On the Brink of Insolvency: Reversing Washington’s 30-Year Strategy-Resource Mismatch for the US Armed Forces

For over three decades, the United States military has been expanding its mission while losing ground financially—even as its enemies and potential peer adversaries race ahead in meaningful technological and warfighting leaps. At the so-called “end of history” in 1991, the armed forces were forced to accept a procurement holiday on spending for weapons and new capabilities. This was followed by two decades of war. While money poured in, most of it was to make up for the shortfalls of the Clinton era and war-related consumables—a hollow and perishable spending spike.

Uncommon in our national history, Washington then began slashing military budgets with troops in harm’s way when the era of fiscal restraint and the Tea Party began in 2010. The Budget Control Act (BCA), sequestration, and lasting reductions across the board followed. Even when new administrations swept into office with modest increases for defense above inflation, they were hardly enough to cover the potholes that grew out of this period. Restoring readiness became a priority while rebuilding combat power consistently slipped further to the right.

As the military’s conventional and strategic deterrents eroded nearly simultaneously, the global threat environment grew only more vexing, interconnected, and expansive. The United States faces its most dangerous strategic environment since World War II—with more enemies, fewer resources, and growing risks of conflict on multiple fronts. We are facing a strategic landscape defined by the growing strength, aggression, and cooperation of US adversaries. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—once largely acting independently—are increasingly coordinating efforts to weaken American influence and successfully challenge and slowly reshape the norms of the international order.

At the same time, America’s military is shrinking, aging, and overcommitted, leaving it dangerously unprepared for modern warfare. This imbalance between expanding global commitments and a diminishing force structure has resulted in strategic insolvency.

Sound defense planning demands long-term thinking, considering not what changes—threats and technologies—but what stays the same: American interests and principles. Since 1945, international politics has been shaped by American military strength more than by anything else.

Restoring the nation’s strategic credibility will require confronting this widening gap between national security ambitions and resources for hard power. Without significant investment in a modernized and capable military, the United States risks falling behind in its ability to deter threats and safeguard global leadership.

The Axis of Aggression: America’s Multi-Theater Threats

America’s adversaries are on the march. Revisionist powers around the world have escalated their respective efforts over the past decade to undermine US security, put the homeland at risk, and overturn the world order independently. These powers are increasingly working together to advance this goal across multiple theaters simultaneously.

China has aggressively sought to challenge US military might in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party’s military investment has increased rapidly, as its growing outputs demonstrate. According to the Pentagon, China is not only catching up to but exceeding the United States’ military capabilities in several key areas.¹ China now fields the world’s largest army, navy, and sub-strategic rocket force; possesses a steadily growing and technologically advanced air force; and aims to multiply the size of its nuclear arsenal.² Recent AEI research indicates that Beijing is investing up to three times its publicly reported military expenditures with an actual budget as large as ours. When considering that China is focused on changing the status quo in Asia, whereas the US military must always play an away game, China’s ability to generate force may be even greater than that of the US.³

Russia’s invasion of a sovereign, democratic Ukraine stands at the center of its campaign to destabilize a continent and break an unprecedented generational alliance in NATO. To sustain its assault, Moscow has relied on support from Iran, which provides drones, tech know-how, and manufacturing capacity, and North Korea, which supplies weapons, manpower, and tunnel warfare expertise. Yet this invasion has not fully occupied the Kremlin’s attention. Russia continues to support Houthi efforts to disrupt Red Sea trade and bolster authoritarianism in the Middle East, illustrating Moscow’s ongoing ambition to strengthen US adversaries and weaken US influence beyond Europe.

