An expansionist dictator is on the march in Europe; European democracies, too late, mobilize to meet the threat after yielding territory to the aggressor in a futile bid for peace. In Asia, a rising naval and air power is confronting its neighbors and seeking territorial aggrandizement and natural resources; neither America nor her friends in the region have the military capacity to deter additional offensives. New technologies on land, in the air and at sea threaten to overturn the advantages of status quo military powers and, possibly, create a new world order.
Voices in America, sensing that the nation has fallen behind and eyeing the troubled international system, begin to discuss the need for a military buildup; most are ignored or derided as pessimists a generation after the last great war. Underfunded international institutions, such as they are, strain to prevent an oncoming world war.
This is, of course, a description of the late 1930s—the late fall of 1938, to be exact. Nazi Germany had just been given control of the Sudetenland by the terms of the Munich Agreement; British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed he had achieved “peace for our time.” Japan had seized control of Korea in 1910 and Manchuria in 1931; U.S. and Allied embargos on materials and oil were about to be imposed. The integration of tanks and combat aircraft linked by radios and a new military doctrine called “blitzkreig” were about to revolutionize warfare on land; naval airpower was about to make battleships irrelevant; strategic bombing would decimate national homelands without the defeat of armies and navies that traditionally had protected them from harm; and the power of the atom, only dimly visible, would soon create a true revolution in warfare.
The League of Nations, created a generation earlier to ensure World War I was in fact the “war to end all wars,” was incapable of meaningful intervention without the support of the United States, which had abjured international engagements to focus on America first.
Global Pressures
This also is a description of the mid-2020s—the late fall of 2025, to be exact. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has conquered about a fifth of eastern Ukraine in the biggest war in Europe in 75 years; various peace plans have suggested allowing Russia to keep control of the land it has gained, contravening the most basic principle of international law. European countries belatedly are recognizing the peril they face; discussions of conscription, increased defense budgets and even military action against Russia are reminding the continent that it often creates more history than it can consume locally. Meanwhile, China is attempting to impose its claimed control of the South China Sea and its neighbor Taiwan through gray-area warfare that almost, but not quite, rises to the level of open war.
The integration of unmanned systems on land, at sea and especially in the air with the revolutionary technology of artificial intelligence appears to have rendered conventional armies, navies and air forces all but irrelevant; drones and hypersonic missiles enabled by global surveillance, much of it conducted from space, put national homelands at risk without the employment of nuclear warheads. America looks inward, focused on securing its own borders while stepping away from decades of serving as the global hegemon that set and enforced the rules of international order.
This author is not the first to note the parallels between our times and the gathering storm, as Winston Churchill called it, of some 90 years ago; others include Phil Zelikow, who warned last year in a Texas National Security Review article that “a serious possibility of worldwide warfare may be only in the 20–30 percent range,” and Jane Harman and Eric Edelman, who in their July 2024 “Commission on the National Defense Strategy” report cautioned, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. ... The nation ... is not prepared today.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates similarly has argued in a 2024 Washington Post op-ed, “After a 30-year holiday from history, we face an aggressive China and Russia (abetted by North Korea and Iran) and the very real prospect of war between nuclear-armed great powers.”
Dangerous Times
In another echo of the 1930s, the warnings from Zelikow, Harmon, Edelman and Gates have not broken through the noise and raised a general alarm commensurate with the danger the U.S. faces. Former President John Kennedy, while an undergraduate at Harvard University, wrote his senior thesis on “Appeasement at Munich.” It was published in 1940 under the title “Why England Slept.” And 1940 also was the year the failures of appeasement became clear as Adolf Hitler, now allied with Japan and Italy as the Axis Powers, turned his blitzkrieg against Holland, Belgium and France on May 10. A week later, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress, asking for a significant increase in defense spending and a full mobilization of the American defense industry to meet what he called “the dangers which confront us.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth similarly called for dramatic changes to defense procurement in a speech at the National Defense University on Nov. 7, 2025. Hegseth argued, “The threat environment we face is advanced and multifaceted. Technology is evolving at an accelerated pace. The information landscape has become increasingly segmented and personal and exploited by our enemies. Many of our adversaries, as you know, don’t wear uniforms and use civilians as human shields. Our enemies often activate under the threshold of armed conflict, the gray zone, and intend to destroy us from within. The world seems smaller and more familiar, yet at the same time, more complex.”
Hegseth’s comments echoed many of the criticisms of the American defense industry then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted on Sept. 10, 2001, a day before the focus of the department and the nation shifted to Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a broader war on Islamic extremism. Little has been done to solve those procurement problems in the ensuing two and a half decades. Recognizing what he calls “a 1939 moment,” Hegseth said, “Our objective is simple. Transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing. To rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities and focus on results. Our objective is to build, rebuild the arsenal of freedom.”
The objective may be simple, but the task is easier stated than completed. Many obstacles to rapid and cost-efficient defense procurement are enshrined in law, often because of previous acquisition scandals. More often than not, defense companies follow the law and build what the government tells them to build.
Problems in the defense acquisition system are not why America is short on Patriot air defense missiles or, for that matter, Patriot batteries. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin would be happy to build more Patriot systems, and an Army making real progress on its recruiting challenges would be overjoyed to hire more soldiers and form them into new air defense batteries and battalions. Unfortunately, Congress has not allocated the funds to do those things, and so America sleeps.
More Funding
It may appear unseemly to ask for more resources when Congress has appropriated some $900 billion in defense funds for fiscal 2026, about 3% of gross domestic product. However, Edelman and Harmon, in their congressionally mandated report, “Commission on the National Defense Strategy,” state firmly that “additional resources will be necessary” given the threat environment the nation faces and argue that “subsequent budgets will require spending that puts defense and other components of national security on a glide path to support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War”—defense spending that they calculate “ranged from 4.9 percent to 16.9 percent of GDP.” The low end of that range would require additional defense spending of another 2% of U.S. GDP annually—an additional $500 billion a year. It is not difficult to imagine where that money could wisely be spent, including a substantial increase in the size of the active Army, perhaps to the roughly 750,000 who were serving at the end of the Cold War and the deployment of a heavy corps to the eastern flank of NATO.
Harmon and Edelman, cognizant of the growing federal deficit, close their report by arguing that “increased security spending should be accompanied by additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending,” a politically unpopular position that likely helps explain why their report landed with barely an audible thud when it was published in July 2024, the last presidential election year.
Roosevelt’s May 16, 1940, “Ominous Days” address to Congress similarly asked for a substantial increase in defense procurement. It came 19 months before Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II but a week after Hitler turned the Nazi blitzkreig west. It is approaching four years since Putin attempted his own blitzkrieg, attacking west into Ukraine. We cannot know what the future holds for us today, but we can be certain that fortune favors the prepared.
Ominous days, indeed.
* * *
John Nagl is professor of Warfighting Studies at the U.S. Army War College, where he directs the Ukraine War Integrated Research Project.