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.”
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