On October 8, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its accompanying carrier strike group finally steamed back into U.S. waters after an exhausting 320 days at sea. That near-record deployment for the modern American military had long since devolved into controversy. As the strike group’s vessels went month after month without a single port call, onboard conditions deteriorated precipitously. Sailors faced severe supply shortages, persistent plumbing failures, and water contamination issues. Morale plummeted so markedly that eight sailors attempted suicide. By the time the ships finally pulled away from the Middle East, their acute struggles had captured national headlines and sparked urgent questions about the operational tempo of the armed forces.
The harrowing ordeal of the Lincoln is far from an isolated incident. Since the outbreak of war in Iran last February, a series of alarming developments regarding the U.S. military has rattled defense observers. Military analysts have expressed growing anxiety over the increasingly lengthy deployments of other carrier strike groups. They have scrutinized the Trump administration’s strategic choice to redeploy soldiers and military hardware traditionally stationed in the Indo-Pacific, shifting them instead to the Middle East. Perhaps most critically, experts have watched with mounting concern as the United States rapidly depletes its finite stockpiles of sophisticated, high-end munitions.
Beneath all of these systemic problems lies a single root cause: the U.S. military simply is not built for the near-constant state of use and deployment it has experienced for decades. Ever since the conclusion of the Cold War, American defense planners have structured the armed forces around the capability to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously. In operational practice, this has meant Washington has constructed a force explicitly designed to win short, sharp wars. Consequently, the military possesses neither the sheer volume of units, the depth of weapon inventories, nor the personnel strength required to sustain never-ending conflicts while concurrently deploying forces globally to coerce adversaries and reassure jittery partners.
In response, American officials are currently attempting to modestly increase the overall size of the military. More importantly, they hope that massive infusions of capital will enhance the technological capability of the existing force structure. Yet executing these sweeping changes will prove exceptionally challenging—and, according to many critics, entirely unnecessary. The United States remains an inherently secure nation surrounded by oceans, blessed with bountiful resources, and backed by capable, wealthy allies. It does not require a defense apparatus designed to fight everywhere, all at once. Instead, the nation would be far better served by focusing its strategic attention on a smaller, more disciplined set of priorities and scaling down its global footprint accordingly.
STRETCHED THIN
U.S. conventional nonnuclear forces, which consistently consume more than 80 percent of the defense budget, are meticulously structured and sized for specific, high-stakes contingencies—most notably a direct clash with China, Russia, or potentially both almost simultaneously. To prepare for these scenarios, military hardware is explicitly engineered for maximum lethality and survivability within what planners anticipate will be an extraordinarily dangerous combat environment. To that end, the Pentagon has heavily prioritized the acquisition of precise, long-range, and stealthy weapon systems. These platforms are intended to blast open the doors of heavily defended enemy airspace, allowing other expensive, advanced platforms—such as F-35 fighter jets or B-2 and B-21 bombers—to deliver large quantities of slightly less sophisticated, yet still devastatingly lethal, precision munitions.
Washington has never realistically expected these kinds of high-end wars to be protracted affairs. Rather, planners operate under the assumption that under the fierce pressure generated by such intense conflicts, an adversary will quickly back down, or the fighting will rapidly escalate to nuclear threats or, worse, actual nuclear use. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States and its NATO allies planned for an extraordinarily intense, roughly 30-day conventional conflict against the Soviet Union. Today’s military planners likely rely on similar foundational assumptions regarding a potential war with Beijing or Moscow. The prevailing American strategic theory holds that highly capable conventional forces, coupled with the terrifying risk of nuclear escalation, will effectively deter an attack in the first place. If deterrence ultimately fails, planners hope to stop an enemy dead in its tracks and generate such catastrophic escalation risks that the adversary will quickly realize its grave error and attempt to reverse course.
However, this foundational mindset means Washington inherently lacks the sustained resources necessary to wage long-term, great-power conflicts. With a price tag of roughly $100 million per aircraft, the F-35 fighter—a core mainstay of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps—is simply not designed for mass production. The same limitation applies to the long-range standoff missiles that would serve as the preferred munitions during the opening days of such a conflict. While the U.S. military has developed sophisticated theater ballistic missile defenses, their primary operational purpose is to protect deployed U.S. forces and essential military infrastructure, rather than towns, cities, or civilian industries. While they can be repurposed under certain conditions, doing so rapidly exhausts the available supply of interceptor missiles. In a full-scale war with China or Russia, civilians in allied local countries would largely be left to fend for themselves.
