Our Military Stockpile is Stretched Thin and Vulnerable

No matter your position on U.S. aggression in Venezuela, it is worth considering whether the United States is in a position to make the long-term financial and military commitments necessary to implement the plan this administration has articulated, and how vulnerable it makes us in the meantime.

With security guarantees for Ukraine and Israel already bleeding our nation of not only treasure but essential military resources that cannot be swiftly replaced, we seem to be one move on the board away from a collapse in our ability to undertake basic defensive military operations.

The primary concern should be whether the "Donroe Doctrine" further emboldens China to take over Taiwan, for whom it has at least as good a case using the same logic U.S. officials have articulated as to why our government feels it is justified in its actions in Venezuela. Were the Chinese to establish the same control over Taiwan's resources, they would be able to limit or preclude our access to the semiconductors necessary for our military to operate at a basic level, let alone wage a defensive war against another superpower.

Combined with the rare earth minerals for which China has already cornered the market, an adversarial country would effectively have a kill switch on our entire military supply chain. Considering that it would take years if not decades to reconstruct our defense industrial base, we would be unthinkably vulnerable to both China and Russia in the interim.

This begs the question, why create the most dangerous global military situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis before addressing these critical chokepoints? While the U.S. has had some success in using economic policy to address the rare earth minerals, we would be at a considerably greater disadvantage were our access to Taiwanese semiconductor factories cut off, and without a viable threat of meaningful military retaliation.

I don’t think many Americans understand how our multi-year support of Israel's military adventurism and the defense of Ukraine has strained our own military resources. In the so-called 12-Day War between Israel and Iran, the U.S. military spent a whopping 25% of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. That was for a very short conflict in which our own forces were not even an active participant. CENTCOM’s operational plan for Operation Midnight Hammer called for a sustained 35-day bombing campaign, but it had to be cut far short because we simply lacked the munitions. Yet, Trump has hinted that we are poised to attack Iran yet again on Israel's behalf.

We have been strong-arming countries like South Korea and Pakistan to sell their shells for use in Ukraine, and even with the EU having ramped up its capacity, the total has fallen short of what Russia has been able to deliver, demonstrating a wartime advantage enjoyed by centralized economies. Our defensive operations against the Houthis in Yemen, while defending the Red Sea, also significantly depleted our military inventories, as we used million-dollar anti-defense missiles to shoot down $20,000 drones.

That doesn’t even begin to consider the economic impact such situations are likely to cause. Remember what it was like during COVID, when chip production stalled for less than two months. The auto industry took but a short pause, and the prices of both new and used vehicles skyrocketed as assembly lines slowed to a crawl.

This week, we got an absolutely horrid jobs report in which only 50,000 jobs were added. We also learned that 85% of the jobs added last year had been created by April. We are now in the worst non-recession economy since 2003, and don’t forget that our current economy is essentially an all-in bet on AI, which relies on Taiwan for the production of around 90% of its most critical chips, meaning that even if the AI bubble isn’t really a bubble, it will pop anyway if access is cut off.

President Trump’s answer to this has been a call to raise the military budget by a whopping 50%. That’s right, the “fiscally-conservative” president who bragged about being first to create a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget this year (up from $842 billion in 2024), is calling for a jaw-dropping $1.5 trillion budget next year, even as the national debt approaches $40 trillion. Remember, this is the agency that has been unable to account for approximately $1.9 trillion of its $3.8 trillion in assets and has never passed a comprehensive financial audit since Congress mandated annual audits for all federal agencies starting in 1990.

Historically, empires have collapsed primarily because they overextend militarily, grossly inflate their money supply, and take on unsustainable debt loads, while failing to adequately tax the wealthiest citizens. Plan accordingly.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch's 2015 novel, A Long Road Home, was recently released in its third edition. His other books can be found here. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.