Emboldened by new ties with Russia and China, Iran has escalated its regional aggression, directly attacking Israel and US forces while enabling proxy campaigns across the Middle East.⁵ Its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon have intensified strikes against Israel while ballistic missiles and drones have targeted US bases.⁶ Tehran has also provided direct support to the Houthis, who have repeatedly engaged in monthslong shooting wars with the US Navy. Even after the incredible and successful strike to set back Iranian nuclear ambitions, the country’s radical leaders continuously seek to further escalate tensions and destabilize the region.⁷

Interconnected threats across multiple theaters have left the US military stretched dangerously thin. Critical but scarce munitions must be divided between the competing needs of US allies and domestic stockpiles, and decisions on deploying missile defense systems pit the urgent demands of Ukraine, Israel, and Indo-Pacific bases and partners against one another.⁸ Joint assets are constantly redeployed to cover gaps in one region, often creating vulnerabilities elsewhere—illustrating the fragile nature of the US military’s current force structure.⁹ If Russia escalated its aggression beyond Ukraine, China move on Taiwan, and Iran further embolden its proxies across the Middle East simultaneously, the United States military would be catastrophically overstretched, forcing impossible prioritization and leaving critical regions undefended.¹⁰

A One-War Military in a Three-Theater World

While military funding is typically flat or down from year to year, national ambitions and political habits change very little. That means they often only grow over time. The result is a military no longer sized or structured to fight and win in multiple theaters while Washington continues to assume it can. Successive National Defense Strategies under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have emphasized global commitments and great-power competition, even as resources and force structure have declined.¹¹

Historically, American defense strategy was built on the ability to fight and win two simultaneous wars, ensuring global stability and credible deterrence. This “two-war strategy” was key during the Cold War, allowing the US to engage in a major conflict while deterring the Soviet Union. However, after the Cold War, American leaders moved too aggressively to cut budgets even while strategic priorities grew as threats emerged and reemerged in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe.¹²

The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review still reiterated that a “two-war” force was necessary, emphasizing the ability to “deter and defeat large-scale, cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames, preferably in concert with regional allies,” despite post–Cold War drawdowns in force size and strength.¹³ The review also spelled out the danger of a one-war capacity, stating it would “risk undermining both deterrence and the credibility of US security commitments in key regions of the world.”¹⁴

Despite these warnings, by the 2010s, shrinking defense budgets, reduced force structure, grinding long-term counterinsurgency operations, and evolving threats had further eroded this capability. More recent strategies have prioritized China while assuming the US can still manage risk in Europe and the Middle East—effectively accepting a one-war force. This has made the US military a one-war force lite. The 2024 National Defense Strategy Commission’s report made this clear when it stated that the 2022 National Defense Strategy “does not sufficiently account for global competition or the very real threat of simultaneous conflict in more than one theater” and that the commission was “not confident that the US military would succeed in a regional conflict against China.”¹⁵

America’s Shrinking Defense Budget

The military’s size and strength are correlated with the resources—primarily defense spending—available to it. While the defense topline has grown modestly overall since the post–Cold War lows, inflation-adjusted budgets have often failed to provide real growth, eroding purchasing power.¹⁶ As a result, the armed forces have continued to shrink the active-duty force and delay the modernization of critical capabilities nearly across the board.¹⁷ Recently, defense spending has declined in all three key metrics: as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), as a share of federal spending, and when adjusted for inflation.¹⁸

The most recent budgetary challenges can be traced to 2011’s BCA. Designed to rein in federal spending, the BCA imposed stringent caps on discretionary spending, including on defense, triggering cuts via sequestration when Congress failed to reach broader deficit reduction agreements. This proved devastating for military readiness, modernization, and force structure, necessitating across-the-board reductions with little regard for strategic priorities.¹⁹ The 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission estimated that these cuts amounted to $539 billion between fiscal years (FYs) 2012 and 2019.²⁰

What made this era even more remarkable—and damaging—was that budget cuts accelerated while American troops remained deployed in combat zones. Unlike past drawdowns that occurred after wars ended, Congress slashed defense spending at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This marked the first time since Vietnam that the US hollowed out its force while still involved in multiple theaters of conflict. Indeed, the reductions were so devastating that more US troops are now dying in peacetime accidents than in combat—even while meaningful force levels were still deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan.²¹

Managed decline has led to deep cuts and outright cancellations of numerous necessary and already overdue weapons programs—regularly deferred after 1991. When defense budgets failed to provide real growth, policymakers often raided procurement and modernization accounts to cover immediate operational needs. Slowed procurement and modernization efforts resulted in a downsized military unable to do easily or quickly what it had for the generation prior.

