Is the purpose of highly expensive munitions with high accuracy politically binding?
The U.S. military’s stance is to never leave someone behind. Soldiers especially in films depict this camaraderie. With 800 foreign U.S. military bases, the presence requires defenses. Soldiers know that they have high likelihood of death. So why do we have highly accurate munitions? Firstly, the skills of soldiers is highly necessary when a breach of conflict emerges before replacement ranks from drafts or conscription occurs. Their skills in the long run are also highly valuable and not replaceable. Secondly, the U.S. shows soft and hard power. Soft power through funds, but hard power through our military might. U.S. military presence acts as a deterrence to conflict or, in the event of one, a conflict ready to be dealt with, regardless of its location in the world. However, being in foreign territory should come with the expectation of death during conflict. The reason for highly accurate munitions is both to conserve the skill and wisdom of veterans but also to avoid political death. To continue America’s military showmanship globally, American voters need to believe this is true too. If American soldiers are dying while America isn’t legally at war, there would be widespread backlash. Wars are not politically popular in the United States if American troops are on the line. The Iranian War, the quick Venezuelan Maduro-capture operation, avoiding intervening in the Russia-Ukraine War, and the lack of ground troops in the Iranian Air Invasion of 2026 proves that it’s on every politician’s mind.
I bring up this topic because wars are inherently political, albeit multifaceted with different underlying reasons for one’s support of a war. The United States’ dwindling missile stockpile is due to their high cost and high accuracy, partly due to research, partly due to variable costs like material and labor, and partly due to the hollowed defense industrial base of America. So why hasn’t America which plans for every war scenario so unprepared for high volume, cheap munitions war found depleted in their high value munitions? It’s because politically, they were never needed. For the last few decades, we were in a Cold War where high accuracy munitions were needed to defend the nation’s homeland from the Soviet Union; politicians could justify high accuracy, expensive munitions because actual civilians were on the line. But to continue the development of these expensive munitions post-Soviet collapse, politicians continued justifying spending high amounts of R&D and production of expensive munitions to protect every American life in all literal war zones starting from the ‘90 in the Middle East and Africa.
Those unpopular wars are the lingering reason for the United States’ depleted stockpile. The U.S. military and the political regimes have been so focused on protecting every life possible that they continued developing extremely expensive, highly accurate munitions to save every life possible. Even in enemy territory, a single life lost would be unacceptable, even though military they should be expected. Because of politics, the U.S.’s stockpile of munitions is extremely depleted, and now the United States’s air invasion is now showcasing Iran’s hand is stronger than President Trump’s. Military analysts are also concerned about America’s ability to counter China in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, and that it would take 6 years to recover America’s stockpile just from Air Invasion according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (accessed April 21, 2026).
There’s a debate that America thought that wars can be won through just quality, and now more people are realizing that wars are won through a balance of quantity and quality. In my opinion, America’s military is much smarter than the common man; the U.S. military is extremely well-studied, and America and the Soviet Union used quantity as their core mechanism to win WWII in addition to America and Great Britain’s rapid research output. America’s military knows that quantity is important. But, because of politics and the lobbying of the military industrial complex (i.e. their need to profit), politicians mainly approved of the most expensive equipment rather than a balanced war force. There are other reasons to only fund the most technologically advanced equipment such as just letting the MIC stay afloat during peacetime eras, but you would think that funding could also be directed to ensure we at least had the capability to build low-cost munitions in volume — even if the industrial base could not produce the volume, the research at least would’ve been valuable but was never funded.
I’m not debating whether we should shutter our bases. I’m not debating whether we should be involved, to any degree, any war. I’m simply presenting how we’ve found our wartime preparedness completely void: the end of post-Cold War peace and, of course, politics.