used traditional twin arm missile launchers. Subsequent batches used vertical launch systems which was a massove improvement.
The concept is “preplanned product improvements” P3I.
Sometimes you cannot get it all in first production model, sometimes there are technology not ready now but in a few years. Sometimes a block just gets what was spec’ed upfront and is a sham.
What the block delivers depend.
The latest F-16 block might be 70, I have seen reference but not sure.
Keeps the contractor involved.
Bravo!
Much of this is unarguable, but I’d flag up a couple of nuances.
First, militaries fulfil many purposes, although the American obsession with war-fighting at the expense of everything else tends to obscure this in Washington. Militaries are symbols of national prestige and independence, supporters for diplomacy, ways of garnering good opinions in peace missions, advertisements for defence equipment and many other things. The real issue is not their size, or even necessarily war fighting capability, but suitability to carry out the functions the political leadership gives them. Here there are indeed legitimate criticisms to be made.
Second, senior posts are an old story. It’s not so much that the ratio grows radically in peacetime, as that it reduces radically in wartime. In both Wars, the massive increase in personnel was very bottom-heavy: you couldn’t recruit Admirals off the street. Officers of flag rank, like Generals, were preponderantly career officers who stayed after the war was over. A Divisional commander, for example, might have twice as many troops under command as in peacetime. In addition, ships in particular are designed to be crewed by far fewer personnel than was the case in the past, but each ship still needs a Captain, and a Task Group needs a senior commander. And finally, there’s a whole range of technical high-level jobs that simply didn’t exist in WW2 because the technologies didn’t exist.
In any event, militaries need a different type of senior officer in war than in peace, and it’s usual to have a clear-out when fighting starts. The Russians have been through this process in Ukraine.
Do you think expectation of war is the reason Xi is having his clear-out?
The clear out begins once war starts and competence and lesser competence is demonstrated. I’d say what’s happening in the PLA is a different kind of battle.
I mean, during the US Civil War, people who were still West Point cadets at the time of Ft Sumter got made brevet (ie temporary) generals when they showed ability (G A Custer was the most famous, but he’s not the only one. Being reduced to a captain–technically, just going “back” to his regular rank–when the War ended apparently hit Custer hard, although making captain just four years after West Point in peacetime US Army would have been no joke.)
There is a broader institutional failure here dating back to the Cold War. Faced with overwhelming Warsaw Pact superiority, US and the rest of NATO developed the quantity over quality doctrine, where the numerical inferiority will be compensated by technical excellence and training. Current US doctrine, military thinking and weapons development programs are just a culmination of 50+ years of this belief, which is now basically a religion in the US and NATO military circles, including majority of analysts.
The problem is that this was never validated in practice, in fact World War 2 and Korean War experience showed that once a certain quality threshold is reached (good enough point), technical superiority margin is immaterial and has diminishing influence on combat outcomes. Good example is German tank technology in World War 2, who held unquestioned technical lead in tank technology, but it was irrelevant to the combat outcomes as tank-on-tank combat is exceedingly rare and does not factor in real world battle outcomes. War in Ukraine showed the same, Western tanks fared no better than Ukrainian Soviet era ones because most of their losses came from drones and anti tank missiles, not from enemy tanks.
I fear that the focus on technological superiority for the sake of it is fully ingrained in US military fabric that it will take a massive disaster to even put a dent into it, like losing an aircraft carrier (or such major loss) to Iran or Houthis. My fear is that even following a major disaster, the response would be to double down and claim that complacency and inactivity allowed the adversaries to close the technological gap, and if only the ships had lasers they would have been fine (followed by massive funding surge into laser development :).
Thanks for pulling all these facts together in one place. The statistical tables tell the story.
Thanks, Haig. You’ve given us some nice charts that confirm and quantify what some of the Youtube commentators often discuss.
I’d like to offer my own point about manpower. It is often lamented, even here, that we no longer have a draft because of the presumed effect a draft would have on our entering wars. I have two counters to this:
1) Opposition to starting a war in the form of demonstrations has had little to no effect in recent American history, the best example being Iraq II; and
2) The absence of a draft at least prevents our violence-prone country from undertaking large, potentially long term wars, especially against peers.
Check out this nice chart of military manpower going back to the Revolution. Following the trend line with your cursor, you can see that WW II manpower topped 12 million, nearly 9% of the population at that time. The smaller Korean War peaked at 3.5 million, around 2.2% of the population. Vietnam topped out at 3.6 million, by then 1.67% of the population. All that took place with a draft.
The draft continued until January, 1973, even though manpower was already declining as draft resistance, political opposition and soldier resistance increased. With the end of the draft, manpower dropped to around 2 million, 1 % of the population. It has continued to decline to 1.4 million, .43% of the population. Even 9/11 and Iraq II didn’t change the trend. The National Guard and stop loss orders were heavily used to maintain necessary manpower in Iraq II, a factor in increasing opposition to that war.
