A Military Cost to our Failure to Help Ukraine in its Defense Against Russia

We spend on the order of $1 trillion a year on defense-related outlays, and the Department of Defense manages roughly $4 trillion in total assets -- not all weaponry, but a vast base of equipment, systems, facilities, and infrastructure. Much of America's defense posture -- its procurement habits, doctrine, and assumptions -- was shaped by Cold War deterrence, large-platform warfare (ships, aircraft, armor), and the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and post-Cold War interventions.

Ukraine's rapid evolution of drone warfare suggests we may be living through a shift that could devalue much of that legacy investment. Cheap, fast-iterating drones -- paired with persistent surveillance, precision strike, and electronic warfare -- are rewriting what survives on a modern battlefield. This doesn't make tanks, ships, or aircraft obsolete overnight. But it raises a sobering possibility: some of what we're buying and maintaining may be optimized for a battlefield that is disappearing.

We're spending $1 trillion a year on defense. To save a tens - possibly hundreds - of billions, we're largely on the sideline in Ukraine's defense against the autocrat Putin. I would argue that helping to protect a democracy on the border of NATO from an autocracy is reason enough to get involved in Ukraine's defense, and for that reason alone we should have been more involved over the last 5 years. But even with that aside, we're missing out on a crucial period of battlefield evolution. The question isn't whether we can afford to help Ukraine. It's whether we can afford to sit out the war that's showing us what defense needs to become.

And here's the uncomfortable twist. Our reluctance to help Ukraine more -- sometimes defended on the grounds of cost -- may prove penny-wise and pound-foolish. Ukraine is pioneering the next frontier of battlefield adaptation in real time, under real fire, iterating faster than any peacetime R&D program could. Every lesson learned there is a lesson we don't have to learn the hard way. Underinvesting in that learning loop today could cost us far more later: in rushed procurement, doctrinal scramble, and painful write-downs of systems built for a previous era.