Trump is burning through missiles and threatening jail for people who counted them.
In the first month of the strikes, the military launched more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, ship-fired precision weapons priced at around two million dollars apiece. That is more than $1.7 billion in missiles fired in thirty days. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, the private-equity founder now serving as the Pentagon’s number two, sent contractors a memo obtained by The Washington Post telling them to drive “significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules” for critical capabilities. He gave them 21 days to explain how. “Years-long development cycles are not acceptable,” he wrote.
A month that burns through 850 of anything is not a war of measured application. It is a war of opened taps, and the production lines cannot fill them. That is not a charge from the President’s enemies. It is the arithmetic on his own deputy’s letterhead.
The reports that the United States had spent down much of its stockpile of long-range precision missiles were not a leak of opinion. They were a leak of the count.
Now hold the official statements side by side. The Pentagon spokesman said the military “has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the president’s choosing.” Feinberg’s memo says the defense industry must accelerate dramatically, expand production capacity now, and abandon years-long development cycles. Both statements came from the same administration. Only one matches a department sending 21-day demand letters to its contractors.
The President offered a different version. The United States holds “massive amounts” of munitions, he said, while the people who reported otherwise were being “hunted down” and would face “long-term jail sentences.” He called the depletion reports “treasonous.”
Both versions cannot be true. A man with a full warehouse does not demand emergency plans to refill it. The memo was not written by a man with a full warehouse. It was written by a man who had just found out what his ledger actually held.
There is a reason the counters have to go to prison, and Dwight Eisenhower named it sixty-five years ago. In his farewell address of January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned the country to guard against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He also said that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could compel the proper meshing of the military and industrial machinery of defense with the country’s peaceful purposes.
The administration has heard the warning and taken the opposite lesson. It is not guarding against the complex. It is feeding the complex on an emergency schedule, under the Cold War-era production law it invoked back in June, while the alert and knowledgeable citizens are exactly the people being told to keep quiet or face a federal cell.
In Eisenhower’s republic, alertness was the safeguard. In this one, alertness is the crime.
The working drafts of Eisenhower’s speech called it the military-industrial-congressional complex before the word “congressional” was cut. The congressional part is worth restoring. The members of Congress who voted for this war are not being hunted. The people who told the country how many missiles remain are.
The constitutional posture is plain. Congress alone can declare war and appropriate the money, so the Congress that authorized this campaign should hold its hearings in public, with the missile counts on the table, before approving another dollar. The press should be free to report the debate, because the press is how a citizenry stays alert and knowledgeable. That is the first business of a republic.
Jailing the people who make the citizenry knowledgeable is the military-industrial complex defending itself.
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, Chapter 2, “Waging War,” puts the arithmetic before the glory. He writes that there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. The chapter counts what a long campaign costs the people who have to feed it. A war that exhausts its principal weapon in its first month is a war that ought to end.
Washington’s answer is not to end it. Washington’s answer is to build faster and make the counting itself a crime.
Clausewitz’s basic point is just as plain: war is an instrument of policy. The means have to fit the political object. Eight hundred and fifty missiles in one month is a means with no visible object behind it except itself. When the weapon expenditure becomes the policy, the war has turned into its own justification.
From where I sat in a gunner’s seat, the question was never the unit price of the round. It was whether the next one was on the rack when you needed it. That is the soldier’s supply question, and no spreadsheet from the Pentagon changes it. Feinberg knows the answer well enough to write it down and send it around. The only people being punished are the ones who told the rest of the country.
The memo’s arithmetic also leaves out the numbers that actually matter. The crews who fire those missiles are not in the production forecast. The sailors who carry them are not interchangeable with the weapons they carry. The civilians who live where the rounds land do not appear in the delivery schedule at all.
A war is not a line item.
The arrangement underneath it is old enough to have a song written about it. The men who order the strikes are not, by and large, the fathers of the men who fire them. The volunteer force comes from working towns. The defense companies, by the administration’s own boast, are building the largest number of plants and factories in the country’s history. No one in the boardroom is threatened with prison for the state of the stockpile.
The shareholders get the surge.
The sailors get the depleted magazine.
The citizens who tried to know what their government was doing with their money and their children get the jail sentences.
That is the whole enterprise in one gesture.
Now, I’m just a simple man who turns wrenches, but a republic that meant what its Constitution says would put the count before Congress in the light of day. Congress would decide whether a war firing at this rate is a war the country can afford to fight. It would let the public hear the argument before the next appropriation. It would not hunt the messenger because the ledger embarrassed the President.
In the shop, when a part is on back order, you tell the customer the truth. You do not threaten the parts house, and you do not hunt down the man who asked when the part is coming. The part is either in the warehouse or it is not. A quiet lie about it is how an engine comes apart on the highway.
The President has ordered the factories to run faster and the messengers jailed.
The missiles are still not in the warehouse. The war is still burning.
The Tomahawks can be replaced. Given money, plants, and years, the racks will fill, and the bill will come due across a generation. The harder thing to replace is a citizenry’s habit of telling itself the truth about its wars.
Eisenhower said only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could keep the machine in check.
When alertness is the crime, the machine is not checked.
It is fed.