Having a ready military is like buying insurance. You hope you never have to use it, but having it helps you sleep at night. Almost all prefer security to risk.
Readiness projects strength, enhances diplomacy, attracts and reassures allies. Combined with the clear willingness to employ military force when necessary—call it backbone—it can deter war.
A nation that budgets more than $840 billion for national defense has reason to believe it is well-insured. But circumstances change. What was good enough before may not be good enough for long.
Risk is rising. So too is the cost of insurance.
Start with risk. Iran lobbed 180 missiles at Israel in October, its second major salvo this year. The U.S. helped defend Israel against attack in both April and October. Both times the attack was anticipated, and forces were in place for protection. Iran is still burning over the embarrassment of Israel’s July killing of a Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, and Hamas military mastermind Yahya Sinwar in Gaza on Oct. 16. Expect them to strike again.
Risk is rising. So too is the cost of insurance.
In Europe, Russia is importing North Korean troops to aid its war on Ukraine. Russia is already dependent on North Korea for munitions, Iran for drones, and China for components and parts. Adding foreign troops turns the heat up for everyone and raises the question: What will North Korea do for Russia in return?
The longer Russia struggles in Ukraine, the more Vladimir Putin will work to destabilize the situation. North Korea provides a new vector.
Meanwhile, China bullies its neighbors: Chinese vessels intentionally ram Philippine Coast Guard ships; its military aircraft violate Japanese airspace; its bombers penetrate the U.S.-Canada air defense identification zone; mystery drones—most likely Chinese—overfly Langley Air Force Base, Va., peering at F-22s; and its cyber force hacks into enterprise software.
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference that he’s instructed his staff “to stop referring to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army as a future or emerging or potential threat. China is not a future threat. China is a threat today.”
China is spending “specifically to defeat the ability of the United States and its allies to project power in the western Pacific.” It’s developing space weapons, long-range hypersonic missiles, sophisticated counterair defenses, satellite-based targeting systems, nuclear arms, and cyber tools all with a focus on one foe: Us.
That is the threat picture. The insurance side isn’t any better, because military readiness is slipping.
It isn’t that America isn’t willing to spend on defense. Rather that the United States’ clear, asymmetric advantages in air and space are eroding, as China focuses with laser precision on how best to threaten or deny those capabilities.
The Air Force today fields the smallest, oldest force in its history. It is retiring aircraft faster than it chooses to acquire them, and therefore shrinking further, day by day. The Air Force dropped below 5,000 aircraft for the first time ever this year. It is programmed to plunge below 4,000 without any plan to stop—let alone reverse—the decline. It struggles with a chronic pilot shortage that has left it, consistently, some 2,000 pilots short of requirements. Leaders are quick to say that does not leave flying billets vacant, but it does put non-pilots in jobs that require pilot experience. That doesn’t bode well for strategic and operational planning.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Air Force pilots in combat-coded squadrons are not flying enough sorties to be considered combat mission ready. None are qualified to execute all their potential missions. The Air Force keeps spending more on fighter sustainment, but spare parts shortages and maintenance backlogs undermine readiness such that mission capable rates for F-35 and F-22 fighters hover around 50 percent. The General Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog agency, criticized the Air Force, noting that operations and maintenance funding requests rose 27 percent from 2018 to 2023, while the needle hardly moved on mission capable rates.
No wonder: After factoring in inflation, that amounts to, at best, a 1 percent net increase over five years. Looking just at weapons systems sustainment—spare parts—the picture gets worse. For those same five years, that account rose 11.6 percent—which, after inflation, is a net cut of 15 percent.
The Air Force is struggling to buy new weapons. To sustain the fighter force and modernize, it should be buying 72 fighters annually. It achieved that in fiscal 2023 and 2024, split between F-35s and F-15EXs. Plans don’t come close in 2025 or beyond.
The Space Force is in similar straits. U.S. space assets are undefended and vulnerable to attack. Yet those satellites are also required to fight in every imaginable region and domain. Counterspace capabilities are essential to hold adversaries at risk and deter war in the heavens.
Now suppose we do have a war with China, and that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and Space Force turn out to be reasonably capable. You can’t order replacement jets or satellites on Amazon. It takes three years to go from approved funding to delivery of a fifth-generation fighter jet. It takes a minimum of a year and often far longer to put new satellites on orbit.
In the run-up to World War II, America was the world’s leading industrial power, but half its factory capacity was still idle a decade after the start of the Great Depression. It was that overcapacity—and the available pool of underemployed workers eager to make a good wage—that built the so-called “arsenal of democracy.” And in a war of attrition, it took four years for those factories to produce enough bombers and fighters for the Allies to finally destroy the German Luftwaffe.
America has no such excess capacity today, and the complexity of building today’s fighter jets goes far beyond anything imaginable in World War II. Our supply chains are too small, too brittle. We don’t produce enough steel, aluminum, titanium, or advanced carbon composites; we can’t produce enough high-performance engines, let alone the materials that go into them; and we can’t make computer chips fast enough.
War, it has been said, is too important to be left to generals. Jens Stoltenberg, the former Secretary General of NATO, offered a twist: Business is “too serious to be left to businessmen.”Businesses operate on very short timelines, focusing on short-term profits. Generals may think strategically, but career incentives focus them on short-term results. Politicians focus on elections.
Yet a nation’s security must be viewed across very long horizons—decades or more—and when they don’t, they fail.
Americans must wake up and address our growing risk. We can’t rewind the clock. But we can start working now. As Kendall said in February, “We are out of time.”