For 12 days in June, the United States teetered on the edge of yet another war in the Middle East. We seem to have avoided the worst for now, but there is a chance that fighting between Israel and Iran could resume — especially if diplomatic efforts to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions fail. And pressure on President Trump from prominent interventionist Republican policymakers remains to support a regime change operation against Iran, which also risks reigniting the conflict.
At the same time, the threat of war with China looms large. China continues to rapidly expand its Navy and build capabilities that would enable it to seize Taiwan if it so chooses. We are now less than 18 months away from 2027, the year that Adm. Phil Davidson, a former commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, once said China could be able to seize Taiwan through force. A war with nuclear-armed China would be several orders of magnitude more dangerous than a war with Iran.
Regardless, the United States still must be prepared to wage a major conflict. And while there is no doubt that the U.S. military remains the most powerful and capable fighting force in the world, it is suffering from systemic challenges in a critical component of warfighting success: personnel readiness.
Even on the modern high-tech battlefield, war is still a people business. For the Department of Defense, this means it must care for its people along with developing its weapons in order to maintain lethality while also creating an environment that incentivizes Americans to continue to serve. When service members and their families cannot rely on the programs that are intended to ensure their quality of life, it distracts them from their duties, which inevitably limits their effectiveness in combat.
A critical challenge the second Trump administration inherited is the state of the Military Health System. The system is responsible for caring for over nine million uniformed service members, military families, retirees and contractors around the world, while also providing care for wounded service members at home. But the system has been declining, and budgets for military hospitals have fallen by nearly 12 percent since 2015. As a result, its ability to provide adequate care to these groups and support the Defense Department in a major conflict has become severely compromised.
Military treatment facilities face a global maintenance backlog exceeding $10 billion, which has led many of the system’s hospitals to fall into disrepair. The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington., which routinely treats presidents and members of Congress, had to evacuate several clinics this year, owing to burst pipes that resulted from delayed maintenance.
In March, a military health care expert testifying before Congress warned that without major interventions to fix deficiencies in the system, the M.H.S. would slide into “medical obsolescence.” Dr. Jeremy Cannon, a retired Air Force trauma surgeon and medical professor, estimated that in a war with a high volume of casualties, “many of these patients will have survivable injuries, yet one in four will die at the hands of an unprepared system.”
Military housing is also in disarray. In October, the Government Accountability Office found that persistent housing shortfalls for military families in some areas threaten overall quality of life and financial stability for service members and could lead to “negative effects on performance and mission, especially for lower ranked, junior personnel.” Other facilities and services designed to support military families — in particular day care centers on military bases — are increasingly strained as well.
The Navy secretary John Phelan was apparently shocked after touring barracks for sailors and Marines in Guam in May. The barracks were plagued with mold, exposed electrical wiring and damaged plumbing, which made the building practically unlivable. That situation is unfortunately not unique; the Marine Corps alone reportedly estimated it will need $1.5 billion a year over the next decade to bring its barracks around the world up to standard.
Fortunately, Mr. Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law includes nearly $9 billion to improve military quality of life, with a significant portion of that money earmarked to address the poor state of military health care facilities and housing that the Trump administration inherited.
It is also imperative that both Congress and the administration resist pressure or temptation to redirect this money to other priorities, as has happened in the past. The lobbying power of major defense acquisition programs far outmatches those speaking up for military personnel. The military, too, has had to redirect money from quality of life initiatives to other more urgent priorities. This occurred most recently when the Defense Department planned to shift $1 billion away from barracks improvements to support efforts to improve border security. That mission is critical to our nation’s safety, but there have been times when the Pentagon has prioritized funds to sustain missions less essential to national security, such as the Iraq war, which shouldn’t have been fought in the first place, and nation-building in Afghanistan.
Leaders at the Pentagon and in Congress must avoid these diversions and the pressure to start more unnecessary wars that further undermine readiness to deal with actual threats to our safety. Military housing and health facilities can’t sink Chinese ships in the Taiwan Strait or shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles in the Persian Gulf. But the administration must understand that future diversions will continue to erode the quality of the Military Health System and military housing, undermining personnel morale, readiness and retention and diluting recruiting power.
The individuals who serve in our military are some of the best, brightest and bravest our country has to offer. This was recently exemplified by the dozens of pilots who flew a 37-hour round-trip mission to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, a feat unmatched in American military aviation history. But in order for service members to be successful at fighting and winning America’s wars, they must have quality housing, health care and services that enable them to focus on their core responsibilities.
As Gen. George C. Marshall reportedly told an aide, “We are going to take care of the troops first, last and all the time.”
Dan Caldwell is a former senior adviser to Pete Hegseth and a veteran of the Iraq war. Darin Selnick is a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Hegseth and served at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the White House during the first Trump administration.
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