The U.S. Military Is in a Historic Crisis. Good!

Earlier this summer, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted a fitness challenge video that offers an apt representation of the current state of the U.S. military. The video shows Hegseth lifting weights at the infamous Guantánamo Bay prison on occupied Cuban land. The caption claims that he “CRUSHED 44 reps on the bench,” but the video was largely mocked for Hegseth’s poor lifting form and his twitching legs as he clearly struggles to rack the barbell.

Like the video, which boasts of strength while clearly depicting weakness, the Trump administration’s “peace through strength” agenda is revealing to the entire world the growing frailty of U.S. imperialism and, with it, the crisis facing the U.S. military.

Trump’s own National Security Strategy spoke to this crisis of military power, highlighting commitments in every region as incompatible with the country’s lack of industrial capacity for such commitments. As an alternative to relying on U.S. alliances, Trump believed that unilaterally wielding unmatched military power would be enough to keep other countries in line with U.S. aims.

The idea was to enforce U.S. interests through power projection, without getting the United States sucked into the kind of long-term interventions or commitments that consume U.S. resources, further straining U.S. military power. Iran has exposed the naiveté of this dogmatic belief that force alone can resolve deeper problems.

As La Izquierda Diario editor Claudia Cinatti wrote, the war has stretched for more than half a year, and not only has Trump failed to achieve any of the initial objectives behind his decision to attack Iran, but he also has no clear way out. The ability of the Iranian regime to withstand the United States — despite being economically and militarily much weaker — and the failure of the United States to impose its interests in the Middle East, sends a clear message of U.S. weakness to U.S. partners and adversaries alike.

It will be years, maybe decades, before a full accounting of the political costs of the war is possible. It’s easier, however, to account for some of the concrete military costs.

The United States has used up “virtually all” of its long-range precision missiles, which cost about $1 million each and could take up to a year to replace. The cost (in time and money) for advanced weapons systems is even more shocking. The United States now has fewer than 830 Patriot air defense interceptors and fewer than 280 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors. At the current rate at which these systems are produced, it will take three years to replenish prewar Patriot stocks and two years to bring THAAD stocks. One Patriot interceptor costs $4.2 million (not including the cost of replacements, maintenance, and other expenses), while it costs an estimated $2.8 billion to produce a single THAAD battery.

Then there is the toll on U.S. naval capacity, acutely shown in reports about conditions and morale on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which spent a record 286 consecutive days at sea. Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times both reported that sailors were attempting to jump overboard due to the mental toll of their deployment. Families of sailors have reported that their loved ones informed them of insufficient food and functioning toilets, among other issues on the ship. Hegseth and other Pentagon spokespeople have denied the reports, and Hegseth reportedly went so far as to cover up reports that a key naval resupply base was destroyed by an Iranian strike, contributing to the lack of resources on board.

The crisis of the USS Lincoln results from a longer-standing crisis of U.S. naval power. For some time now, the United States has lacked the facilities needed to maintain its naval vessels, while a lack of domestic shipbuilding and maintenance facilities has left the fleet increasingly overstretched. Further exacerbating the problem, U.S. federal law requires the U.S. fleet to have 11 operational aircraft carriers, meaning that the withdrawal of any one carrier leads to the extended use of other ships, further straining the fleet and deployed sailors.

This strain predates the Iran war. A 2019 ProPublica investigation shows how, even before the growing deployments in the Middle East, the Navy was insufficiently training and over-exhausting its sailors, leading to deadly collisions with civilian vessels in the Pacific. The Iran war suggests that much of the poor management reported in 2019 remains an issue.

To relieve the USS Lincoln, the United States pulled its last remaining aircraft carrier stationed in the Asia-Pacific and moved missile defense interceptors from South Korea to the Middle East. The withdrawal comes as China, which U.S. military officials deem a near-peer competitor, is quickly building its own naval capacity, further demonstrating the geopolitical toll of the decline of U.S. military power. A report by Politico, based on conversations with anonymous defense officials, shows just how seriously this reshuffling threatens the United States’ ability to deter its adversaries. “What’s more important,” says an official quoted in the report, “is the message that’s being sent quietly by diplomats behind closed doors, which is that the United States is unreliable, the United States is unfocused, and China is focused.”

As problems build up for the military abroad, Hegseth is facing greater scrutiny at home, and not just for his handling of the war. Hegseth has been obsessed with instilling an ideological “warrior ethos” in the military above all else, ousting top military officials who have challenged him. As put by former Army secretary Dan Driscoll — the most recent high-profile official forced out by Hegseth — Hegseth’s sweeping changes to the military are doing “generational damage.”

The crisis of the U.S. military’s weakness and the massive unpopularity of the war on Iran has led sectors critical of constant U.S. interventionism (from the Right and the Left) to argue that now is the time to seriously limit military actions abroad. Of course, the arguments differ; the Right emphasizes the need for restraint as a way to address the crisis of military readiness, while the Left takes a more critical (though in some cases seriously limited) stance against the war machine as an institution that conflicts with workers’ interests.

Yet, faced with the crisis of the country’s dwindling hegemonic power (which, despite challenges, still sits at the top of the world order) and growing confrontations between great powers, the capitalist class and the bipartisan regime will have to find solutions to shore up U.S. defense resources. This necessarily means more funding for the military. In this, despite their differences in degrees, both parties are aligned.

This is all especially true as countries increasingly pursue military solutions to resolve their domestic and international challenges. The Iran war is just one example in a world situation that includes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent proxy war, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other offensives in pursuit of a “Greater Israel,” Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” in Latin America, the rearmament of imperialist powers like Germany and Japan, and China’s rise as an economic and military challenger to U.S. hegemony.

Anticipating the conflicts ahead, Trump is demanding a $1.5 trillion increase in defense spending for the fiscal year of 2027. It is a major increase, but the U.S. military budget has increased every year since 2015. In fact, since the start of the war on terror in 2001, the military budget has climbed nearly every single year. These budgets, whether requested by Democratic or Republican presidents, have always been approved with bipartisan support.

Despite the trends toward greater militarism, there is a historic basis to build a powerful anti-war movement in the United States. Americans are increasingly skeptical of constant military interventions. And as the movement for Palestine showed, a generation of youth and workers are going beyond commonsense skepticism of constant war and drawing deeper anti-imperialist conclusions, making incredible sacrifices to stand with the Palestinian people. An anti-war movement in the United States can also strengthen itself by highlighting how the same system that bombs and sanctions workers around the world is the same one that terrorizes communities in the United States. From the Black Lives Matter movement to the movement against ICE, which has confronted domestic expressions of militarism from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Chicago to Newark, all movements against oppression and state violence should be connected to an anti-war movement.

Most importantly, however, the goal of an anti-war movement should not be to persuade the bipartisan regime to lower its military budget or pursue a more humane foreign policy. U.S. warmongering is not the product of poor policy decisions or politicians not feeling enough pressure from voters. The wars and militarism are the product of a capitalist system that incentivizes countries to wage war in service of their capitalists’ interests. Actually bringing an end to constant war and militarism requires bringing an end to this very system. Fortunately, that system has never been weaker. Let an anti-imperialist movement show what real “generational damage” to the war machine looks like.