Washington should avoid a real fight with serious great power rivals anytime soon—until the Pentagon can make real changes to its acquisitions process.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, as America celebrated its 249th birthday, President Donald Trump basked in the warm glow of fireworks, the successful passage of a very controversial—and expensive—Big, Beautiful Bill (BBB), and the series of ostensibly successful airstrikes he oversaw in Iran.
To many in the public, America is back after years of uncertainty and decline. This feeling was capped off by Trump’s successful strikes on Iran that, according to Trump, “OBLITERATED” Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity and avoided the pitfalls of a major US military intervention in the Mideast.
Of course, the reality is far murkier.
The consensus now is that Trump’s airstrikes successfully degraded Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons, setting the program back for perhaps as long as two years. And with Israel still poking Iran and its proxies in the region, it remains to be seen if Trump can keep the United States out of war completely.
Most Americans believe their military is unquestioningly dominant. But the recent airstrikes, despite their outward success, actually underscore a weakness undergirding the American military.
America Doesn’t Have Enough Weapons to Fight a Long War
For instance, the airstrikes against Iran’s hardened nuclear weapons facilities involved B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers using America’s largest non-nuclear bomb, the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The Americans possess only 19 B-2s in their entire arsenal—with no backup coming online in a reliable timeline or in any meaningful number, due to the complexity of the engineering involved and the cost.
To make matters worse, the United States had only 20 GBU-57s in its arsenal before Trump’s airstrikes. The Air Force used 14 on two targets in Iran, leaving only six. It took more than a decade to build 20 of those bombs, and the GBU-57’s production line has been shuttered as the Pentagon waits for America’s defense contractors to bid on the contract for a Next Generation Penetrator (NGP). In other words, if Trump ever wanted to go back into Iran and strike hardened military targets deep underground, he would find America’s hands tied due to depletion.
This is not the only area where the US military’s power is hollow. America’s defense industrial base as well as its naval shipyards have been underperforming for years. This is an acknowledged fact even by the current NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, who has argued that the Russians—a nation with less than one-tenth of America’s GDP—can produce in three months what it takes a year for the entire NATO defense industrial base to produce.
It gets scarier when comparing the US industrial capacity with that of the world’s second-largest economy, China. The production levels of Chinese shipyards are particularly shocking. One state-owned Chinese shipyard has produced more tonnage than the entire United States produced during the Second World War.
In essence, a single Chinese firm has built more ships than the United States ever did at the peak of its industrial might!
How Are China and Russia Both Outcompeting the United States?
China’s defense industry is seeing an explosion in productivity and interest from foreign buyers.
After Pakistan’s Chinese-made equipment upstaged India’s more expensive Western warplanes and missiles during the two countries’ recent four-day war, many nations in the Global South have expressed growing interest in Chinese systems. The more business China’s defense industry does overseas, the better its defense industry will get at overall production of weapons that are increasingly advanced. By contrast, the Americans substantially lack this scale. That is not a problem for either China or even Russia—the two nations that the United States will most likely find itself in a great power conflict with.
During the recent 12-Day War between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel used up an extraordinary amount of its air defense systems to repel Iran’s missile swarms. In that time, experts assess that the Israelis went through an astonishing two years’ worth of Iron Dome ammunition (supplied by the United States). One of the reasons that Trump has pursued a negotiated settlement to that war has been because he understands that neither the Israelis nor the Americans can sustain the Iron Dome defenses at the current operational tempo—let alone an increased one. It will take years to fully replenish the ammunition stocks for the Iron Dome and its related air defense systems. Neither the American nor Israeli defense industrial bases can meet that demand, especially if hostilities resume in the near future.
These are merely snapshots of a much larger crisis facing the United States military. Its current equipment is old and shrinking in number; the newer systems the Pentagon is trying to procure are too far off, way too expensive, and ultimately are geared toward fighting the wars of the past. The single biggest advance in warfare, as demonstrated by the Ukraine War especially, has been the revolution in unmanned systems.
The Pentagon Is Still Pouring Money Into Legacy Systems
Yet, the Pentagon continues insisting that they need a $1 trillion budget to build weapons, such as Trump’s eponymous “F-47” sixth-generation warplane, or more outdated aircraft carriers, or newer versions of the Abrams Main Battle Tank (MBT). All these systems are built for a twentieth century conflict, even as Ukraine shows what a twenty-first century one will look like.
The United States can celebrate its successful chicken run over Iran all it wants. But Washington should avoid a real fight with serious great power rivals anytime soon—until the Pentagon can make real changes to its acquisitions process and its overall strategic outlook shifts away from its current paradigm and toward the new reality of unmanned systems and standoff weapons.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / Ramunas Bruzas.
