Amidst a fiscal deployment, Navy Lt. Tom Sandford facilitated the launch of an F/A-18E Super Hornet from the flight deck of the USS Gerald R. Ford within the U.S. 6th Fleet’s operational jurisdiction on August 15, 2025. In the continuum of our country’s relatively short-lived existence, individuals from every corner of the United States have embraced civic duty, confronting our adversaries and ensuring the preservation of our liberties. Be they the intrepid forces who dared to descend onto the war-torn fields of Normandy during D-Day or the warriors engaged in intense battle scenery in Iraq and Afghanistan, the endurance of the American spirit is an exemplification of the remarkable feats achievable when we commit our finest attributes towards noble causes.
However, as global strategic landscapes undergo a fast-paced evolution, the essentiality of gearing up for wars that we neither desire nor instigate, too, is transforming. The upheavals in locations like Ukraine and Gaza are stark reminders of this predicament, simultaneously serving as overt warnings that the American armed forces need to remodel to combat the prevailing realities of the current global scenario.
Historically, our nation has endeavored to assemble a military and strategic blueprint proficient in handling disputes across diverse territories, extracting crucial wisdom throughout this process. The Vietnam conflict illustrated that even a supposedly minor war necessitates substantial forces, thereby discrediting the presumption of the Johnson era that advocated the possibility of engaging in dual war theatres in Europe and the Pacific, concurrently with a lesser conflict elsewhere.
During the tenure of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, our military structure was reduced by a considerable thirty percent compared to the stature it held in 1990. A noteworthy revelation from the Clinton administration’s Bottom Up Review said that one of the critical facets of our strategizing revolved around the judgment that the United States must align forces with allies to efficiently combat and emerge victorious from two substantial regional conflicts occurring nearly concurrently.
The national defense arrangement’s ability to handle multi-theater warfare progressively evolved during George W. Bush’s administration. The regulations were developed with the intent of setting up a force competent enough to inhibit hostilities in four prime regions simultaneously. The objective was to ensure one of the four regions could counter two swift victories, with a decisive win in one.
With the onset of the Obama administration, it has been generally accepted among the national security fraternity that China is the new imminent threat, with an alarmingly expanding military capacity in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Consequentially, both Trump and Biden administrations prioritized refocusing and fortifying our military readiness for potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific landscape.
However, Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine underlined the fact that Russian military threats were far from being eliminated. Occurrences in the Middle East, including the resurgence of terrorist threats, potential for wide-spread conflict due to the Gaza war, and rising tensions with Iran, persistently engage our strategic interest and military potential.
Recent saber-rattling from Iran emphasizes its burgeoning regional dominance and underlines the imperative of U.S. military intervention aimed at deterrence of Iran’s ongoing progress towards nuclear arms capability and global security destabilization.
Despite the gradual evolution of doctrines and adversaries, a consistent principle prevails: our absolute necessity to deter and overcome multiple threats at once. Yet, we continue to burden our military to accomplish this daunting task, managing an intricate mission scope with fewer resources, and expecting an ever-growing performance output.
We must gear our forces towards maintaining readiness for a two-theater war construct, capable of engaging in several conflicts concurrently. This strategy would undoubtedly necessitate a substantial increase in defense budget allocation as well as enlarging the deployed forces. A part of the cost implications may be handled via force re-configuration, dependency on emerging technologies, and aggressive overhead cost reduction at the Pentagon.
However, a comprehensive preparation would mandate a higher naval capacity for the Pacific, a more competent Army for Europe, an Air Force with enhanced range and vastly improved strategic airlift to support and go offensive, and a Marine Corps equipped as a combined-arms force ready for all eventualities.
Simply stated, if we neglect the pressing need to overhaul and reconfigure our military capacities to handle numerous conflicts concurrently, we risk relegating ourselves forever in a reactive mode, putting our troops in nonviable situations that jeopardize the security of our great nation.
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