The weakest US national security posture of my lifetime
TAT readers,
Today’s essay is a sobering discussion about the precipitous state of America’s national security posture. It has been willfully degraded since Inauguration Day, but since the Iran War’s first salvos, our inability to protect the nation from a variety of threats, has grown sharply. The willful degradation of our national security should concern every American. National security professionals have been writing about this whittling away of our national security since before inauguration day, 2025. In my opinion, we’ve reached a point of vulnerability nationally, that requires all Americans to acknowledge the threat and act to stop any further damage.
Today’s essay is less a well-organized assessment, than me brainstorming out loud an array of thoughts about our national security that don’t seem to make it to our mainstream news headlines. To be clear, far more goes into national security than just troops, planes, ships, intelligence etc. A true-in-depth and detailed analysis would require volumes to explain the severity of our current vulnerabilities, but today’s cursory look should alarm you enough without overloading you with massive amounts of data from every nook and cranny of our national security budget. Today I am only looking at what I consider to be a few of the most dangerous indicators and issues of our national security readiness.
A nation’s defense depends on a wide variety of factors but they are not all equal. In fact, every nation looks to their own security and much of their decision-making, which is based on their potential adversaries or as is common in much natsec planning these days, “competitors.” Every new administration puts out a document called the NSS or National Security Strategy early in their term. The NSS outlines where the incoming administration sees the most significant threats to our nation and how they intend to go about addressing them. Our most recent NSS is the November 2025 version from the current Trump administration.
I am far from the only national security professional to pan the 2025 NSS. Most serious think tanks find this version to be a strong deviation from everything America has always considered critical to our national security. High profile think tanks tend to carefully couch their criticisms of any administration in euphemisms, so as to not offend whichever political party is in power. Those who have read their reports for years as I have, will immediately recognize a harsher or maybe blunter tone of criticism of this administration. This is an indicator of a highly-stressed national security environment.
Below are a handful of highly respected sources echoing many of my concerns.
My most prescient threat "One of the most dramatic geopolitical developments in recent years has been the growing alignment among America’s adversaries and competitors. China is helping Russia reconstitute its military, and in exchange, Russia is providing China with valuable military technology and assistance that could give it an edge over the United States in a conflict. North Korea has sent troops and weapons to Russia in its war against Ukraine, and in exchange, Moscow has helped Pyongyang modernize its military. All of these countries and Iran are cooperating diplomatically against the United States. If a U.S.-China war were to break out, it could easily go global, given these links. Reading the NSS, you’d never know about any of this." - A Strategy That Ignores the Real Threats - The Atlantic - Thomas Wright - December 8th, 2026
Americans and others are dying, while thousands have become causalities in and around the Iran War. It hasn’t stopped there either. In Trump’s second term, we’ve bombed seven different countries, more than any other president in the modern era. For a guy elected to our highest office by promising to end wars, provide peace deals within 24 hours of being elected and prevent future wars, it’s quite clear that Trump and the GOP who has given him free rein to wage his wars, are abject failures at peace. To make matters even worse, we are less safe, not more after all of these global attacks. I explained this issue in detail in a couple of the essays I wrote for a ten-part series on the early part of the Iran war.
Part 4: the War with Iran leads to grave consequences on a local and global scale
The Iran War, Part VIII: The liars, cowards and thieves, looting our household budgets.
Part IX, the Iran War: Hold your horses everyone, a yet unsigned MOU is not a peace deal
All of this military activity takes a toll on troops, equipment, R&D (research and development), morale and sustainability. The US lagging behind in all of these issues and more. For example, for decades, the building and sustaining of our national security has required the ability of the US to fight two, full-scale wars simultaneously. By no stretch of the imagination is that now currently possible. Iran is not even a full-scale war and yet, we’ve critically depleted much of our entire specialty missile and related munitions stockpiles, having borrowed many of the munitions used against Iran from other global commands. Most of those stockpiles cannot be fully replenished until sometime in 2027 at best, and some of the most important ones far later. Should China decide to fight over Taiwan, we’d be in an extremely weak position due to our depleted stockpiles.
It’s not like we entered into this war ready for another war either. The Pentagon has been struggling to maintain readiness for over a decade due to two decades of war in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. We haven’t yet determined a strategy for modernizing and refitting the Pentagon for the rapidly evolving combat environments we see globally. In other words, this is a poor time to start wars around the globe for which we are not prepared. Again I remind readers, our ongoing abuses of our allies, especially NATO, makes our current degraded national security posture, even more pronounced. Such a situation is much like how predators select prey on the savannahs of Africa. They look for the weakened, slow, injured animals without allies on the edge of the herd, as their dinner.
It is not only the munitions stockpiles we’re burning so carelessly, but the Pentagon’s already bloated budget has now faltered under the weight of the absurdly unnecessary war with Iran. Pete Hegseth is now begging Congress for another 70 billion for his losing war. America can ill afford the losses we are suffering, especially regarding the 2.6 billion dollars worth of aircraft lost to Iran. Such losses put a huge dent in our sustainability goals to maintain a force that is fully equipped, trained and operationally competent to protect our nation. As of yesterday, this administration cannot even determine the number of deaths and other casualties. No one in their right mind believes Hegseth’s claim that we’ve only spent 37 billion on the war so far. Honest experts put the number at roughly 90 billion. Despite a 1.5 Trillion dollar budget, Pete is now asking the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t see any point to this war, to pay another 70 billion.