These structural vulnerabilities have become glaringly apparent in Washington’s ongoing conflict against Iran. The United States likely calculated that it could swiftly overpower the Islamic Republic—at best a regional middle power, albeit one harboring significant ambitions. Under optimal circumstances, the U.S. military historically overmatches this category of adversary, much as it did Iraq during the 1990–91 Gulf War. Yet American adversaries have steadily adapted over the decades. They no longer simply attempt to produce smaller, less capable knockoffs of the high-end great-power militaries that U.S. forces are designed to deter and combat. Instead, they have purposefully prepared themselves to absorb severe punishment and keep fighting, even if operating at reduced levels of combat effectiveness.
OVERPROMISE AND UNDERDELIVER
Overly ambitious war plans and flawed policies are not the sole drivers of the military’s current struggles; domestic and international politics are also compounding the difficulties. Because the American public remains deeply hesitant to support prolonged foreign interventions, U.S. politicians will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid casualties. In practice, this means they take the high-end weaponry that the military has meticulously stockpiled to breach formidable great-power defenses and instead spend it profligately on sporadic regional conflicts. Similarly, leaders deploy scarce air defense systems to shield allied towns and cities, driven by the fear that those allies might otherwise seek alternative security partnerships or opt to settle ongoing wars through unfavorable compromises with their adversaries.
Furthermore, U.S. policymakers display a persistent tendency to overuse the armed forces as a default instrument of statecraft. Politicians frequently favor accompanying diplomatic messaging with kinetic action—partly due to a waning faith in traditional diplomacy—which pushes them to parade or deploy military assets far more frequently than circumstances warrant. When civilian leaders issue directives to act, military commanders almost invariably salute and comply. Others simply struggle to remain idle; after all, professional commanders assumed their high-ranking roles precisely because they wanted to lead operations.
The inevitable result is a severely worn-down military establishment. The defense press is routinely dominated by reports of warships and aircraft falling well below operational standards due to deferred maintenance resulting from extended deployments. This backlog creates cascading repair problems across the entire fleet. When a single combat ship must remain in dry dock longer than scheduled to receive adequate overhauls, subsequent ships are forced to wait longer for their routine servicing, causing their maintenance needs to compound over time. Ultimately, the Navy finds itself with fewer fully ready combat ships available to respond to a sudden great-power crisis.
The U.S. Army faces parallel challenges, with combat and support vehicles frequently arriving at maintenance depots in unexpectedly poor condition. Within the Air Force, the "full mission capable rate" for the F-35—which was never exceptionally high—has deteriorated dramatically from 38 percent down to 25 percent since 2021. Overall aircraft readiness rates across the broader Air Force have similarly declined in recent years, largely driven by chronic overwork and insufficient downtime.
Throughout this relentless cycle, American soldiers, sailors, pilots, and marines remain on a perpetual footing of high alert, attempting to simultaneously coerce adversaries, deter regional threats, and reassure anxious allies. This relentless tempo generates severe operational strain that directly impacts personnel retention. Although the military has managed to retain senior enlisted personnel reasonably well in recent years, those trends may soon reverse. Since 2024, Navy warships have repeatedly been forced to deploy severely undercrewed. The cumulative outcome of this systemic overuse is clear: the sharp edge of America’s military instrument is being dulled, and its steel blade is steadily weakening.
FIT FOR PURPOSE
U.S. defense officials are acutely aware of these compounding crises. Presently, they are attempting to engineer a solution by building a somewhat larger and vastly more technologically advanced military apparatus. Congress, for instance, appears poised to increase the Pentagon’s baseline budget—encompassing what the Congressional Budget Office defines as the enduring costs of manning, training, and equipping the force—by more than 25 percent, pushing it to $1.1 trillion for the 2027 fiscal year. Additionally, the Pentagon hopes to secure an extra $350 billion in subsequent funding bills outside the base budget.
