Since the end of the Cold War, the West has operated under a dangerous illusion: the belief that financial expenditure is synonymous with military power. Over that timespan, the United States and its NATO allies have spent trillions of dollars on defense in service of this commitment, maintaining a network of military bases and personnel on both sides of the Atlantic to counter foreign adversaries.1
While these expenditures provided Western powers with sufficient resources to topple authoritarian regimes in Iraq and Libya and launch counterterrorist operations in Afghanistan, they crumbled under the pressure of genuine interstate war in Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, this mountain of defense spending failed to translate into the material capabilities needed to ward off Russian aggression. European peacetime defense arsenals evaporated in months, and munitions and artillery production lines on both sides of the Atlantic failed to meet Ukraine’s wartime needs.2 The West discovered, to its peril, that it had built a defense establishment optimized for consuming budgets rather than generating combat power.
This failure is more than a procurement oversight; it is an institutional pathology. Washington, London, and Brussels have allowed the financial accounting of defense spending to eclipse the operational realities of war. The defense establishment’s fixation on NATO’s two percent of GDP defense spending target perfectly captures this institutional sclerosis. This metric rewards the input of money rather than the output of security, and permits nations to satisfy their NATO alliance commitments by funding pensions or building bureaucratic bloat instead of actual combat power. The West has financialized national security, mistaking the size of military budgets for the security of Western nations.
Reversing this trend requires a fundamental paradigm shift in military strategy, one inspired by America’s abundance agenda. Domestically, the abundance agenda champions removing legal obstacles and regulatory sclerosis that create artificial scarcity in housing, energy, and infrastructure. It also calls for rebuilding the state capacity needed to deliver these goods to ordinary people.3 Applied to national defense, abundance demands the same relentless focus on removing legal barriers and rebuilding state capacity to produce measurable results that improve the national security of Western nations.
Combat Readiness is the doctrine that translates abundance thinking into national defense. It calls for restructuring of how we measure and manage military power, shifting evaluation away from financial inputs and toward observable outputs. Under this doctrine, the central question of defense policy is no longer how much money the United States and its allies allocate to defense. Instead, the primary focus is whether the United States and its allies have the forces, supply chains, and industrial base to generate and sustain combat power and prevail in the face of war.
As the West faces the growing specter of Russian and Chinese aggression, Combat Readiness may no longer be an optional luxury. It may be a defining military and geopolitical issue of our time, one that requires genuine structural reform and sustained commitments over the coming decades.
The Institutional Failure of Input Metrics
Today’s Western defense establishment focuses on spending allocations and budget execution over Combat Readiness, a condition produced by deliberate institutional choices over the past half‑century.
This wasn’t always the case. During the early stages of the Cold War, defense institutions oriented themselves around material outputs.4 The central questions for military planners during this era were largely operational: how many daily sorties a fighter wing could generate, how many days of sustained armor combat prepositioned stocks could support, and how rapidly a carrier group could reach a crisis zone. Budgets served as instruments for achieving these material results, and the primary metric that disciplined institutional behavior was readiness.
This situation changed during the early 1960s when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS), which elevated financial inputs into the organizing framework for all defense activity. While PPBS imposed fiscal discipline in the short term, it trained generations of Pentagon officials to conceive of power through budget projections, program codes, and appropriation cycles. As a result, these fiscal categories became the new grammar of defense planning.5
The Soviet Union’s collapse accelerated this transformation.6 Operational benchmarks left over as vestiges from the Cold War era slowly vanished, and abstract financial metrics filled the void. The “peace dividend” reconstituted defense budgets as a political resource to obtain defense industry jobs in congressional districts and military bases in European countries, all while entrenching Pentagon bureaucracy in Washington.7
Since the 1990s, defense professionals have internalized this inversion. Instead of focusing on genuine readiness, military officials on both sides of the Atlantic have become masters of the defense budget process, defending program line items through legislative strategy and equating robust appropriations with institutional health.