One aspect of national security that doesn’t get near enough attention is morale. Troops must always know what they are fighting for, believe in the mission, know that they will not be ordered to commit illegal acts etc. Absence of this understanding or not being supportive of current policies can be debilitating for military forces. We saw this often in troops mobilized to go to walk around D.C. or the streets of LA during early administration immigration actions. We’re seeing it again from US casualties in and around the Persian Gulf who were ordered to operate without the necessary layered protections from Iranian missile and drone attacks. There is always some level of morale problems within the force but today’s malaise is universal.
In fact, the US military talks to its troops a great deal about something called “the will to fight.”
"In 2018, RAND published two reports for the U.S. Army describing will to fight. Arguably, will to fight is the single most important factor in war. Will to fight is the disposition and decision to fight, to keep fighting, and to win. The best technology in the world is useless without the force of will to use it and to keep using it even as casualties mount and unexpected calamities arise. Will to fight represents the indelibly human nature of warfare." - Will to Fight - RAND - Ben Connable, Michael J. McNerney, William Marcellino, Aaron B. Frank, Henry Hargrove, Marek N. Posard, S. Rebecca Zimmerman, Natasha Lander, Jasen J. Castillo, James Sladden, et al. - September 13, 2019
A dangerous hollowing-out of senior officers based on race, gender or policy opinions has taken a toll, especially on the officer corps. Some commands operate like Soviet troops did, with political and religious Kommissars. The recent forced retirement of GEN. Christopher Donahue, commander of all US forces Europe and Africa, stunned all senior leadership. GEN. Donahue was generational leader that I once had the humbling honor to serve under. Seeing him being shown the door was a shock wave of proportion all across the Department of Defense.
When one looks at some of the other facets of national security like allies, friends, a strong economy, manufacturing, a unified citizenry, diplomacy etc., it is easy to see that even outside of the Pentagon, our national security posture is at its weakest since just prior to WW II. Manufacturing still trends towards sending manufacturing overseas, our economy for oligarchs only is spiraling downward before our very eyes, our citizenry is highly divided and not one agency within the federal government is running anywhere close to “smooth.” America is nowhere near prepared to defend itself.
I have even mused here in writing, that in some ways, China has replaced the US as the world’s most dominant superpower. The longer this fiasco in the Persian Gulf drags on, the stronger China becomes and the weaker we look. The stronger Xi becomes, the weaker we become. Not even US military strength can protect us if a China dominated world becomes a reality. For the record, Xi’s 2012 China Dream Strategy which calls for Chinese regional hegemony by 2035 and global hegemony by 2049, is right on schedule. We cannot go it alone in today’s world. No nation can. The smart play is to stop abusing our allies and try to win back a little of the trust we so callously destroyed. Without a competent corps of Ambassadors, which we don’t have, we cannot restore trust with allies via standard diplomatic norms. Not only have we shot ourselves in the foot, but we’ve used a cannon to do it. In the modern world, those without allies formal or otherwise are nothing more than prey. For example, just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he ordered all cyber and influence operations against Russia halted. Now Russia attacks us constantly and we’ve made it far-easier for them.
Our primary threats are not just overseas either. Terrorism from across the ideological spectrum threatens citizens, with far-right violent extremism continuing their twenty-plus years spree that accounts for the majority of the violence. Cost of living challenges for citizens continue to mount, diseases once eradicated have reappeared, our civil rights are disappearing and the overwhelming majority of Americans, deservedly no longer trust their government. In fact, my professional opinion is that miss and disinformation have turned our media environment septic. The government not only refuses to help, but doesn’t know how even if they tried.
Summary
I am appreciative for those who’ve taken the time to read my thoughts on some aspects of our national security vulnerabilities that don’t make the headlines. To be blunt, I no longer am confident that the US is still the primary global power. China has a far-better diplomatic and commercial network that links them to nearly every corner of the world. Their military is growing as rapidly as it is modernizing. Tariffs, diplomatic abuses, refusal to cooperate, are just some of tools that we use to force ourselves and our allies into retreat.
Debacles of the Iran War demonstrate not only failed leadership from the administration, but that we are a bull-in-a-China-shop when it comes to the global economy. Being unpopular around the world is one thing, but being a selfish international agitator when it comes to the global economy only further isolates the US from the safety of our existing military and trade alliances.
Without firm intervention by congress that restores professionalism to our national security community, America will become critically vulnerable on the world stage and with a sharply reduced voice in global affairs. Are we really willing to surrender our future to oppressive oligarchy that leaves us less safe than at any other moment in my lifetime? The only way we can stop the bleeding from the deep wounds in our national security, is to take it to the press and to congress relentlessly. We can sort out our intra-American partisan battlefield later but at the moment, our national security is in the ICU, and the patient is coding.
My very best for your week,
Paul