Key programs like the Seawolf-class submarine, F-22 stealth fighter, and the Army’s Future Combat Systems were either canceled outright or the Pentagon ended up buying fractions of the forecasted purchases at the time of program launch.²² Today, as older platforms age out of service, the military faces a stark reality: There are no robust next-generation systems ready to replace them.²³

That is, unless the once-in-a-generation reconciliation bill for the armed forces that was passed by Congress in July succeeds. This is a big question mark, but it is likely to inject a significant infusion of real money in a short amount of time to help scale research projects long overdue; update planned purchases for the warfighter in the face of tech that changes, in some cases, by the day or hour; and disrupt long-staid concepts of operations and force-planning assumptions. While it is a huge and welcome investment, it cannot become a fiscal cliff. Starting dozens or even hundreds of programs without a tail of investment to see them over the production finish line or sustain those weapons after they are fielded would be worse than waste; it would be a dereliction of duty for those in uniform who demand world-class capabilities.

The Cost of Doing More with Less

Though the US military remains the world’s preeminent fighting force, its size and strength have eroded, compromising its ability to deter and operate effectively across multiple theaters. Consistently adapting to do more with less has come at a steep cost, undermining long-term readiness and credible deterrence. Incremental decisions to manage within annual budgetary limitations often established new baselines where deterrence degraded gradually and then suddenly.

The consequences of authoritarians on the march are increasingly tangible across key regions. In the Middle East, the Navy is consistently expending more munitions than it can replenish, setting the stage for significant munition shortages in a potential multiregional great-power war.²⁴ The Marine Corps, with its shrunken amphibious warship fleet, can no longer serve as the crisis response force and cannot meet combatant commanders’ and allies’ needs.²⁵ The Air Force no longer provides immediate or regional air superiority—resulting recently in the first US soldiers killed by an air threat since the end of the Korean War.²⁶

The US Army active-duty force has seen a staggering decline until an uptick just recently. Though just a few years ago Army leaders sought to build up to around 550,000 troops, the Army saw little progress amid recruiting challenges and a lack of budgetary growth.²⁷ The most recent budget request puts the Army’s end strength at just 442,000—100,000 short of that goal and the smallest it has been since before World War II.

Despite advances in technology and the deployment of new capabilities, the military’s force structure has weakened drastically. While modern capabilities offer new advantages, sufficient capacity is necessary to sustain a globally deployed force. A single soldier, ship, or aircraft can still be in only one place at a time.²⁸ The US Navy, for example, is nearly half the size it was at the Cold War’s height, yet the demand is the same or, more often, higher. In 1985, roughly 15 percent of the fleet—about 100 ships—was deployed at any given time, with typical deployments lasting six months. Today, the Navy forward deploys a similar number of ships but with a much smaller fleet, placing significantly more strain on each vessel and crew.²⁹

In recent years, deployment length has effectively doubled while consuming 30 percent or more of the fleet since 2017.³⁰ Additionally, the Navy has failed to meet goals of having 75 mission-capable surface ships ready at any given time.³¹ Fewer ships to spare means longer deployments, which, in turn, mean more hardship for service members and deferred maintenance on hardware, compounding growing costs on the shrinking fleet.

The US military is now too small and ill prepared to meet its full suite of global responsibilities. The persistent strain on platforms, people, and readiness is not a temporary challenge—it is a structural shortfall. When the force lacks sufficient capacity, it cannot sustain forward presence well, surge in crisis, or deter adversaries in multiple regions at once. This scarcity imposes hard trade-offs between the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and homeland defense and between current operations and long-term readiness.³² Without additional capacity, the US will continue to fall short of its own strategy, undermining deterrence and increasing the risk that adversaries act while America is overstretched or absent.

Living Off the Reagan Buildup

The military buildup of the 1980s, which peaked under President Ronald Reagan, offers an important lesson for addressing today’s challenges: Sustained investment and a clear strategic vision are essential to rebuilding military strength. Just as the United States faced heightened Soviet aggression following the post–Vietnam War drawdown, today’s adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and their proxies—pose similarly coordinated and multifaceted threats. Reagan’s approach to rebuilding the military contrasts sharply with modern efforts, which are marked by inconsistent funding and a lack of commitment to expanding combat power. Further, while Reagan oversaw the largest peacetime buildup of military forces in modern history, he also employed the armed forces with far less regularity than all of the presidents who would come after him who used it more but often funded it less.

