October 20, 2026
The Problem with Our Military
Timothy Birdnow
The great Victor Davis Hansen does a cost analysis of why our war making capabilities are a very bad deal.
Patriot missiles cost $4 million a piece, Tomahawks cost 3-4 million, and the Hellfire is two hundred grand and has to be shot from a plane, rising our pilots. The enemy can fight with drones that cost five to six THOUSAND dollars and can be made very easily.
So we are spending twenty to thirty times as much to knock them down as they spend to put them up. It's a recipe' for disaster.
Yes, ours can do more, but who cares? In the end ours are the best weapons we won't be able to afford.
Meanwhile we've lost a quarter of our own drones and at most it is projected we will produce 300,000 new drones - while war-raveged Ukraine is making over a million. There is something wrong with this.
And our drones cost several million dollars to make. We've got to do this much more cheaply. Much more.
Maybe we should arrest all the illegal aliens and force them to serve sentences in drone factories; make cheap labor (in this case free) work for us for a change.
There is no reason we can't build Predator drones and at the same time make cheap expendable ones.
It's the same old problem; American labor costs are too high due to labor unions, government regulations on environmental and work safety conditions, etc. But if we outsource we spill the secrets about our equipment and put ourselves in danger of having our hardware supplies cut off.
Hansen contrasts our wonderful military of today with the military hardware that won WWII:
When we rearmed, and we started the war with number 19 in size of our army and almost virtually no air force to speak of except some B-17s and out-of-date fighters. We had a good Navy, but the idea was we were not going to try to match the Germans or the Japanese necessarily, in the quality of each particular plane.
We were not going to build a Panther or Tiger tank that was indomitable as far as the power of its gun, and the armor, but would be produced in very limited, at 5,000 or 6,000 Panthers to a little over 2,000 Tigers. We were going to do something different. We were gonna produce 50,000 Sherman tanks.
Pretty good tanks. 10 hours on the road, one hour maintenance. Not like the Tiger or Panther, one hour maintenance, one hour on the road. Easy to maintain. Very crew adaptable. If they were hit, you could drop out on the bottom through a trapdoor. Three out of five of destroyed Sherman crewmen escaped with their lives.
This was based on a war of attrition model. America abandoned that when it became obvios Russia and China could outlast us in a war, so we went full Wehrmacht and devised a new kind of military, one which could outmaneuver the enemy.
But times change and now we are seeing that our wonderful gadgets and superior tech is too expensive and can be countered by cheap, simple tech. All this fancy hardware does is force us to waste money and resources better served with a more lean approach.
When Rome and Carthage went to war in the first Punic war the Romans were at a serious disadvantage because, while they had the best close-range fighters in the world, they had virtually no navy. Carthage had far and away the best navy on Earth, with vast capabilities in what was then the best ship on Earth up to that time - the Quinquereme - which balanced speed and power and maneuverability. The Romans couldn't hope to compete - they were fighting the best sailors of the time. So they took a low-tech shortcut; they put grappling hooks on their ships, closed with Carthaginian ships, then sent in Roman soldiers to fight hand to hand. Worked beautifully and the Romans quickly neutralized the superior Carthaginian vessels and won the war. Carthage never could recover from that and in the end Rome utterly destroyed the city and sowed salt in the Earth to make the place uninhabitable for a long time.
Lower tech can often outperform the spiffy new tech that everyone becomes enamored of so quickly. Mostly because it's cheap and takes little in the way of resources.
The Chinese invented a repeating crossbow and they could then use children or women with no training to help fight battles. reasonably low tech but it worked.
And we all remember what the Vietcong did to us during the Vietnam war. They hid in the jungle, lay nasty, hidden traps, and generally did not engage us directly. It worked.
The point is it is sometimes better to use cheap and small than big and expensive. Low tech - especially when there is an innovation nobody expected - can often defeat a superior opponent. Too much pomp. It's part of why the British lost the Revolutionary War. They strutted around in their fancy uniforms while the Colonials moved faster in their simple clothes and shot faster with their simple varmint guns.
America needs to overhaul our military system. The time of wars with big armies going at each-other and navies dominated by carriers is largely over. Now it's drones and precision missiles. We need to adapt or wind up like Persia after Marathon.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:38 AM
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