Aftermath: Trump Is Wrecking the U.S. Military

This story was first featured in the Aftermath newsletter, a series from David Dayen exploring the economic consequences of the war in Iran. To have these stories delivered to your in-box as soon as they are published, sign up for the newsletter here.

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This edition of Aftermath is about how Trump’s war is seriously eroding American military strength. You can read our previous story about jet fuel and all the others in our series at prospect.org/aftermath. And sign up there to get this newsletter delivered to your in-box. Tell a friend, too!

Are We Still at War?

Despite the supposed cease-fire, clearly yes. A blockade is an act of war, and both America and Iran have imposed them on the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump is currently in China, where he is apparently attempting to get Chinese help ending the conflict, but I’ll believe that when I see it.

Trump Is Showing How Not to Fight

One of the most common criticisms Republicans have of Democratic presidents is that they damage military readiness. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush accused Bill Clinton of such neglect. “The next president will inherit a military in decline,” he said. Donald Trump claimed in 2016 that President Barack Obama left the military “depleted,” and recently said that President Joe Biden left it “gutted.”

Well, Trump had a strategy. Find the most serious Alpha Male Warfighter among Fox News’s weekend hosts, put him in charge of the Pentagon, and take the proverbial gloves off. No more of this woke nonsense like “nonwhite male generals” or “following duly enacted treaties.”

The results are coming in: The military is falling to bits.

The most immediate problem is Trump’s consistent, impulsive use of military force, above all his madcap crusade against Iran. This war will certainly get its own chapter in future histories of military catastrophes; maybe even its own class at West Point someday entitled “Things to Avoid.”

All the fighting is leading to serious attrition. Three full U.S. Navy carrier battle groups—that is, a carrier and its complement of support vessels—have been in the field for months, which naturally costs billions and leads to serious wear and tear. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet, has finally been sent back for maintenance and refitting after steaming all over the planet nonstop for 11 months—the longest such deployment since the Vietnam War—which led to all kinds of maintenance and repair issues, including a major fire.

The Navy as a whole could be out of cash in two months, according to Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle. The U.S. Army, facing a budget shortfall of $4 to $6 billion thanks to all the Trump deployments, is cutting back training exercises all across the force. The Air Force has lost many very expensive planes—in particular, an E-3 Sentry, which is literally impossible to replace—and U.S. bases around the Middle East have been heavily damaged.

According to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), citing a Pentagon report, it will take years to replenish the military’s supply of key munitions, like cruise missiles and interceptors, that have been fired with reckless abandon at Iranian targets. NBC News reports that the Defense Department has bizarrely not even signed new contracts to boost munition supply. Contrast that with the war in Ukraine, where Biden largely handed over older munitions that were due to be retired anyway, and replaced them with fresh ones, thereby providing badly needed support to Ukrainian defense and modernizing the American defense industrial base simultaneously.

An important background here is that the Trump administration has not prepared either the public or the military itself for such heavy use. If you read histories of the Second World War, one of the central themes of American victory was the heavy focus on production, logistics, and maintenance. A serious conflict consumes titanic quantities of ships, tanks, trucks, munitions, rubber, fuel, and so on. American war planners met the demand with a tremendous restructuring of the entire economy, with factories of all descriptions overhauled to churn out war materiel.

An Imperial Japanese Army dedicated to cultivating a fanatical warrior spirit—not unlike that espoused by Pete Hegseth, incidentally—got curb-stomped by an adversary that churned out so many fighters and bombers that in 1944, at the very height of the air war in the Pacific, U.S. forces were so overloaded with planes that at certain points they had no choice but to throw them into the ocean by the dozens. Recall who won that war.

But that production required placing unprecedented taxes and controls on the public. The top marginal tax rate went up to 94 percent, key commodities were strictly rationed and price-controlled, and the government’s share of GDP skyrocketed. Yet the public overwhelmingly supported these measures, because they rightly believed the war was just and necessary.

Trump hasn’t done any of that basic blocking and tackling of war. The fight with Iran was not touched off by some dastardly sneak attack—or rather, it was, by Trump. He did not ramp up materiel production in anticipation of the fight; heck, he didn’t even bother to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Now, the war in Iran is not a global-scale conflict (yet), so it’s not like Trump would need total war mobilization. That said, modern war is exponentially more expensive than it was in the ’40s. Today we have highly sophisticated nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, precision-guided munitions, missile interceptor systems, and so on. A Patriot battery, for instance, costs about $4 million a shot, and replacements are extremely time-consuming to manufacture.

Yet while Trump recently proposed a radical increase to the military budget, up to $1.5 trillion, he is highly unlikely to get it. Trump did not publicly justify the war beforehand or provide any coherent justification for it afterward, to this day. Every time someone asks, it’s a different explanation. It doesn’t help that the Trump administration’s other main budget priority is enormous cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and Obamacare, coupled with tax cuts for the rich that are so huge they still increase the deficit. In a quite literal sense, Trump is snatching food out of the mouths of hungry American children, in order to pay for bombs that are dropped on Iranian children, and the effect is to make the price of gas and diesel, and therefore food, shoot upward.

As a result, the war is tremendously unpopular, and even the fairly modest taxation necessary to pay for all Trump’s conflicts would be politically radioactive. Instead, it appears the military is pinching pennies by cannibalizing its readiness—running ships and planes ragged, and skimping on training and maintenance. That is only banking up worse problems for the future.

A more subtle but potentially even worse problem is corruption. The second Trump administration is unquestionably the most corrupt in American history, besting the record set by his first administration by a mile. It didn’t even occur to any previous president to sue his own administration over complete nonsense and then settle with himself for a cool $10 billion in free money, as Trump is reportedly considering. That is leading to the usual problem of public spending going to incompetent insiders, like a company linked to Trump’s two sons getting a $24 million Pentagon contract.

But the rise of prediction markets—in which, once again, the Trump sons are heavily invested, and the administration has defended to the hilt—unlocks even worse possibilities. These platforms are practically designed to enable the easiest possible commission of treason. When anyone can bet on all manner of foreign-policy developments, an incentive is created for administration insiders, from soldiers on up to Trump himself, to bet on what is going to happen, and thereby reveal it to any enemy watching these markets. Sure enough, at least one soldier has already done this regarding the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and that’s just a tiny fraction of the insider trading happening these days.

It’s not hard to imagine how this might end in major disaster, like Iran getting wind of naval movement plans by watching Polymarket and sinking an aircraft carrier with a lucky missile hit. The Australian defense economics expert Perun does not exaggerate to say that “insider trading destroys armies.”

The fact that war is so incredibly expensive these days points toward a core truth of modern foreign policy: A wise statesman avoids it if at all possible. Another Republican president, who had commanded the largest amphibious invasion in history, knew this better than most. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population,” Dwight Eisenhower famously said in a 1953 speech. “It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat.”

Today, a single F-35 fighter costs about $100 million, which at current prices is worth roughly 17 million bushels of wheat. But Trump is above such concerns. A reporter recently asked him about the war’s effect on ordinary people. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said. “I don’t think about anybody.” That much is obvious.

Thanks for reading. If you have tips or ideas for future stories, let us know! You can email us at aftermath@prospect.org.