First, the Reagan buildup devoted a much larger portion of national wealth to national defense. Though defense spending is nominally higher today than at the Reagan buildup’s height (an inflation-adjusted $798 billion compared with $849 billion today), defense spending was much higher as a proportion of national wealth.³³ During the buildup, defense spending averaged around 5.9 percent of GDP. Today, it stands at just under 3 percent, the lowest it has been since the end of the Cold War (and lower than what the current administration is asking of NATO allies).³⁴ This means that defense spending received nearly twice as much economic commitment during the buildup as it does today.³⁵ If Washington allocated 6 percent of today’s $27 trillion GDP to defense—the same percentage as during the Reagan buildup—the defense budget would be roughly $1.6 trillion, nearly twice its current size.³⁶

Second, while the topline matters, how the budget is spent matters equally. Reagan’s defense increases focused on purchasing substantial quantities of equipment and expanding the armed forces’ capacity and end strength. From FY1983 to FY1987, the cumulative boost in current dollars in modernization spending—procurement and research and development (R&D) combined—amounted to $567 billion above the average of the preceding and following decades. This investment not only enhanced readiness but provided the foundation for a robust and well-equipped force that remains, in many ways, the backbone of today’s military capabilities.

Modernization spending—research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) and procurement—made up a larger share of the defense budget during the Reagan buildup.³⁷ In FY1985, it accounted for 42.9 percent of the budget, compared with just 36 percent in the FY2025 request. Reagan-era budgets also prioritized buying equipment over developing future systems, with $3.30 spent on procurement for every $1 on R&D. Today, that ratio has shrunk to $1.16.³⁸ While R&D spending is important to maintain a technological advantage, parity between procurement and R&D is a recipe for a smaller and weaker military.

In simple terms, mid-1980s defense budgets bought a whole lot of everything—airframes, ships, and armored vehicles. Take aircraft for instance: In FY1985, the US purchased a plethora of different fighter and attack aircraft, amounting to 338 aircraft, with 192 for the Air Force and 146 for the Navy.³⁹ This total doesn’t even account for purchases of bombers, electronic warfare aircraft, and other planes.⁴⁰ Compare that with the FY2025 budget request, in which the administration is seeking to acquire only 86 fighter and attack aircraft, with 60 for the Air Force and 26 for the Navy.⁴¹ This amounts to about 75 percent less than the same category of aircraft that the military purchased in 1985.

For the Army and Marine Corps, ground vehicle procurement offers a similarly sharp contrast. In 1985, the Army and Marine Corps acquired more than 2,000 tracked vehicles across multiple programs.⁴² These large-scale buys built the core of the ground combat fleet in service today. In the FY2025 request, the combined total for new tracked vehicles is less than 250—including limited numbers of armored transport and amphibious vehicles and some modest upgrades to legacy platforms.⁴³ The gap between past and present output reflects the broader decline in the sustained procurement necessary to modernize the force at scale.

The Navy also saw significant expansion during the Reagan buildup, anchored by a clear strategic goal: a 600-ship fleet. The FY1985 shipbuilding plan included five submarines, three cruisers, one destroyer, and numerous auxiliary vessels, totaling 23 new ships.⁴⁴ In contrast, the FY2025 request calls for just six ships: one submarine, two destroyers, one frigate, one amphibious warfare ship, and one support vessel. With planned retirements exceeding new construction, the Navy’s fleet will decline from 287 to 283 ships—moving further away from stated force-level goals aspiring to a fleet of well over 300 ships.⁴⁵

Military Modernization Bills Are Overdue, Mass Matters, and Our Tech Is Lagging

Recent administrations have tried to increase modernization spending, but persistent shortfalls remain given that defense increases often come after massive cuts. Spending spikes that are not sustained over time and above inflation therefore have little lasting impact. They are more like funding to fill potholes versus wholesale replacement of road for, say, high-speed rail. Procurement has not kept pace with the need to replace aging equipment on anything close to one-to-one or to close critical readiness gaps. The balance between procurement and RDT&E remains skewed, with insufficient investment in fielding new platforms at scale. As a result, modernization has lagged, creating a growing mismatch between current capabilities and future requirements.

