The last time tanks paraded through the streets of Washington, the U.S. Army was at the peak of its confidence and power.
U.S. forces had smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in a ground assault that lasted just 100 hours. The Soviet Union was months from collapse.
Three decades later, Army tanks are once again preparing to take to the streets of the capital, this time as part of a procession that President Trump has described as a celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday and raw American firepower. Now, though, the service is working through its most profound identity crisis since its defeat in Vietnam.
There are concerns about the politicization of the force by a president who describes protesters as “animals” and often seems to be looking for an excuse to mobilize ground troops in response to demonstrations or civil unrest.
There are big questions about whether the Army’s aging equipment can survive on future battlefields swarming with cheap precision drones and what role the service will play as the Pentagon shifts its focus to deterring China.
Finally, there’s the unsatisfying end to the war in Iraq and the military’s defeat in Afghanistan, with both continuing to inflict a psychic toll on soldiers and their families who question whether their sacrifices amounted to anything.
Those sacrifices were top of mind for Seana Arrechaga, whose husband was killed in Afghanistan in 2011.
As the Army was preparing troops and equipment in Washington for Mr. Trump’s big parade, Ms. Arrechaga was boxing up and mailing 73 faded, smelly combat boots at her home outside Nashville.
For the last decade, the boots, along with nearly 8,000 others, had been set out on the lawn in front of the 101st Airborne Division headquarters at Fort Campbell, Ky., as part of a remembrance of those killed in America’s post-9/11 wars.
Then this spring, Army officials at the base abruptly announced that they were ending the display, scheduled for late May. The move set off a mad scramble among some family members to make sure that their loved one’s boot was not thrown away.
Ms. Arrechaga, who lives about a two-hour drive from the base, posted on social media that she was going to get the boot belonging to her husband, Sgt. First Class Ofren Arrechaga, and offered to grab others as well. Not all of the boots in the memorial belonged to an actual soldier, but hundreds did.
She made a spreadsheet and then she and some friends spent hours walking through the final display grabbling boots to mail to families as far away as Guam and North Pole, Alaska.
Many boots had been decorated with faded pictures, personal messages and pieces of the deceased soldier’s uniform, like their rank insignia or name tape. “I love you daddy,” her son, Alston, now 17, had written in his 6-year-old scrawl. He was 3 when his father was killed.
Army officials at Fort Campbell told the families that it no longer made sense to single out the dead from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for special honors. They also acknowledged that they did not realize that many families would want their donated boot back.
“If there was one way to anger an entire community, they did it,” Ms. Arrechaga, 36, said.
The decision to end the display reflected a broader impulse among many in the Pentagon to put the painful era of wars behind them.
The U.S. military “is undertaking a forced exercise in forgetting about the last 20 years of war,” Carter Malkasian, who served in Afghanistan and wrote a history of the war, said in a speech in 2024.
Those inside the Pentagon who bring up the military’s defeat in Afghanistan, Mr. Malkasian said, are “shunned” or derided as “stuck in the past.”
“Officers and enlisted know that their careers depend on forgetting,” he continued.
The result is that the military has not learned from its mistakes in those conflicts, said Jonathan Schroden, an expert on irregular war at CNA, a nonpartisan defense research institute. “We didn’t learn in real time, and now we’re not learning through a historical lens,” Dr. Schroden said. “That’s really troubling.”
For the Army, the push to forget and move on is fueled in part by its need to confront more pressing problems around the world. The Russia-Ukraine war has highlighted the grave vulnerabilities of much of the Army equipment that will be on display for Mr. Trump’s parade.
In 2023 and 2024, the Pentagon gave the gave the Ukrainians dozens of M1 Abrams tanks, which struggled to stay in service on a battlefield overrun with precision drones. The vast majority have been destroyed or captured. To compensate for the new threat, Ukrainian and Russian forces have traded their heavy armor for smaller, nimbler and more dispersed formations that employ motorcycles and are harder to hit, said senior Army officials.
Attack helicopters, which U.S. forces relied on heavily in Afghanistan to support ground troops under fire, have similarly been unable to stay in the air in Ukraine, these officials said.
Last month, Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, noted that the service is saddled with 100,000 Humvees that are so out of date that they probably cannot be used in a future war.
“We don’t need them,” General George told the “War on the Rocks” podcast. “We’ve been producing them for, you know, close to 50 years, if not more than 50 years.”
Senior Trump administration officials, meanwhile, have instructed the Pentagon to shift its focus from the Middle East and Europe to Asia and competition with China. The vast distances in that theater and large stretches of open ocean mean that Army forces are likely to play a secondary role to the Air Force, Navy and Marines.
Such details seem lost on Mr. Trump, who in the lead up to Saturday’s parade visited Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where he rhapsodized about the Army’s power. He described the “chilling howl of Black Hawks in the dead of night” and praised the American soldier as someone who “will chase you down, crush you and cast you into oblivion.”
Beyond that, the president’s speech highlighted the danger that the Army, which has enjoyed broad support from the American people for the last quarter century, could be perceived as a partisan or political force. Both Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speak often about the threat posed to America from within.
At Fort Bragg, Mr. Trump, with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division behind him, denounced his political rivals — former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California — eliciting boos from the troops.
He criticized people protesting immigration raids and those who attacked public property in Los Angeles as subhuman, and warned that they could be targeted by U.S. troops.
“They came in with bricks, red bricks, that they could throw at our military and at the police in L.A., who are very good,” Mr. Trump said. “But they weren’t aggressive like our soldiers. Our soldiers really were aggressive.”
Among the biggest concerns of senior Army leaders is that Mr. Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would give U.S. troops law enforcement powers in American cities and potentially put them into conflict with their fellow citizens. The possibility prompted discussions this year among some senior Army leaders about whether such orders might cause them to resign in protest, according to a current and recently retired senior Army official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal talks.
Although Mr. Trump has not indicated any plans to invoke the act, some officials worry he could be laying the groundwork for such a move with his references to a migrant “invasion.”
This weekend’s parade in Washington, with its focus on tanks, helicopters and armored personnel carriers, is unlikely to do much to strengthen the connection between the Army and the country it serves.
“A military parade made up of people is honoring service,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “A parade with heavy metal rolling is an expression of power.”
As she packed up the last of the boots from Fort Campbell, Ms. Arrechaga thought of the Army and Mr. Trump’s coming parade. “I hope they actually do something for the fallen instead of just some North Korea show of force thing,” she said.
Last Saturday, the 15th anniversary of the day her husband’s battalion lost five soldiers in Afghanistan, she got a call from one of his former soldiers. They talked about the people who died, the marriages that had been ruined and the mental toll the war was still taking on those who had survived.
The soldier, who is still serving, asked her what it was all for, she recalled.
“I’ve been struggling with that for like 15 years,” she said she told him. Her husband, a Cuban immigrant, served because he loved his adopted country and the men and women who fought alongside him, she recalled.
These days, she said, her service is ensuring that her husband and those who fought with him are not forgotten.
“As long as we speak their names they still exist,” Ms. Arrechaga said. “I feel very strongly about that.”
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