The United States of America has neither a secretary nor a Department of War.
Legally, the name of the institution, led by the incompetent Pete Hegseth, is the Department of Defense and his office, for which he is cosmically unfit , morally, mentally, intellectually and temperamentally, is the secretary of defense.
Here is how the military historian Phillips P. OBrien, author of a new book called “War and Power,” sets up the coming disaster when a generation of Americans are wiped out in a war with China for which the nation is unprepared to win because the US military is led by fools:
If United States military planners think they going to defeat the Chinese through close combat they are fooling themselves—most likely they will lost masses of American soldiers to Chinese drones and other military production. Just looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, for instance, the sacrifice of soldiers by the Russians is gaining them less and less other than casualties that are now well over a million. The war itself is being determined not by the lethality of the average infantryman, but instead by the production of millions of UAVs, artillery shells and long-range systems that are now being used to attack targets thousands of kilometres behind the front lines, from oil refineries to power plants.
Here is just a snippet of Trump speaking to US forces in Japan:
Once again, his speech was completely unhinged, ugly and partisan. Each time he steps in front of a military audience, he weakens the national defense by assaulting the values of the US military and dividing the nation. Last week, Donald Trump released a video of himself defecating on his political opponents, who are the parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, daughters, sons and loved ones of the soldiers whom he embarrasses with his ceaseless nonsense, vitriol and venom.
No president who hates his country, the people who live in it, the cornerstones of its civilization and its core values could conceivably lead a nation in a winning war against a nation as powerful as China.
Trump is as delusional in his public pronouncements, and as completely incoherent in October of 2025, as Adolf Hitler was in April of 1945—with the caveat that Trump’s sycophants are more loyal, with the exception of Goebbels.
Yet, the coming Trump wars are going to be lost for reasons beyond his appalling idiocy and incompetence. John McCain used to like to point out that political parties and factions don’t lose wars, nations do. The sick truth of our present national crisis is that Trump can’t wage a war against California, Illinois, New York and Oregon, while preparing for conflict in the Pacific.
National unity matters, and it has been obliterated.
Yet, even that isn’t the main reason why America will lose a conflict to China in the Pacific.
Again, here is O’Brien:
In his recent address to the combined audience of generals and admirals of the US military, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stressed the military virtues of lethality, bravery and even hand to hand combat, equating them with key ingredients in any future US victory in war. He even went on to paint a vivid picture of his vision of how wars are won.
“We were built to load up in the back of helicopters, five tons, or Zodiacs 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….In this profession, 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.”[i]
This stress on bravery and lethality certainly sounds exciting in a boyish way, as if wars are won and lost by Spartan or Roman warriors, staring their enemies straight in the eye and killing them with swords or spears.
However, the US military is not going to fight the Athenians or Carthaginians and the results of any war its enters into is not going to be determined by bravery or sacrifice. Indeed, if the US goes to war with China, its closest competitor and greatest geopolitical challenger, the bravery of soldiers on both sides will be irrelevant. Any such war will be won by production, logistics and technological mastery—as all industrial wars have been won or lost in the 20th and 21st centuries—from World War I to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.
If United States military planners think they going to defeat the Chinese through close combat they are fooling themselves—most likely they will lost masses of American soldiers to Chinese drones and other military production. Just looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, for instance, the sacrifice of soldiers by the Russians is gaining them less and less other than casualties that are now well over a million.
The war itself is being determined not by the lethality of the average infantryman, but instead by the production of millions of UAVs, artillery shells and long-range systems that are now being used to attack targets thousands of kilometres behind the front lines, from oil refineries to power plants.
The one thing that those troops should know is this: when they come home in flag-draped boxes, Trump won’t care nor remember their names. Second, neither will Pete Hegseth.
MAGA is going to get a lot of young Americans killed in the next few years.
Fascists always campaign on freedom, prosperity and peace. What they deliver is slavery, penury and war.
It is what Trump will deliver. When he does, America will lose and the American people should contemplate what that will mean in a world that is shrinking every day.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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