In many ways, the US military is living off the fruits of the Reagan buildup. F-16 and F-15 fighters, which still form the backbone of the US Air Force’s combat aircraft fleet, are on average over 30 years old.⁴⁶ Similarly, the Navy’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines have an average age of approximately 35 years, while many of the Navy’s destroyers are approaching or exceeding 30 years in service.⁴⁷ The US Army continues to rely on Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, of which new procurement is limited and older variants are upgraded.⁴⁸

Without replacements ready or politicians willing to risk leaping the acquisition “valley of death,” the Pentagon has relied on increasingly expensive efforts to extend aging platforms’ service lives. These extensions often lead to higher maintenance and operating costs with diminishing returns. Alternatively, some equipment is retired without replacement, shrinking the force and exacerbating readiness challenges.⁴⁹

Even after the end of the BCA, budgets have done little to right the wrongs. The “Trump bump,” which increased defense spending by $225 billion over previous plans, was not enough to change the trajectory of managed decline set in place by Barack Obama.⁵⁰ Much of this new funding was dedicated to personnel, operations, and maintenance accounts, which meant modest and inconsistent boosts to procurement hindering any wholesale replacement of aging equipment.⁵¹

While defense budgets increased under Joe Biden in nominal terms, they failed to offset inflation or meaningfully address the modernization backlog. The FY2025 request reflected a 1 percent increase over FY2024 to $849.8 billion and allocated just $170 billion to procurement—roughly 20 percent of the total budget and well below the share devoted to new equipment during the Reagan buildup. In real terms, this represented a decline from FY2024, highlighting the growing gap between strategic demands and available resources.⁵²

Similarly, the FY2025 topline was $10 billion below the Pentagon’s internal projections and fell short of inflation-adjusted requirements.⁵³ Much of the funding for new equipment has been deferred into the out-years, prompting former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to acknowledge that “we’ll need to have growth in a top line in the out-years to ensure that we can recapture some of the things that we weren’t able to get into this budget.” Without sustained real growth, that recapture looks increasingly unlikely.⁵⁴

This overreliance on legacy systems has created a modernization backlog so severe that the US military is now firmly in the “Terrible 20s”—a decade in which equipment is aging out faster than it can be replaced.⁵⁵ It is also why the reconciliation bill for defense granting $150 billion in mandatory spending over the next several years is precisely what is needed for the US military at this moment. The Army, Navy, and Air Force are all facing simultaneous modernization demands, requiring urgent recapitalization to replace aging fleets, restore lost capacity, and adapt to the challenges of great-power competition—particularly with China.

A Fragile Posture in a Dangerous World

Winning wars does not solely demand capable forces, skilled leaders, smart planning, joint readiness, or exquisite and abundant weapons. Fundamentally, to win a war—and therefore deter one—demands (1) public support, (2) ample funding, and (3) a manufacturing and tech industrial base capable and large enough to crank out kit of sufficient quality to support a protracted war long after our high-end gear has run empty.

Unlike the Cold War, where a singular focus on deterring the Soviet Union defined strategy, today’s threats are dynamic, sophisticated, and multilayered. Aligned adversaries pursue coordination that amplifies their ability to challenge the United States across domains, from economic and trade to cyber, space, and information warfare.⁵⁶

This shift is likely to heighten demands on current US strategy, as simultaneous and interconnected threats require a level of agility and capacity that the current force struggles to meet. Today’s military also faces additional challenges unique to modern warfare, including a largely transparent battle space, advanced precision weapons, anti-access and area-denial systems, and cyber capabilities that undermine traditional notions of deterrence and defense.

