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With Donald Trump’s second term now entering month #3, his budget-slashers are sharpening their knives and beginning to focus on the Pentagon. Rather than arguing over inefficient procurement policies [ [link removed] ] and how many submarines or tanks are required to deal with imaginable contingencies, it may be useful to evaluate what the U.S. has gotten for the mega-trillions it has expended on the military over the past 80 years.
Not much, it seems. There have been occasional successes, but costly efforts during the Cold War to deter the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe or the United States seem to have been scarcely necessary. And more recently, there has been the development of the “by, with and through” approach, in which active and direct combat intervention is minimized in favor of supplying preexisting warring factions with munitions, intelligence and sometimes bombing as long as they, not the Americans, accept the burden of casualties. That strategy is currently being applied in the war in Ukraine and is likely to be a useful approach in the future. But it scarcely justifies spending nearly a trillion dollars annually on defense.
The Age of Alarmism
To begin with, American ground troops have won no wars since World War II except against adversary forces that substantially didn’t exist, as in Panama in 1989, Grenada in 1983 and in the Persian Gulf in 1991, where ground combat was mostly a matter [ [link removed] ] of crowd control to deal with surrendering Iraqi soldiers.
Furthermore, while concerns about Communist subversion may have been justified during the Cold War, the threat presented by domestic Communists was greatly overblown, and it was unwisely militarized in response to an incursion by a Soviet ally on the Korean peninsula in 1950. The venture could have been taken to be an opportunistic probe in a then-remote corner of the world, and subsequent information [ [link removed] ] suggests that that was what it was.
But it seems virtually no one at the time embraced or even brought up that perspective. Instead, defense analyst Bernard Brodie recalls [ [link removed] ] that many, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “utterly convinced” that the Soviets “were using Korea as a feint to cause us to deploy our forces there while they prepared to launch a ‘general’ (total) war against the United States through a major attack on Europe.” Indeed, continues Brodie, “they had convinced themselves that an outbreak of general war in Europe was both probable and imminent.”
Such breathless alarmism inspired the Cold War arms race, including spectacularly costly expenditures to deter an imagined threat of a Soviet attack on Europe or the U.S. In the process, the United States spent around $10 trillion on nuclear weapons and delivery systems—by one calculation [ [link removed] ], enough to purchase everything in the country except for the land. If those deterrence monies had instead been invested in the economy, one estimate [ [link removed] ] suggests, they would have generated an additional 20% to 25% of production each year in perpetuity.
Although the dominant perspective about deterrence went largely unchallenged during the Cold War, Brodie, one of the few defense analysts of the time seriously to consider the premises of American policy, did conclude [ [link removed] ] that it was “difficult to discover what meaningful incentives the Russians might have for attempting to conquer Western Europe—especially incentives that are even remotely commensurate with the risks.” And diplomat George F. Kennan said [ [link removed] ], “I have never believed that they have seen it as in their interests to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”
After the end of the Cold War, a great amount of documentary evidence [ [link removed] ] became available. After researching those archives, historian Vojtech Mastny concluded that “all Warsaw Pact scenarios presumed a war started by NATO” and that “the strategy of nuclear deterrence [was] irrelevant to deterring a major war that the enemy did not wish to launch in the first place.” As a top Soviet war planner put it in 1992, “We never had a single thought of a first strike against the U.S. The doctrine was always very clear: We will always respond, but never initiate.”
It could be argued, of course, that the restrained Soviet perspective stemmed from American deterrence policy. However, those who would so contend need to demonstrate that the Soviets ever had the desire to risk anything that might come to resemble the catastrophe they had just endured in World War II. In addition, they were under the spell of a theory that said they would eventually come to rule the world in a historically inevitable process to which they would contribute merely by safely inspiring and encouraging like-minded revolutionaries abroad—a mindset that was not, and could not be, deterred.
It is sometimes argued that the U.S. military created a Pax Americana in the world. However, those proposing this perspective never seem to supply convincing evidence of a war that was prevented by extravagant defense expenditures. For example, it is sometimes claimed [ [link removed] ] that the absence of a war between France and Germany since 1945 is impressive because those two countries had proved in the past to be so adept at getting into wars with each other. However, it seems impossible to find anyone in either country who has advocated reviving that venerable tradition, and it seems unlikely that U.S. military expenditures were necessary for that.
Mellowing Out—and Then Ramping Up Again
However, times began to change, and the American military approach did as well. There was some mellowing of militarization after the fiasco of Vietnam, which ended in a matter of a few weeks in 1975 as the non-Communist South collapsed and the Communist North took over (and has subsequently become something of a buddy to the U.S. in its opposition to China). There was further softening after the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
As a result, in contrast to their hyperbolic and self-important rhetoric, U.S. policymakers showed a strong aversion to bearing U.S. casualties in support of their visions. Between 1980 and the end of the century, in fact, the United States military averaged [ [link removed] ] only about 11 combat deaths per year.