This shift has even permeated the vocabulary and vernacular used to describe military power. Today’s defense planners often speak in terms of the “color of money,” “full funding policies,” “obligation rates,” and “continuing resolutions” instead of actual readiness measures.8
NATO’s two percent defense spending target is a symptom of this institutional sclerosis, not its cause. This target emerged in the wake of this shift, as officials turned toward financial metrics and surrendered the vocabulary of readiness itself in the face of unprecedented peace following the end of the Cold War.
The 2022 war in Ukraine exposed the consequences of this catastrophic divergence between defense budgets and actual combat endurance, revealing a fiction decades in the making: that financial commitment do not magically guarantee Combat Readiness or national security.
Reversing half‑a-century of institutional decay demands more than new metrics. It requires dismantling the accumulated practices that have subordinated the operational reality of warfare to budget execution and demands the creation of a new paradigm for defense planning itself.
The Strategic Logic of Combat Readiness
If financial inputs offer only an illusion of security, understanding the true nature of military power requires discarding modern bureaucratic habits and returning to the foundational logic of military strategy.
Across centuries of military history, scores of generals and military strategists have converged on the same general insight: military power is measured by a nation’s ability to generate and sustain combat effectiveness, not by the appearance of strength or the magnitude of expenditures. Combat Readiness is simply the modern articulation of this enduring tradition.
Sun Tzu offers the earliest and most durable expression of this principle. In The Art of War, victory is determined before battle begins through superior preparation, self-knowledge, and logistical depth: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”9 This maxim encapsulates the core logic of Combat Readiness: preparing the industrial and physical realities of war long before the shooting starts.
Carl von Clausewitz extends this intuition into a systemic theory of war under uncertainty. Because “friction” is inevitable in conflict, military institutions must build redundancy, stockpiles, and industrial depth before a crisis begins.10 Combat Readiness is, therefore, a doctrine for managing friction rather than merely anticipating it.
This strategic imperative also carries profound moral weight, articulated by the likes of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas through the just war tradition. A nation may only wage war if it has a just cause and reasonable probability of success.11 Entering a conflict without the stockpiles, industrial base, or force readiness to sustain genuine combat is therefore more than just a strategic blunder; it is a moral failure. Modern scholars describe this obligation as jus ante bellum, the ethical duty to prepare responsibly before conflict arises.12 Combat Readiness fits naturally within this tradition and provides a nation with the kind of credible preparedness needed to deter aggression and reduce the likelihood of a protracted, catastrophic war.
Together, this strategic and moral tradition converges on a single insight: the state has a duty to convert national resources into sustained combat power.
The Architecture of Combat Readiness
To translate the ancient logic of this strategy into twenty-first-century policy, Western defense planners must replace financial inputs, like military budget figures or percents of GDP, with metrics and outputs that measure the physical and operational realities of war. This reorientation requires a constellation of indicators that expose the health of the entire defense enterprise from the factory floor to the front lines across five domains: Military Preparedness, Force Projection, Operational Sustainment, Industrial Capacity, and Alliance Interoperability.
Military Preparedness answers the most elemental question: is a nation’s military force ready to fight a protracted war today? While a military unit may exist on paper, its crews, weaponry, and personnel might be untrained and unfit for combat when war erupts. Military Preparedness therefore tracks the percentage of a nation’s combat arsenal, like aircraft, naval ships, and armored vehicles, that are fully mission-capable at any given moment in time. It also measures the share of brigades, squadrons, and military personnel rated at the highest readiness tiers for combat within thirty days of a war declaration. And it tracks the amount of training military personnel have received: whether pilots have the flight hours, tank crews have the gunnery tables, and infantry battalions have the collective field exercises that separate muscle memory from atrophy in the face of war.