There has been only one troop deployment since the end of the draft comparable to the Vietnam War: Bush I (how nicely parallel) sent 600,000+ plus as part of a nearly 1,000,000 person UN sanctioned force. The deployment lasted from the beginning of the buildup in August of 1990 until the end of February, 1991 when Kuwait was cleared of Iraqis, a total of 7 months. The Vietnam deployment lasted over 8 years, with more than 400,000 in country for more than 4 years. (AI answer).
A deployment as large and lengthy as Vietnam is impossible without a draft. The ending of the draft has protected the country from any inclination on the part of its often-mad rulers to fight another major war.
But before we celebrate too much, we’re not far away from AI wars using drones, robot dogs (“burn ’em with fire,” Lambert would say), robot guns and tanks. Then a draft will be irrelevant.
Good points.
I have oral history about the all-volunteer force (AVF).
Vietnam was fought with the regular US armed forces, regular soldiers and draftees in regular Army units. Early in the conflict a National Guard unit was sent over. It was an artillery battery and got mauled pretty badly when the Vietnamese overran their battery. A lot of funerals in a couple of small towns. The idea of National Guard was eliminated.
Some of us who were in the military at the time thought AVF would limit crazy “adventures” like Vietnam because no large number of infantry soldiers.
Boy, were we wrong. The solution for Iraq was activating the National Guard. There are National Guard troops with as many or more deployments as regular career soldiers.
No complaints, in some instances deployments were good income for people laid off.
Result; Helicoptering off the embassy roof.
There should be a 4th option – stop living by the sword. I think the vast majority of the world doesn’t.
pain day, today, so i was out here at the bar at 2am reading this series(this chick is remarkable):
https://themindness.substack.com/p/weaponizing-time-elite-anxiety-and
she’s obviously done her homework, and is complimentary to what you’re saying.
except that she focuses a lot more on the hubris and delusion among the movers and shakers, and what an utter disaster that is courting.
worth yer time.
I read the link you offered in your comment above, but did not follow to Part II of the analysis. I did not find the analysis illuminating. My over all impression is that the author postulated all sorts of complex motivations and psychologies for our movers and shakers. Looking at our movers and shakers I just could not imagine the depth or level of introspection that originating those complex motivations and psychologies would require. When I regard our movers and shakers I definitely perceive great hubris and delusion but I think it is much simpler to conclude they are just arrogant and deluded without looking for some complex explanation of those traits. I suspect they were self-centered, arrogant, and deluded as children and grew up to be even more self-centered, arrogant, and deluded.
I think the Joker got it right in the “Dark Knight” — This city[country] deserves a better class of criminal.
aye. but its the first time ive seen their wall to wall pinky and the brain world domination plans laid out end to end.
theyll spend trillions we dont have to build it, until they cant…and theyll immiserate and kill millions in the process.
doesnt mean theyll succeed, just that we’re in for more murderous shitshow.
Thanks for this link! Lots of good material on her Substack.
My father was a state university professor of History, and one of his persistent notes was that, throughout history, any time a dominant power faced a crisis and they were forced to choose between humility and wisdom or arrogance and aggression, they choose arrogance and aggression every time.
I have no confidence that we will do any differently.
The solution is rather simple, albeit never gonna happen. Option 2 combined with closing 90% of bases worldwide, nationalizing the arms industry, jailing all the grifters inside and outside the MICC and eliminating all foreign military aid.
China, Russia and Iran do so much more with so much less it’s obvious to a child it all boils down to the profit motive.
Another excellent piece by Haig Hovaness. Sourcing on the statistics would be a nice addition, although they certainly seem consistent with observations.
I am struck by the efficiency of the US manufacturing sector in WW2. They could really produce a combat aircraft or battle tank for around the inflation-adjusted cost of a modestly sized family home today? That’s pretty impressive. Exactly what made the US so efficient back then, and why it’s reversed so dramatically since that time, could be an interesting subject for discussion as well.
This clip from Ford v. Ferrari explains American productivity during WWII. Plus there were men like Carroll Shelby on the loose back then.
During world war two the US established a number of boards to plan out production. This was hardly welcomed by the industrial owners, but the New Deal Democrats were not shy in using the state to plan the economy.
I think it mattered both that the rich had reason to fear a revolution, and that the war was existential for the political class. For what they knew at the time the war might have ended with them hung instead of them doing the hangings.
Well you can’t entirely dismiss that modern equipment is massively more complicated. Though WW2 equipment is often more complicated than people believe. That does have a large impact.
But thr biggest issue is that WW2 was the largest war in history and that states devoted a huge proportion of their economic output to it. I mean the USA devoted around 40% of GDP to the war effort. Not 40% of government spending but 40% of the entire economy. That would be about 12 trillion USD of todays economy. And with that volume of production you end up with massive efficiencies.
To look at it another way. Military aircraft costs before WW2 were higher than during. Firstly becuase they tended to be small batches. Maybe one or two hundred aircraft. They also tended to be far more experimental. No one quite knew what would or wouldn’t work in a war so all sorts of things were tried. As the war started production numbers increased rapidly so the upfront costs were diluted far more. And in addition people learned what worked and what didn’t. So design work became more streamlined. Production was simplified by removing items that were learned not to be essential.
