In his address to generals and admirals late last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vividly described his vision of how wars are won. Soldiers and sailors are prepared to ship out “in the dead of night, in fair weather or foul, to go to dangerous places to find those who would do our nation harm, and deliver justice on behalf of the American people in close and brutal combat if necessary,” Hegseth said. “In this profession,” he went on, “you feel comfortable inside the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is our calling card, and victory our only acceptable end state.”
This stress on bravery and lethality in hand-to-hand fighting evoked Spartan and Roman warriors who stared their enemies in the eye and killed them with spears or swords. But the U.S. military is not going to confront the Athenians or Carthaginians in its next war, and the results of that war will not be determined by individual valor. Indeed, if the United States goes to war with China, its closest competitor and greatest geopolitical challenger, the bravery of soldiers on both sides will be largely irrelevant. Since the beginning of the 20th century, industrial-scale wars have been won through superiority in production capacity, logistics, and technological mastery.
[Read: What Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand about soldiers]
If Hegseth and other U.S. military planners think they are going to defeat China through ferocity in close combat, they are fooling themselves. The course of Russia’s war on Ukraine—which looks more and more like the prototype for wars of the near future—is being determined not by the valor or lethality of the average infantryman, but by the ability of Ukraine and its allies to inflict pain on the Russian economy, and to waste Russian battlefield and home-front resources through the manufacture of millions of drones, artillery shells, and long-range weapons systems. Such equipment is now being used to attack oil refineries, power plants, and other targets hundreds or thousands of miles behind the front lines.
As I argue in my new book, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—And Why, generations of military leaders in powerful nations have long made fundamental errors in thinking about what prepares a state to win a war. Many of those mistakes reflect what we might call a “battle-centric” understanding of conflict—an assumption that outcomes are determined by what happens when troops meet in the field. In this line of thinking, a war may turn on a decisive battle, often in the war’s early stages, in which one side suddenly renders the other’s position untenable.
In modern warfare, though, most battles are not contests for control of areas of immense strategic importance, and they almost never destroy equipment in quantities that determine the outcome of wars. Rather than deciding wars, individual battles reveal a war’s course by showing how different militaries are generating forces and adapting to changing conditions. Today’s wars are decided less by the military capabilities that each side has at the start than by the participants’ ability to generate new forces, adapt to new technologies, and work in coordination with allies.
At the start of World War I, many major European powers presumed that they could quickly end the conflict by overwhelming their enemy in early battles. Most famously, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was based on the premise that the German army could swiftly defeat the French army and seize Paris, driving France out of the war and allowing the Germans to turn the mass of their army on imperial Russia. Events did not work out that way. Instead of ending before Christmas 1914, as parties on both sides of the hostilities had predicted, a war of attrition went on for more than four years, drew in soldiers from around the globe, and killed many millions of people.
In World War II, individual battles, even those remembered as the most important, rarely destroyed much equipment relative to how much was being produced at the time. In 1943, for instance, the German and Soviet armies fought the largest tank battle of the war at Kursk—an event frequently described as a turning point in the war. Yet during the most intense phase of the engagement—the opening 10 days—Germany lost only approximately 300 tanks, most of which were older, less efficient models. At that time, Germany was producing tanks at a pace of 11,000 a year. The obsolescent models destroyed at Kursk were soon replaced by more modern tanks, increasing the average quality of the German tank fleet.
[Anne Applebaum: The Pentagon’s preferred propaganda model]
What decided World War II in the end was that over the course of several years, the Soviet Union and its key allies, the United States and Britain, were together able to generate and sustain better forces than Germany could ever hope to match.
Like World War II, the war in Ukraine has turned into a long, brutal struggle of force generation and destruction. Before launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia, as well as many outside analysts, believed that its superior stocks of tanks, warships, and other vehicles would crush the Ukrainians in short order. The war might be effectively decided in hours and could end in a few days, with the Russians in control of Kyiv and Ukrainian leaders fleeing for their lives. This was a tragic misunderstanding of war. Instead, Ukraine fought back effectively, the war lengthened and metastasized, and it led to more than 1 million casualties for Russia alone.
In the past three and a half years, both sides have constantly had to build up new forces with new weapons and keep them supplied in the field. The armies of 2025 now bear little resemblance to the armies of 2022. Initially, drones were mostly an afterthought, and both sides deployed tanks, armored personnel carriers, and in some cases massed infantry near the front. The Ukrainians have used drones and missiles to sink many of Russia’s largest surface vessels in the Black Sea and driven the rest back to port. And both countries are bombarding each other almost nightly with long-range drones. By the time the war is ultimately decided, both militaries will have been destroyed and reconstructed many times. This is exactly what happens in most wars.
These dynamics do not bode well for the United States in a long war with China. Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China—which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II—could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace.
[Read: Trump hands the world to China]
Controlling shipping in the Pacific Ocean would likely be the first task for the U.S. military. But the U.S. mostly lacks a shipbuilding industry. In 2024, for instance, the United States built 0.1 percent of world ship tonnage, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis; Chinese shipyards built more than 50 percent. The U.S. has allowed its shipyards to close and lost generations of shipbuilding-engineering expertise, and it now has hardly any experienced shipbuilding workers outside of a few shipyards that supply the U.S. Navy. It would have to re-create all this expertise, which would take years, before it could start producing ships at a fraction of Chinese output.
Shipbuilding is just one industry in which U.S. production would struggle to keep up. China, for instance, controls 90 percent of the world’s commercial-drone production, and supplies many of the components that are being put into both Ukrainian and Russian drones today. American wealth helps only so much: States cannot simply throw money at a problem and create productive strategic industries in a short period. To compound the issue for the U.S., its allies are even less prepared militarily, and Washington is currently going out of its way to alienate them instead of fostering the cohesion necessary to deter or fight China.
Hegseth might well prefer to imagine that the valor of American soldier-warriors can overcome any other disadvantage, including a diminished military industrial base and fractured alliances. Instead of boasting about its superiority in hand-to-hand combat, the U.S. should be preparing its military for an onslaught of Chinese drones and a conflict that could last for years. Otherwise, it might win the opening battles—but it will probably lose the long war.