Compounding these challenges is the US industrial base, which decades of underinvestment have diminished.⁵⁷ Unlike the Cold War era, when the defense industry could rapidly scale production, today’s constrained manufacturing capacity means the military lacks the surge potential to replenish equipment and adapt quickly to prolonged conflicts.⁵⁸ This bottleneck increases the risks of supply-chain disruptions and equipment shortages, further weakening the United States’ ability to sustain prolonged operations.⁵⁹

Ultimately, the interplay between these modern threats and declining US military strength leaves the force operating on a razor’s edge. A significant escalation in one theater risks exposing critical vulnerabilities in another, creating openings for adversaries to exploit. China, Russia, and others understand that America lacks the depth to fight and sustain operations in multiple regions at once. This recognition increases the risk of opportunistic aggression, as adversaries may conclude that the current moment offers the best window to act. Addressing this precarious balance will require not only reinvestment in force structure but a deliberate effort to restore industrial capacity and adopt more innovative, resilient deterrence strategies.

The Path Forward: Resourcing to Match the Strategy

Rebuilding the US military to align with policymakers’ aims, our global strategic commitments, and reality as it is versus what we wish it could be is essential to restoring global deterrence. Any effort to grow the military’s size and strength must directly tackle the challenges of deferred modernization and insufficient funding.

As the US navigates the midpoint of the Terrible 20s, the consequences of decades of underinvestment and deferred modernization are becoming increasingly clear. Budget cuts, flat funding, and incremental increases are insufficient when the costs of maintaining a globally deployed, volunteer force continue to rise and adversaries rapidly modernize their capabilities. While toplines have grown nominally over the past five years, red-hot inflation has decreased the Pentagon’s buying power. In fact, the average annual real rate of growth in the Pentagon’s budget is −1 percent.⁶⁰ This is unsustainable as the costs of personnel, equipment, and operations continue to rise.

To reverse the military’s current trajectory and meet the current strategy’s demands, significant, sustained budgetary growth is required along the lines of the 2026 budget reconciliation for defense, at $150 billion over a half decade.

Both the 2018 and 2024 National Defense Strategy Commissions recommend an annual increase of 3–5 percent to offset inflation and provide the Pentagon with meaningful, sustained growth.⁶¹ If the full 5 percent annual growth is achieved, the projected defense budget will grow by approximately $235 billion over the next five years. This level of investment would provide the necessary resources to address critical modernization needs, rebuild force capacity, and strengthen the defense industrial base, ensuring the military can support the sustained modernization and surge requirements necessary in great-power competition.⁶²

Quite simply, trillion-dollar defense budgets should be here to stay.

New funding must focus on procurement at scale—acquiring the hardware needed to replace aging systems and expand the military’s capacity. While R&D is essential for future innovation, it cannot address the immediate need to field cutting-edge equipment. Disproportionate spending on RDT&E has resulted in advanced systems being developed but not sufficiently procured, leaving the military reliant on outdated platforms.

It’s not just about the dollars; it’s about the outputs. While funding levels are key, the true measure of the resourcing’s success is the delivery of tangible outcomes that favor America, our economy, and our way of life. That means fielding a force that is modern, capable, and able to deter America’s adversaries effectively in multiple theaters at the same time.

Shipbuilding provides a clear example. Over the past few decades, the shipbuilding budget has seen real growth, yet the Navy remains trapped in a “doom loop” of aging platforms, limited new construction, and rising operational demands.⁶³ Despite this, shipbuilding continues to decline, as post–Cold War spending cuts have created an environment in which the industrial base is producing fewer ships each year and failing to meet the Navy’s needs. As a result, costs have skyrocketed, productivity has plummeted, and the Navy’s fleet goals remain out of reach.⁶⁴

Consistent and predictable funding is a big part of breaking this cycle. Stable investments will enable shipyards to expand capacity, reduce inefficiencies, and deliver new platforms at scale, helping the Navy meet its readiness and force-structure goals. This approach must extend across all domains, ensuring that budgetary growth translates into a stronger, more capable military that can deter aggression in multiple theaters and safeguard US interests worldwide.

