Arthur Herman
As a crucial presidential election looms, with a world on fire and threats of multiple wars dotting the globe, we need to take stock of where America is and where it needs to go in the coming decades. Accordingly, it is time to celebrate one of the proudest American achievements: its “military-industrial complex.”
Spawned in a time of great distress during World War II, it won the greatest war in history and kept the Cold War from boiling over against a nuclear-armed peer rival, the Soviet Union. For over seventy years, it kept America and the free world stable, secure, and ready to confront any military challenge.
Today, it’s a shell of its former self. Thanks to shrinking funds, a changing industrial picture, and decades of vilification by critics on both the Left and Right, the American military-industrial complex’s decline has made us less safe, less secure, and more vulnerable to our enemies.
The most recent National Defense Strategy (NDS) report reveals that America is barely ready to fight a war against either Russia or China—let alone both. It concludes, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945.”
It’s the decline of that much-maligned military-industrial complex that’s made the once mighty America so vulnerable. At this current point, the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding is at its lowest point in twenty-five years. Meanwhile, OSINT sources report that China has shipyards that can build thirteen naval vessels at the same time.
Now, Americans need to recreate a military-industrial complex, one fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the meantime, it’s worth looking back in time to see what the first iteration did right.
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