Trump Wants to Counter China. His Policies Are Eroding America’s Military Instead

Two weeks ago, the Vice President of the United States told a crowd of European grandees that he was not worried about either Russia or China but about “the threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”[1] Vance’s extrospection is inane. But the point about threats from within is poignant, though it is more applicable to America than Europe, and I don’t mean that in a political way. America’s armed forces are affected by more than meets the eye.

First, the obvious: the salient issues with the US Armed Forces. America is no longer the world’s largest economy – as measured by purchasing power parity. However unlike Russia and China (the main potential adversaries of the United States), the United States’ population is still growing. Nevertheless only 9% of young Americans are interested in serving and 77% are not qualified for military service without a waiver.[2] Military branches either miss their recruiting targets or barely meet them, even as the size of the forces shrink.[3]

Like the rest of Western Europe, the US is spending more on social issues (dare I say, welfare?) than on the military. The US used to spend over 9% of its GDP on the military in the 1960’s, which shrank down to about 3% after the cold war and is now, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, still under 4%. Partly as a result, its physical capabilities and assets have suffered. I’ll give a couple examples. In general the mission capable rates for tactical aircraft are not meeting Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps goals. None of America’s 15 tactical aircraft variants met their mission capable goals in fiscal year 2023.[4] Mission capability is stagnant around 70% for the Air Force.[5] In contrast, will soon have the world’s largest Air Force.[6]  The situation is worse for the US Navy. China currently has the world’s largest maritime fighting force, operating more ships than the US Navy (not including logistic and support vessels). Larger navies almost always win naval wars.[7] China’s ships are newer, American ships are more expensive to maintain and many will be retired; only 25% of the US Navy’s ships were launched after 2010 compared to 70% for China’s.[8] The situation is more critical for strategic assets like submarines.[9]

America is also struggling to adapt its high-cost approach to procurement with the exigencies of modern combat. Missiles worth millions of dollars are fired at drones costing a couple thousand in the Middle East.[10] Though the skies on the Eastern front in Ukraine are buzzing in countless cheap drones, many costing $500, America is only buying a few thousand drones a year and each costs tens of thousands of dollars.[11]

These are some of the obvious challenges America’s armed forces face. Beneath the surface though, political and societal forces are eroding a key source of American strength. Although there are both taboos and rules (i.e. DoDD 1344.10) restricting the participation of members of the Armed Forces in politics, the reverse is not true. In the era of ‘culture wars,’ that pollicization has focused on what generally falls under diversity, equity, and inclusive policies.[12] What’s absent from the discussion until now is America’s slipping status as a relatively corruption-free country.

               One of the main prongs of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a massive 64-kilometer-long convoy of vehicles targeting Kiev. The convoy stalled and ultimately pulled back with major losses. Analysts were quick to point towards rampant corruption as a key cause of not only the convoy’s failure but also wider strategic and tactical issues for Russia.[13] Why does Russia fight in such an inflexible, centralized way, for instance?[14]

               Perhaps spurred by the saliency of corruption in this conflict, a series of recent political science papers have explored its impacts on war outcomes. Are the negative effects of corruption so great as to actually contribute to victory or defeat? All quantitative studies suggest a resounding yes. Corruption dramatically reduces the probability of victory in wars between states. A higher absolute level or relative level of corruption (comparing corruption levels between countries at war) is highly and significantly predictive of both war outcomes and relative losses, after accounting for all other factors such as the size of the economy or government type. A country that is half as corrupt as another is about 0.7X more likely to win a war, all else equal.[15] Corruption also erodes the tactical effectiveness of armies even outside wars between states.[16] 

Western armies can take comfort that the money they spend on defense is likely money well spent; kickbacks alone are estimated to double the cost of Russian military procurement.[17] Yet for the United States, that critical advantage is starting to erode.

Though corruption lurks away from the public eye, there are various ways of tracking its rampancy. Two of the most prominent quantitative measures of corruption are developed by Transparency International in its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Varieties of Democracy group in its v2x_corr index (V-DEM). The CPI ranks countries based on perceived levels of public sector corruption, using a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). It aggregates expert assessments and business surveys to provide a comparative measure of corruption across nations. V-DEM measures political corruption across executive, legislative, and judicial branches, capturing both petty and grand corruption within a country. It ranges from 0 (low corruption) to 1 (high corruption), offering a broad assessment of governance integrity.

Over the last twenty years, the United States’ position along these indicators has worsened while that of China’s has improved (see Figure 1):

Corruption does not exist in a vacuum, it both causes and reflects societal issues. Other measures tied to corruption suggest a similar pattern of socio-political breakdown; public trust in the government is down by 50% in the U.S. in the last two decades.[18] A similar measure – the fragile states index (FSI) ranks countries based on their vulnerability to conflict and instability, using 12 indicators that measure political, economic, and social pressures. Higher scores are bad.

Figure 3: U.S. FSI score and annual changes in FSI score 2006-2024.

Even as the U.S. score has increased by 28% since 2006, China’s score has steadily dropped by 22%. It is now only 46% higher than that of the U.S. On the one hand, the problem does not need to be overstated. China is still about 0.5X more corrupt than the U.S according to the CPI; according to V-DEM China is 6.5X more corrupt than the U.S. On the other hand, much of the negative changes seen in the United States’ performance are closely tied with the impact of populism on politics, a worrying trend. The return of the Trump presidency, clearly correlated with the breakdown in FSI metrics and increased corruption, will likely negatively impact corruption across the country. The new administration’s actions are not encouraging. Major trends such as the mix of pro-cronyism economic policies and willingness to use government to support extractive business deals such as mineral concessions and oil extraction,[19] the concentration of billionaires associated with the Trump administration, moves against legal corruption measures, the evisceration of the independence of the DoJ, and Republican fealty towards a person rather than strong ideological principles all suggest corruption will increase in the United States.[20]

The Trump administration appears to be directing its attention towards China, arguing that China is the United States’ primary foreign threat that requires all available resources to counter.[21] That perspective is in line with over a decade of American defense and foreign policy.[22] The foundation of a strong military is also a force multiplier if a conflict were to break out: a unified force free of corruption. It is unfortunate that America’s economic strategy under this administration undercuts its foreign policy objectives, and that America’s military might is likely to continue fraying beneath the surface.