Good piece. “A steadily rising probability of catastrophic miscalculation” indeed.
During the early 1970’s I learned that the US Army had career counselors…
Every current flag officer in the US Military has acquired all the right merit badges while never making a mistake they could be held accountable for.
You advance in rank by pleasing your immediate superior, if they like BeBop you love BeBop, If they like wonder bread, you love wonder bread.
Too much time with the troops is a career killer as is any award for valor greater than a bronze star with a “V”.
Based on our Civil War, WW1 and WW2 experiences no more than 10% of these flag officers are truly competent, another 25% are marginally competent and the rest are disasters on two feet.
There are too many rice bowls involved for this to change, short of a catastrophe.
The US still has a lot of combat power but it is designed for short, sharp actions and not long sustained warfare and takes months to get into place. So as an example, it could launch an attack on Iran but if such a war went for the next several months, the US would be stretched to the limit and would start breaking in terms of being able to sustain for example the F-35. Same for US Navy ships. And if the Iranians kept on hitting bases and ships that led to mass casualties, would the US be prepared to take them in such a dubious cause? What happens when the US runs out of anti-air missiles after a few weeks? Ask the Iranians for a pause for a coupla months while they try to build more? If we want a picture of what a modern war looks like we only have to look to the Ukraine. And the inescapable truth is that if a US brigade was sent to fight in it, that it would be utterly annihilated. Are US tanks even being equipped with ‘cope cages’ right now? I have seen no sign of them. But what really kills the US military is the fact that modern manufacturers don’t care if the weapons they build even work or not but only care that they get maximum profit from the Pentagon. The newer weapons break too easily and are often not built to purpose so that you have for example pistols – pistols! – that go off by themselves. The US military needs a top to bottom overhaul and a reduction in commitments but there is zero appetite to even consider to this. Kasserine Pass 2.0 here we come.
Does our post Cold War military exist for any purpose other than military Keynsianism and engaging in pointless brief conflicts for Deep State foreign and domestic clients–most particularly Israel among the former? Don’t forget Bin Laden said he attacked New York because we were over there attacking him. If this country had taken a hands off approach to the Middle East the twin towers might still stand.
Yes our fool of a president is likely to meet with disaster using our no toilet flush aircraft carriers against Iran but then why in sanity’s sake would we want to attack Iran anyway? Here’s suggesting that the reason our Pentagon doesn’t worry too much about whether things work is because the odds of the US engaging in another WW2 style war are zero.
So here’s suggesting we need fewer ships, airplanes, tanks. Let others play the empire game if they are so inclined. If everything looks like a nail to a hammer then we need fewer hammers.
Great piece – it seems Tomahawks also suffer a high 30% to 50% not mission capable, too.
And on the Ukrainian battlefield, it seems the weapons largely do not work (against a peer rival rather than Afghanistani’s) exhibit A) the Patriot except to generate massive profits.
I would add another category to
“Hypersonic systems, long‑range precision strike, integrated air defenses, and large‑scale unmanned warfare have moved from experimental concepts to routine force elements elsewhere, while others have field hypersonics and other technologies, U.S. efforts remain fragmented, delayed, or confined to prototypes and power point slides.”
When Trump fired all those Tomahawks at Nigeria about Christmas time, about a quarter of them proved to be duds so I would call that not mission capable either. :)
“He who knows the opponent and knows himself need not fear in a hundred battles. He who knows only himself and not the opponent will lose one for each that he wins. He who knows neither will fail every time.”
Sun Tzu “The Art of War” Chapter III, paragraph 11
If you don’t know what you are doing, neither will your enemy. Joe (Biden) Tzu.
Also reiterated by Don Tzu lately and much more loudly…
We are neck deep tzuing, aren’t we?
Seconded! This is a very important article, as it points out the fragility of ‘power’ Where does the escalation ladder lead if a carrier is sunk?
Ten years ago I told a friend that I hoped Bernie Sanders would win because he was the only US politician I could see withdrawing after losing a carrier to a missile barrage. Say from a misadventure against Venezuela. The others I thought would escalate up to nukes in a fit of rage.
But the US empire skipped their chance at a Gorbachev and here we are.
Selective Service is the basis for 2 kinds of draft one for specialties and one general one. From Wikipedia This includes immigrants among others. I wonder if a military Draft will happen in 2027
An “automatic” registration provision was included and enacted in Section 535 of the NDAA for fiscal year 2026. Beginning on December 18, 2026, the Selective Service System will be required to identify, locate, and register all male (as assigned at birth) U.S. residents 18 to 26 years old on the basis of other existing federal databases. Men will no longer be required to register themselves or be subject to penalties for failing to do so. This was noted to be the most significant change to Selective Service since the self-registration system began in 1980.[53][54][55][56]
Regulations implementing and establishing procedures for “automatic” registration, including notices required for data collection, data matching, and data use, will be issued by the Selective Service System in 2026.[57]