Investing in America’s Future Defense

The United States stands at a strategic crossroads, facing a world that is more dangerous and complex than at any point since the Cold War. Yet the US military is shrinking, struggling to modernize, and operating with an increasingly strained industrial base. This decades-long strategy-resource mismatch risks enticing our allies to see America as a paper tiger, vulnerable to adversarial miscalculation and escalation. As this chapter has outlined, the problem lies in decades of inadequate defense budgets, insufficient modernization, and the absence of the sustained, strategic investments that once underpinned American military dominance.

History provides a clear example of what is needed. The Reagan-era defense buildup revitalized the military, expanded capacity, and restored deterrence by matching ambitious goals with consistent and robust funding. It focused on what can be bought at scale at the time versus promising scientific projects of tomorrow. By contrast, today’s defense budgets, while nominally high, are insufficient in real terms to rebuild force structure, recapitalize aging systems, or invest in next-generation capabilities. Strategic insolvency is no longer a risk—it is the reality.

Without sustained real growth in defense spending after reconciliation works its way through the armed forces and industrial base, the US military will continue to be outpaced, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. The United States must recommit to sustained growth above inflation for defense year after year.

This introductory chapter has set the stage for understanding the depth of the challenges resulting from chronic underfunding of our national defense. The following book chapters will explore these issues in greater detail, examining the consequences of a shrinking force structure; the erosion of industrial capacity, supply chains, and workforces; the sharp rise in domestic entitlement spending, most notably in health care; and the risks of ongoing underinvestment in combat power. Together, they will win the argument that America can afford to defend itself.⁶⁵

This book will show that the cost of a failure to adequately fund the armed forces at a steady state—commensurate with politicians’ expectations of them—far outweighs the modest investments of deterrence against the overwhelming costs of war. It builds the case for bold action to restore America’s strategic credibility and ensure our military is prepared today to meet the moment.

The first two chapters lay the strategic foundation for the volume. Hal Brands opens with a sweeping assessment of the global threat environment, tracing how the mismatch between American strategy and available resources has developed over time. He highlights how adversaries have grown more capable and coordinated just as US military power has stagnated or declined, and he outlines steps to close this dangerous gap. Dustin Walker follows with focused recommendations to reinvigorate a multi-theater military strategy, calling for a return to credible global deterrence through deliberate reforms of posture, readiness, and force.

The next series of chapters addresses the economic and fiscal foundations required to sustain a stronger defense. James C. Capretta argues that serious entitlement reform is essential to unlocking long-term budgetary flexibility—especially if defense is to be treated as a national priority. Michael R. Strain emphasizes the broader economic rationale for defense investment, contending that military strength underpins global economic stability and that the cost of deterrence failure far exceeds the price of preparedness. Todd Harrison considers the upper bounds of defense spending, offering a framework for evaluating how much is enough without succumbing to arbitrary limits. Elaine McCusker closes this section with a close look at the defense budget’s mechanics, showing how erratic funding cycles and the diversion of defense dollars toward nondefense functions undercut long-term planning and readiness.

Dan Blumenthal and Zack Cooper then examine the Indo-Pacific, where they explore the operational challenges China’s rise poses and lay out specific posture adjustments, capability investments, and alliance structures required to sustain US influence in the region.

The final set of chapters focus on force development and modernization. Kori Schake and James Mattis begin with an unflinching look at the recruitment and retention crisis plaguing the all-volunteer force, offering institutional reforms to build a larger and more capable military. Frederick W. Kagan draws on the war in Ukraine to illustrate how warfare is changing and how the United States must adapt by embracing flexibility and preparing for sustained, large-scale conflict. Domain-specific chapters from Giselle Donnelly (land), John G. Ferrari (sea), Rebecca Grant (air), and Harrison (space) assess the current state of US military forces and chart modernization paths that align with the demands of a multi-theater strategy. Finally, Kyle Balzer turns to the nuclear enterprise, making the case that a credible, modernized nuclear force remains essential.

Taken as a whole, this book provides a comprehensive plan for the current administration. Restoring American military strength is not a matter of rhetoric or marginal adjustments but of deliberate choices across strategy, spending, and force structure. The task ahead is not easy—but neither is it beyond reach. What is required is the political will to match America’s ambitions with the resources and reforms needed to achieve them.⁶⁶

Authors