George Will: Trump-era military production 'not ready' for challenges ahead

15 August

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland on March 6, 2014 (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)

U.S. President Donald Trump, despite showing an isolationist streak at times and pushing Patrick Buchanan-influenced "America First" ideology, considers himself aggressively pro-military. Trump held a hotly debated military parade in the streets of Washington, D.C. on June 14, and his use of the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement is drawing intense criticism from civil libertarians on both the left and the right.

But conservative journalist George Will, in his August 15 column for the Washington Post, argues that the United States is falling behind in terms of military defense technology. And he makes his point by looking back on World War 2.

"By 1937," Will recalls, "the Danish immigrant, William Knudsen, had risen from the factory floor to the apex of the automobile industry as General Motors' president. On May 28, 1940, as France was falling, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called: 'I want you to work on some production matters.' That bland job description disguised Knudsen's task of turning the (U.S.) Army, then barely larger than that of the Netherlands, and the rest of the U.S. military, from a small, somnolent and technologically stagnant force into an emanation of U.S. industrial might."

But in 2025, the 84-year-old Never Trump conservative contends, the U.S. isn't meeting the military or technological challenges it needs to.

"Today, Vladimir Putin's aggression against Ukraine is rousing European nations from their military slumbers," Will writes. "For example, Germany now has the world's fourth-biggest defense budget and has loosened debt restraints for defense spending to become kriegstüchtig — war-ready, in the defense minister's terminology. The United States is not ready."

The conservative columnist continues, "The Economist reports, 'At current rates of procurement it will take seven years to bring America's ammunition stocks back to where they were before military aid to Ukraine began.' In a Washington think tank's 2023 war game simulating a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. inventory of long-range missiles was exhausted in three weeks."

Will notes that in 2022, Poland, according to The Economist, ordered "a big batch of U.S. Abrams tanks from the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Ohio" but "has yet to receive" most of them three years later.

"Poland needs tanks," the long-time Post writer argues. "The United States needs a new Knudsen."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

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