Force Projection addresses the speed at which a nation activates and delivers its combat power once a war begins. Modern war punishes sluggish mobilization. Force Projection therefore measures how fast a nation can deploy a fully equipped combat brigade team in a foreign theater once war breaks out. It also tracks how quickly a nation can mobilize its military reserves from a cold start to reinforce forward positions. And it measures how rapidly a nation can supply its current troops with munitions, rations, and supplies to ensure that the first military units engaged in combat do not fight unsupported while the remainder of a nation’s military force mobilizes for war.
Operational Sustainment measures the logistical endurance that allows a force to engage in warfare over the course of a long term conflict. To ensure that a nation can endure protracted warfare, Operational Sustainment tracks how large each nation’s military arsenal is and how many months and years of artillery shells, air defense interceptors, machine gun ammunition and anti-ship missiles are available for combat use. It also measures operational fuel reserves and supplies independent of vulnerable commercial networks to ensure that tanks, ships, and planes have the fuel and supplies needed to engage in a prolonged period of warfare. And it tracks how quickly a nation can raise, equip, and train new military units to reinforce existing positions in any theater of war.
Industrial Capacity evaluates the ability to regenerate what combat consumes and to expand output when wartime demand spikes. To meet this demand, Industrial Capacity measures how quickly a nation’s industrial base can accelerate critical munitions production from a peacetime pace to full wartime velocity to ensure that military forces have the munitions they need once peacetime stocks are exhausted. It also measures absolute monthly munition production numbers during peacetime as well, like tens of thousands of artillery shells, hundreds of precision missiles, and hundreds of thousands of disposable drones, to determine how quickly a nation can replace expended stocks during war with existing industrial capacity. And it tracks the source of all microchips, rare-earth elements, and critical supplies used to assemble modern weaponry so that a nation can rely on domestic producers or trusted allies for these supplies instead of turning to foreign adversaries, who may embargo trade and block supply in the event of war.
Alliance Interoperability evaluates the ease with which military forces across multiple nations seamlessly combine into a single fighting force. Genuine interoperability tracks how well allied units share tactical data, employ common supply systems, and integrate into a multinational command structure without improvised workarounds discovered only during a crisis. It also tracks whether allied military forces can use one another’s civilian and wartime infrastructure, including rails, roads, airports, telecommunications networks, and other critical infrastructure in the event of war. And it harmonizes industrial surge plans so that allies do not compete with one another for the same raw materials during a potential interstate war.
Impediments to Combat Readiness
Despites its merits, Combat Readiness faces several potential obstacles. First among these is institutional inertia. The US Defense Department and European defense ministries are structured around maximizing financial inputs, like aggregate defense spending, instead of focusing on operational outputs.13 Generals, civil servants, and other defense officials have structured their entire careers around the current paradigm and may be reluctant to restructure the defense establishment in their countries around outputs if doing so undermines their career prospects.
Another obstacle is electoral incentives. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic often use defense spending to procure jobs and investment for their congressional districts and parliamentary constituencies in order to earn the good will of voters and win elections. This form of “military Keynesianism” creates perverse incentives for lawmakers, who individually benefit from fiscal profligacy, even if this excessive defense spending leaves taxpayers worse off in the long run.14 Forcing politicians to consolidate military bases and defense contractor factories in the name of Combat Readiness may therefore face some resistance in Congress and European parliaments alike.
The final obstacle are defense contractors themselves. During his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the proliferation of a “military industrial complex” of private defense companies, whose profit seeking motives and fiduciary duties to shareholders could undermine the national security of the United States.15 Eisenhower’s warnings were prescient. While today’s defense contractors provide essential arms to the US military, they do so at a prohibitive cost. Through “cost plus contracts,” the US government guarantees every defense contractor a profit margin regardless of the expense incurred to develop, manufacture, and deliver a weapons system to the US military.16 This structure provides defense contractors with little incentive to control production costs and spend taxpayer money wisely. Any shift away from cost plus contracts may therefore run into major opposition from defense contractors themselves.