U.S. troops were occasionally sent on peacekeeping missions during that period. This proved disastrous in Somalia in 1993 and in Lebanon, where 241 were killed by a terrorist bombing of their barracks in 1983. Both experiences led to abrupt troop withdrawals. Peacekeeping was more successful in Bosnia in 1995—although the complete absence of ethnic warfare or even violence in the area after that year suggests there was little for policing troops to do.
Bombing without sending in ground troops was also sometimes applied, as in Kosovo in 1999, which successfully helped to coerce Serbia to shift its policy. But it only achieved this objective after two months, whereas initial expectations were that it would take only two days or so.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks abruptly changed [ [link removed] ] the post-Vietnam perspective. In response, President George W. Bush, who had come into office proposing a humble foreign policy, abruptly proclaimed that the country’s “responsibility to history” now was to “rid the world of evil” and specified that, while evil could presumably be found everywhere, a special “axis of evil” lurked in North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
That led to increases in defense expenditures and, in particular, in wars to deal with regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that had little or no connection to the precipitating event. But these wars failed: After 20 years, the Taliban pushed the U.S. out of Afghanistan in embarrassing fashion, and as an Army War College assessment puts it [ [link removed] ], the only winner in America’s lengthy war and occupation in Iraq was Iran, which, by aiding counter-American insurgents in Iraq, was likely able to waylay a prospective invasion.
As these failures became evident, the United States developed [ [link removed] ] the “by, with and through” strategy. The approach had been applied earlier to an insurgency in Afghanistan that was battling a Soviet incursion in 1979 and to wars in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Later, it was productively applied [ [link removed] ] to a war waged by locals in the Middle East against an insurgent group, ISIS, from 2014 to 2019—a lengthy enterprise in which the U.S. suffered a total [ [link removed] ] of only 20 battle deaths. In 2011, the approach was less successfully applied to an insurgency in Libya in which, with the aid of American bombing [ [link removed] ], the resident tyrant was removed and murdered, but the country then devolved into an extended civil war.
Not Worth the Cost?
Today, would-be budget cutters will find that the U.S. inflation-adjusted defense budget is back at record highs. Troops are committed at high numbers as well, with deployments to a large number of bases around the world where they have little to do. This is occurring despite the fact that any applications of U.S. military force are likely to follow the comparatively laid-back and cost-effective “by, with and through” approach. Concern of late has been impelled in particular by a militarized exaggeration of the threat presented by Russia’s foolish, opportunistic and wildly counterproductive [ [link removed] ] invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and of the one presented by China, even though that threat is held to be primarily economic.
Thus far, the strategy that the U.S. (and its European allies) has applied to Ukraine essentially follows the “by, with and through” approach: supplying intelligence, training, financial and logistic support, and munitions. But there are no U.S. or allied boots on the ground, nor, for that matter, is there direct aerial bombing. The yearly cost for the American aid is the equivalent of about 5% [ [link removed] ] of the U.S. defense budget.
However, there are concerns that, if a ceasefire is arranged, Russia will regroup and renew its attack on Ukraine and then perhaps expand to other countries in Europe. Little evidence for this popular proposition has been advanced, and it does seem unlikely that after the self-destructive failures of his military invasion, Vladimir Putin will try it again. (Moreover, at Russia’s 2024 rate of advance in Ukraine, it would take 116 years to take over the rest of the country.) But even if it does happen, the likely response will generally follow the “by, with and through” mentality, although now with countries that are better prepared to apply it.
A similar approach would likely be followed if China were eventually to use military force to try to take Taiwan—a feat that many consider to be exceedingly [ [link removed] ] difficult [ [link removed] ]. If the locals prove to be able to develop a coherent resistance, the U.S. military would likely seek to help, as in Ukraine, but not by sending in combat troops. This assessment suggests that U.S. defense expenditures, like the threats envisioned, continue to be much inflated.
It is notable that the only substantial and long-term achievement in ground combat by the American military in the 80 years since World War II was the intervention into Korea in 1950, which saved the people in the South from being incorporated into the tyrannical and contemptible regime in the North. Further, the value of that achievement only became apparent decades later when South Korea reformed and developed.
The U.S. couldn’t have done that if it didn’t have a military. But, on the other hand, if it had had no military, it couldn’t have engaged in the costly fiascos of Vietnam and of the 9/11-induced ones in Afghanistan and Iraq either. On balance, the historical record suggests that the U.S. has been spending prodigiously on its military and getting little in return.

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