As the deadlock in Ukraine now suggests, we have entered an era of defensive dominance. Neutered are, or soon will be, every weapon that favored the offense for all these decades. First to go, though the U.S. Navy has yet to notice, was the aircraft carrier, which has been obsolete for a half century, its uselessness masked only by the fact that no U.S. aircraft carrier has been attacked by a competent enemy in all that time. The tank died in Ukraine. The air force is about to go. The ballistic missile has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Our narcissistic or narcoleptic leaders show no signs of realizing this and certainly no signs of doing anything about it. Yet if we are to lose our democracy in the next few decades, the most likely cause will not be sending some vile Republican or decrepit Democrat to the White House, but losing a war to a major power that has grasped current military reality while we waste continue to waste trillions on the weapons of the last war.

[I’m not sure I agree with this. If we are losing the value of force projection, I’d argue that it’s the result of opposition to the very idea of American force projection at all — primarily on the Left, but on the Right to a certain degree as well. The Obama administration was a model of retreat on force projection, attempting to extricate the US from the Middle East by handing it off to Iran, a policy continued by Biden. — Ed]