From Budgets to Combat Power
The obstacles to Combat Readiness are formidable. Decades of bureaucratic routines, electoral incentives, and entrenched institutional interests will not disappear overnight.
However, these impediments are increasingly impossible to defend. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the central illusion underlying the post-Cold War defense establishment: vast military expenditures do not automatically produce combat power. When confronted with the demands of industrial warfare, the West discovered that it had optimized its defense institutions for managing budgets rather than generating military capability.
This institutional drift was understandable, if ultimately misguided. In 1989, mere months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published “The End of History,” predicting the triumph of liberal democracy.17 The Soviet Union soon collapsed, and the United States entered what Charles Krauthammer later called “The Unipolar Moment,” an era in which no peer competitor appeared capable of challenging Western military dominance.18 Under these extraordinary geopolitical circumstances, readiness became increasingly difficult to evaluate because it was rarely tested. Budgets, program execution, and procurement processes gradually replaced operational capability as the language through which defense institutions measured themselves.
This era has ended. China has emerged as a peer competitor, Russia has demonstrated both the willingness and the capacity to wage protracted industrial warfare, and Ukraine has revealed that artillery shells, production capacity, logistics, and mobilization remain the decisive currencies of modern warfare. The assumptions that permitted Western governments to confuse financial commitment with readiness have collapsed alongside the strategic environment that produced them.
Combat Readiness offers a new organizing principle for national defense. Rather than asking whether governments spend enough money, it asks whether they can generate and sustain combat power when deterrence fails. Combat Readiness achieves this goal by replacing financial inputs with operational outputs as the standard by which defense institutions evaluate themselves. It demands procurement systems that reward capability instead of expenditure, political institutions that prioritize deterrence over distributive spending, and industrial policy capable of sustaining military production under wartime conditions. Above all, it requires governments to judge every defense institution by a single question: does it improve the nation’s ability to fight and win a war?
This insight isn’t new. For centuries, military strategists and moral philosophers alike have converged on the same fundamental principle: the state has a duty to convert national resources into sustained combat power. Combat Readiness give policymakers a twenty-first-century framework for fulfilling this obligation. The West possesses the wealth, technology, and industrial potential needed to meet this standard. Whether it develops the institutions capable of doing so may prove to be the defining national security question of our time.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Military Expenditure Database,” https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.
The New York Times, “U.S. and NATO Scramble to Arm Ukraine and Refill Their Own Arsenals,” Nov. 26, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/world/europe/nato-weapons-shortage-ukraine.html.
Derek Thompson, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Atlantic, January 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/build-back-better-abundance-agenda/621231/.
Gordon Adams and Cindy Williams, “Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution in the Department of Defense,” Buying National Security, 2010, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780203861509-11.
Id.
Les Aspin, Report on the Bottom-Up Review (U.S. Department of Defense, 1993), https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/dod_reforms/Bottom-upReview.pdf.
Congressional Research Service, “Defense Spending in Your District,” December 2024, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12274.
Department of Defense Financial Management Regulation (DoD 7000.14-R), https://comptroller.war.gov/FMR/.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter VII, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1946/pg1946-images.html.
See Saint Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, Book XXII, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/; and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Book II-II, Question 40 (“On War”), https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3040.htm.
Ned Dobos, “Jus ante bellum, reckless threats and irresponsible promises,” International Affairs, November 2025, https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/101/6/2235/8292951.
David Norquist, “Reforming the Defense Department’s Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process,” PPBE Reform Commission, 2021, https://ppbereform.senate.gov/in_the_news/reforming-the-defense-departments-planning-programming-budgeting-and-execution-process/.
Rebecca U. Thorpe, The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending, University of Chicago Press, 2014, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo17607479.html.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 17, 1961, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/farewell-radio-and-television-address-the-american-people.
Federal Acquisition Regulation § 16.306, “Cost-Reimbursement Contracts,” https://www.acquisition.gov/far/subpart-16.3.
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/1991, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20044692.