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- Determining America's Role in the World
History repeatedly shows a tension between expensive, high-quality weapons and cheap masses of good-enough weapons. At Agincourt in 1415, the French advanced with 8,000 to 10,000 men-at-arms, featuring the knights, battle-tested and elite. Henry V had deployed 5,000 and 6,000 longbowmen whose rate of fire—10 arrows per minute—sent 50,000 arrows into the air for every minute of combat. Mud, channelized ground, and that storm of arrows broke the French momentum. Quality based on decades of lineage, tradition, training, and wealth had produced the mounted knight. He was the most expensive weapon system in Europe. But the charge of the knights collapsed before massed firepower produced by the cheap, rapidly trained yeoman archers. The French casualties (likely 5,000–7,000 dead) dwarfed English losses (under 200). The rate of fire plus numbers trounced aristocratic excellence.
At Kursk in 1943, the largest armored clash in history, the Germans fielded roughly 2,700 tanks and assault guns, including the technically superior Panther and Tiger. The Soviets flooded 3,600 tanks into the salient and 5,000 across the front. Their tanks were inferior individually, but overwhelming in quantity. The Panther’s 75mm high-velocity gun outranged the T-34; Tiger armor was impervious at long range. But Panther mechanical failures were catastrophic: over 150 of the first 200 Panthers were out of action within 48 hours, mostly from breakdowns and the lack of repair supplies. The Germans lost 1,612 armored vehicles during the operation. The Soviets lost five times that number, over 6,000. Attrition was the determining factor at Kursk. Thanks in large measure to Allied convoys providing materials, the Soviets built 24,000 T-34s in 1943, while Germany produced only 1,800 Panthers. The industrial arithmetic, not the range table of the Panther, was decisive.
In the air war over Europe, the B-17 “Flying Fortress” was the high-quality platform—tough, heavily armed, and expensive. Unit cost: about $240,000 in 1943 dollars. The B-24 Liberator was cheaper ($215,000), easier to mass-produce, and more numerous. The U.S. built 12,731 B-17s and 18,482 B-24s. Despite doctrinal loyalty to the B-17, it was the quantity of B-24s—and the combined mass of both types in “big wings” of 1,000-plus bombers—that ground down German industry. German production remained high into 1944 only because its dispersed factories survived; once American bombers hit oil targets in numbers, German aviation fuel dropped by over 90% in six months. The massed sorties, once air superiority was achieved, broke the Reich.
In wars of endurance, if political will is equal on both sides, then mass will smother higher quality but inferior numbers. Nothing illustrates this more starkly than Germany’s wartime decision to prioritize the V-2 rocket over the simple V-1. Between June 1944 and March 1945, Germany launched over 9,500 V-1s at Britain. The V-1 was cheap and mass-producible. Over nine months, the interception rate improved from 60% to 90%. Hitler switched to V-2s, launching about 3,000. Each cost one hundred times more per missile and delivered a smaller warhead. Neither the V-1 nor the V-2 affected the outcome of the war. But the V-2 was a larger misallocation of resources, consuming as much labor and precision machining as building several panzer divisions.
Hitler was star-struck by the V-2’s technology. His deputy Himmler bragged about its supersonic speed, vertical launch, and supposed psychological shock. Even as the war was being lost, the German High Command persisted in producing V-2s rather than allocating those resources to battlefield units. It provides a clear example of a great power destroying its own war potential by pouring resources into an exquisite weapon largely irrelevant to the war being fought.
America faces a mirror-image dilemma. Our president and Congress talk about restoring America as “the arsenal of democracy,” with a revitalized fleet of manned surface ships. Yet in the five-year defense plan, actual procurement—the buying of ships, planes, missiles, and drones—is only $170–$180 billion, about 0.6% of GDP per year. In the Reagan years, defense procurement was 2.5% of GDP. Today’s 0.6% cannot produce an “arsenal of democracy.”
Equally disturbing, our procurement model is built around exquisite platforms—$14 billion carriers, $3 billion destroyers, $100 million fighters—expected to last 40–50 years. Drones and unmanned vessels receive only a tiny amount of funding, about 4%. In WWII, warships survived by maneuver and concealment; they were hard to find in the vast oceans. Today, China’s ISR architecture—satellites, commercial imaging constellations, over-the-horizon radars, maritime patrol aircraft, drones, and shore-based sensors—permits a persistent maritime picture reaching 300–500 miles beyond the First Island Chain. Analysts at RAND, CSIS, and the Naval War College conclude that U.S. ships can no longer rely on hiding. Satellite constellations refresh imagery every few minutes; drones and radar nets fill the gaps. Once a ship is detected, it can be re-acquired through algorithms that fuse satellite data, radar sweeps, drone tracks and electronic signatures.
Once found, a ship is a target. Long-range firepower has erased the protective radius that once safeguarded surface fleets. Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and hypersonics reach far beyond the defensive envelopes of carriers and Aegis destroyers. A carrier cannot outrun a satellite cueing a hypersonic missile.
The cost-exchange imbalance is severe. A U.S. destroyer fires a $2 million interceptor at a $50,000 drone. A carrier costs $13 billion; a Chinese hypersonic missile costs a few million. In CSIS’s recent Taiwan wargames, surface ships could not close within 500 miles of Taiwan without sustaining crippling losses. In saturation attacks, even the best U.S. defensive systems are overwhelmed. Still more discomfiting is the fact that Americans will tolerate platforms being destroyed, but not men being killed. This is not a moral weakness; it is a political fact. A carrier with 5,000 sailors aboard is a national prestige asset. Its loss would be stunning. But every wargame of a conflict with China projects losing dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of sailors. China’s leaders believe they can tolerate far higher casualties than a U.S. president can ask the public to endure.
The 2025 defense budget proposes buying two DDG-51s, to join the fleet by 2033 and deploy through 2075. At a cost of $3 billion, the DDG can launch 30 to 35 Tomahawk missiles against targets in China before returning to port for resupply. That’s $90 million per shot. At that cost, we are repeating Germany’s V-2 decision, investing for prestige and ignoring battlefield reality. We are locking national strategy into a 40-year commitment to deploy platforms with stunning costs and trivial firepower. Changing course may not be possible, with the president, mega corporations, and powerful senators committed to spending over $175 billion for surface warships and related aircraft. Unless the U.S. accepts that the vast quantity of cheap AI-directed unmanned systems has changed battle on land, air, and sea, we will remain where Germany was in 1944, entranced by engineering brilliance and unable to replace losses.