References

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jd-vance-what-i-worry-about-is-the-threat-from-within/

[2] U.S. Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Recruiting Media Roundtable With Service Leader (2024); Matt Seyler, Military struggling to find new troops as fewer young Americans willing or able to serve, ABC News (2022).

[3] LTC Frank Dolberry and Charles McEnany, “’Be All You Can Be’ – The U.S. Army's Recruiting Transformation,” AUSA (2024).

[4] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Tactical Aircraft: Operation and Maintenance Spending Varies by System, and Availability Generally Does Not Meet Service Goals, GAO-25-107870 (Accessible Version), 2024 pp. 11.

[5] Rachel S. Cohen and Stephen Losey, "US Air Force fleet’s mission-capable rates are stagnating. Here’s the plan to change that." Air Force Times (2022)

[6] Unshin Lee Harpley, INDOPACOM Boss: China ‘Soon to Be World’s Largest Air Force,’” Air & Space Force Magazine (2024)

[7] Sam J. Tangredi, “Bigger Fleets Win,” U.S. Naval Institute, Vol. 149 (2023).

[8] Alexander Palmer, Henry H. Carroll, and Nicholas Velazquez, “Unpacking China’s Naval Buildup,” CSIS (2024).

[9] Jerry Hendrix, “Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base,” American Affairs, Vol VIII, No. 2 (2024).

[10] Paul McLeary, Joe Gould, and Connor O’Brien, "Cost Rising for US as It Fights Off Houthi Drones," Politico, August 7, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/07/houthi-yemen-defense-iran-airstrikes-00173096.

[11] "The US Army Needs Less Good, Cheaper Drones to Compete," The Economist, January 5, 2025, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/05/the-us-army-needs-less-good-cheaper-drones-to-compete.

[12] Shannon Bond, Tom Bowman, Odette Yousef, and Quil Lawrence, "What's Behind Defense Secretary Pick Hegseth's War on 'Woke'," NPR, November 14, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5191941/pete-hegseth-defense-department-dei.

[13] Eric Tegler, "Have Flat Tires and Ukraine’s Mud Season Stalled the Russian Convoy Outside Kyiv?" Forbes, March 6, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/06/have-flat-tires-and-ukraines-mud-season-stalled-the-russian-convoy-outside-kyiv/.

[14] Rob Lee, "The Roots of Russian Military Dysfunction," Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), March 2023, https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/03/the-roots-of-russian-military-dysfunction/.

[15] Gentil-Fernandes, Leonardo and Otto, Jacob. “Corrupting the Battlefield: How Corruption Influences Belligerents’ Battlefield Performance.” International Interactions, Vol. 50, Iss. 5 (2024); Decety, N. (2024). Fighting on Quicksand: How Corruption Weakens State Capacity in War. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 7(2).

[16] Binetti, Marco Nicola. “Far from Home: The Impact of Corruption on Tactical Military Effectiveness.” Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 9, Iss. 4 (2024).

[17] "How Putin Is Reshaping Russia to Keep His War Machine Running," The Economist, November 30, 2023, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/11/30/how-putin-is-reshaping-russia-to-keep-his-war-machine-running.

[18] Pew Research Center. "Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024." June 24, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/.

[19] Harriet Agnew, Amelia Pollard and James Fontanella-Khan, “Trump’s tariff plan would put US on path to ‘crony capitalism’, Griffin says,” Financial Times (2024); Matthias Benz, André Müller, “Is a new era of crony capitalism dawning in the US?” NZZ (2025). Samuel Staley, “Trump’s tariffs are a case of crony capitalism,” The Hill (2018); Kenneth R. Rosen, “The Inside Story of How Trump ‘Kept the Oil’ in Syria and Lost,” Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy (2021); Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz, “Assessing the Viability of a U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal,” CSIS (2025).

[20] Andrew Goudsward and Sarah N. Lynch, “Trump's Justice Department hits the brakes on anti-corruption enforcement,” Reuters (2025); "For Donald Trump, the Resignations Are the Point," The Economist, February 20, 2025, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/02/20/for-donald-trump-the-resignations-are-the-point.

[21] Bryant Harris, "Deterring China, Slashing Waste Top Pentagon Priorities, Hegseth Says," Defense News, February 8, 2025, https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/02/08/deterring-china-slashing-waste-top-pentagon-priorities-hegseth-says; Fox News, "Hegseth Warns Europeans Realities: China, Border Threats Prevent US from Guaranteeing Security," Fox News, February 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hegseth-warns-europeans-realities-china-border-threats-prevent-us-from-guaranteeing-security; VOA News, "Vice Presidential Nominee Vance Calls China 'Biggest Threat to Our Country'," Voice of America News, 2025, https://www.voanews.com/a/vice-presidential-nominee-vance-calls-china-biggest-threat-to-our-country-/7701298.html; James Beal, "UK and Europe Must Listen to Donald Trump and Stop 'Far-Right' Smears," The Sun, 2025, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/33448424/uk-europe-listen-donald-trump-stop-far-right-smears.

[22] See for instance Obama’s 2011 Pivot to Asia, the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, or the 2018 National Defense Strategy.