Defense leadership also aims to recruit over 40,000 new service members. However, this represents a modest personnel increase of just three percent, which is far too small to staff the additional units required to resolve current readiness deficits. Furthermore, the advanced weaponry that lawmakers hope to acquire cannot overcome the physical strain of constant deployments and unyielding operational cycles. The defense industrial base is already struggling to keep pace with existing demands, and recruiting massive numbers of new troops would likely necessitate offering significantly higher wages, which would subsequently need to be extended across the entire force. Personnel costs would quickly consume an even greater share of the defense budget. While officials could theoretically resort to reinstating a military draft, such a move would trigger immense political backlash.
A viable alternative exists, however: strategic scaling down. Rather than pretending the nation must maintain the capacity to fight two great-power wars simultaneously, Washington should tailor its policy ambitions to match its available resources. The military should continue to build capable forces for critical contingencies, such as deterring territorial revisionism by China. However, policymakers must agree to decelerate or scale back secondary commitments.
Congress should task the Pentagon with conducting a comprehensive review of the armed forces to establish an official activity budget. This budget would be calculated based on a realistic assessment of how much physical military activity—measured in flying hours, ship days at sea, and training days in the field—can be sustained without degrading the readiness of the total force. Lawmakers and planners would then allocate operational tempo accordingly.
Based on the systemic attrition the military has suffered through three decades of hyperactive deployment, commanders must determine what level of exercises, forward deployments, and regional interventions the force can genuinely support without eroding the core capabilities required to deter or wage a major great-power war effectively. The U.S. Navy already understands the precise activity thresholds its fleet can sustain, having detailed these limits within its Optimized Fleet Response Plan. Yet successive American presidents and defense secretaries have routinely ignored these internal guidelines whenever political expediency demanded additional force deployments.
Crucially, this proposed activity budget should not be classified; instead, it should be made entirely public, published alongside the annual financial budget documents hosted on the Pentagon comptroller’s website. When political leaders wish to exceed the pre-agreed activity thresholds, they should be required to publicly explain their rationale and detail how they plan to repair the resulting wear and tear on the force. Military commanders should view this adherence as a matter of professional ethics, with leaders occasionally taking the principled stand of resigning when political overuse inflicts severe damage on their personnel and equipment.
To help lighten this heavy operational load, Washington will also need to devolve certain security responsibilities to capable regional allies. This shift should be entirely feasible, even when accounting for the need to manage Moscow’s aggressive ambitions—the primary contingency driving European defense planning. Principal European nations possess more than sufficient economic, industrial, and technological resources to handle Russia independently, should they choose to do so. The foundational transatlantic security bargain must therefore become much more candid regarding the limited liability the United States is genuinely prepared to assume for the defense of the European continent.
While the National Defense Strategy of the Trump administration acknowledges this reality in theory, ongoing U.S. military activity levels and troop deployments across Europe suggest the nation has not truly reduced its foundational role in European defense. The Supreme Allied Commander of NATO remains an American officer, a post that should long ago have transitioned to a European leader. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain permanently stationed across Europe, many of whom should be brought home. Furthermore, official Pentagon and European command websites continue to feature exhaustive inventories of exercises and maneuvers spanning the continent, involving both forward-based American forces and rotating units deployed from the U.S. mainland. These operational footprints, too, should be substantially curtailed.
American officials may harbor a persistent desire to resolve global security challenges simply by purchasing a larger military. Yet a far superior path forward involves shifting U.S. grand strategy toward one of greater restraint. Washington quite simply lacks both the political will and the boundless resources required to underwrite the security of both Asia and Europe while simultaneously fighting protracted regional conflicts, most recently in the Middle East. Nor, fundamentally, does the nation require such an expansive posture.
The United States is inherently a remarkably secure country. It is economically prosperous, endowed with rich natural resources, physically insulated by vast oceanic barriers, and bordered by relatively weak and non-threatening neighbors. Only seismic shifts in the global distribution of political power across Asia, Europe, or the broader Middle East could genuinely threaten core American security interests.
Washington should certainly maintain sufficient military power and adequate reserves of strategic materials to insure against such extreme geopolitical transformations. In general, however, the nation can comfortably afford to adopt a less proactive posture. Embracing this recalibrated grand strategy might even allow the United States to finally trim its defense budget, assisting in the broader national effort to address ballooning federal deficits and restore long-term fiscal health.
