The U.S. military has a preparedness problem. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it. From Senator Tuberville’s political intransigence toward the promotion and appointment of general officers to an ongoing recruiting crisis to the widespread reluctance to arm and equip a Ukrainian military fighting for its life, the idea of a collective “defense” — or collective anything — has never been more doubtful.

The question I hope to answer today is: what does the U.S. stand to lose by withdrawing from its defense obligations at home, and abroad?

THE BIG STORY

The Jenga Tower of U.S. Defense

A rash of political intransigence threatens to cripple not only U.S. military readiness, but the defense industry we need to fight in a 21st century war

Everyone knows Jenga, the entertaining game where one uses blocks from a tower to build the tower higher. The thrill of a block expertly removed without causing the tower to fall — placing that block precariously near or at the top of the tower — the tower’s eventual calamitous collapse.

Defense is a lot like that tower. There is a finite amount of people, money, political capital, and resources, and it needs to be used in certain ways to produce certain outcomes. Taking a contract away from one sector makes the entire edifice less stable, as does awarding that contract to some new concept or initiative.

That’s true for development, procurement, training, and even the task organization of the various branches. If one wants to expand the U.S. Army’s air defense ability, that means taking soldiers and officers from some other unit or units. Think artillery is too light? Beefing up long-range fires means robbing maneuverability or light infantry capabilities.

There are priorities that are more urgent than others, but at present, the most pressing priorities have to be those that take the longest to address. Training an air defense battalion or brigade isn’t like training an infantry battalion or brigade. Recruiting and training NCOs and officers is different from recruiting and training soldiers (it’s more difficult to recruit and train NCOs than officers because one never knows who will become an NCO).

To use the Jenga analogy, bricks were removed from the bottom of the U.S. defense tower years or decades ago, and never rebuilt. The entire edifice is tottering, vulnerable. It’s not so fragile that a stiff wind will knock it over — but neither is it capable of sustaining pressure. If one is playing, one must now remove bricks from its center and base with great care and attention. Frankly, the attention now should be on building new bricks, at the base, and key points of failure.

One point of failure highlighted by the war in Ukraine is that we lack the capacity to produce the ammunition we need to fight a near-peer enemy, a possibility that even as recently as three years ago would have sounded like the ravings of a paranoiac. Many otherwise sensible people — myself included — were under the astonishing misapprehension that industry in the U.S. was healthy (or, at least, defense industry), and that in the case of a WWII style conflict we’d merely throw a switch, and the factories would spring back to life to produce weapons, tanks, planes, and ammunition — whatever we needed.

Ukraine exposed that notion as a lie, a combination of propaganda, nostalgia, and convenient inattention. Most of the manufacturing capacity we’d need to make the 100,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition per month necessary to fight a war with Russia no longer exist, or is being rebuilt in order to get Ukraine the ammunition it needs. Ditto Javelin ammunition, and Stinger missiles, and all the various equipment we have had lying in stockpiles, as we imagined that the Cold War was the end of history.

Jenga: you remove one brick, and put it somewhere else. Those politicians now seeking to block aid to Ukraine seem not to understand that the political will to create the industry needed to survive the next war comes from aiding and equipping Ukrainians — and once that reason is gone, most people will turn their attention elsewhere, and demand that investment go to infrastructure or other important purposes. Denying aid to Ukraine won’t mean we continue to build our military and industrial base, it will mean much of the political will for defense industry vanishes overnight, and returns to the status quo that led to our sad and dilapidated current state.

The defense contractors at AUSA demonstrated what they were most interested in: drones, autonomous vehicles, and AI (not necessarily in that order). Two exhibits featured 155mm ammo, though in a war where artillery is king, it is (even more than drones and far more than AI or autonomous vehicles) seen as critical by both sides.

If Congress refuses to continue aid to Ukraine, it will put the Ukrainians in a bad position, there’s no question. For people (such as myself) who are first and foremost interested in American industrial capacity — the ability to produce what we need to win a big war — the question is different. Will we be able to sustain the political and industrial (important to remember here, military industry has no interest in building big factories to make more artillery ammo, the overhead’s horrible) attention and energy to rebuild? Or will the Jenga tower collapse?

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HUMOR

The concept for this piece is a little confusing but if you stick with it, you’ll see it makes sense and is pretty funny.