The U.S. Military’s Constraint Is Industrial Depth, Not Battlefield Skill

Darren Farber treats “winning” as a political definition before it is a battlefield metric.

In the Iran contingency discussed, Farber said the Strait of Hormuz had been open before the conflict, so if the only outcome is reopening it, the strategic question becomes whether “the juice was worth the squeeze.” His more favorable definition of success is narrower: the strait reopens, Iranian military capability has been degraded, and Iran cannot quickly reconstitute its export network of terror through oil profits. If the strait remains closed and Iran can rebuild quickly, he would call that a strategic failure.

That framing matters because Farber does not describe the adversary as a conventional state that can be easily coerced by pain alone. He argues that parts of the Shia Muslim world absorbed a hybrid of Marxism and martyrdom through Shariati’s work, producing an ideology in which destruction and self-sacrifice can be interpreted as proof of victory. He applies the same logic to Hamas in Gaza: even after Gaza has been “leveled,” Hamas elements still operate, and in the movement’s own ideological frame, he said, suffering can be treated as ascent rather than defeat.

The consequence, for Farber, is that democracies face a moral and political problem. A democracy must decide “how much of our moral rectitude” it is willing to compromise to achieve a political goal, especially when the threat does not feel existential to citizens sitting in New York. Democracies can inflict force, but their political permission to do so is fragile when the adversary is willing to absorb far more pain, or present pain as vindication.

Farber reaches for World War II to make the point. He cites Japan’s martyrdom culture, memorialized in kamikaze tactics and a willingness to fight to the death, as the context in which the United States dropped two atomic bombs. The first bomb, he said, caused enormous destruction and still did not produce surrender. The second produced a split that Emperor Hirohito broke; had Hirohito chosen continuation, Farber argues, Japan would have continued sacrificing itself. He also cites the bombing of Dresden as an example of how fighting fanaticism can push democracies into acts that test “the kernel of your moral fiber.”

That is why Farber is skeptical of simple regime-change language. Even if 85% or 90% of a population wants a regime to change, he said, there must be an alternative power structure to defect to. In Iran, he argues, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls half the economy and holds the guns. It is therefore not enough for citizens to want a new order; the coercive and economic institutions of the old order must either be displaced or co-opted.

His description of the Iranian regime combines corruption, coercion, and ideology. Farber said the IRGC and related elites have exfiltrated major assets into Western Europe, including homes in London, villas, and billions of dollars, while the average Iranian faces an ATM withdrawal limit of $7. He cited the failure of Iran’s second-largest bank shortly before the recent contingency and invoked Abbas Milani’s description of the regime as “mafia-style.” Farber also said there is a growing body of evidence suggesting Ayatollah Khamenei may have allowed himself to be targetable, effectively courting martyrdom to solve problems of illness, succession, and accountability for the deaths of his own people.

The Israel-Hamas war is his closest contemporary analogy. Israel, he said, has annihilated Gaza from a physical standpoint, yet defeating Hamas on Netanyahu’s own terms would require going still further. He is unsure Netanyahu has sufficient support in the Knesset for that “last leg” of ground action. Farber’s broader claim is that even overwhelming technological superiority — he compared Hamas’s military capability against Israel’s to “a toaster oven to the sun” — does not automatically produce political victory against a martyrdom culture.

Farber uses “propaganda” in the plain sense of political marketing: the deliberate shaping of a worldview. Patrick O'Shaughnessy put the point more simply: propaganda is “just marketing.” Farber agreed, defining it as the expression of a political worldview. The practical question, then, is not whether democracies should engage in it, but how much of a finite strategic pie should be allocated to it.

Farber’s answer is that the allocation is not immaterial. He argues that Israel has not spent enough “calories” on positive propaganda, while its adversaries have spent heavily because it works. In his account, this is not a peripheral communications issue. It is part of the contest over what victory, victimhood, legitimacy, and modernity mean to foreign publics.

He argues that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood pursued this kind of influence with long time horizons. Farber described an FBI-monitored meeting in a Philadelphia hotel room after the Oslo Accords, when Hamas had been left outside the Palestinian Authority’s political arrangement. According to Farber, the meeting laid out a plan to co-opt universities, teaching, and institutions to change Western opinion over roughly 20 years. His claim is that later shifts in opinion should not be understood only as a spontaneous moral awakening “out of the ether,” but as the result of a sophisticated political project pursued with intent.

That claim sits inside his larger account of democratic war-making. A democracy must sustain public consent. Its adversaries can use Western institutions, universities, media, and social platforms to erode that consent, while presenting their own suffering as moral proof. Farber describes that as one of the central asymmetries: open societies are vulnerable to manipulation precisely because they are open.

Darren Farber frames current military strategy through two Cold War approaches: Maxwell Taylor’s flexible response and Dwight Eisenhower’s massive retaliation. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, in Farber’s telling, emerged in a nuclear age in which the United States possessed a “new super weapon.” If nuclear deterrence could prevent war, why spend so much building proportional capabilities that might simply create an escalation ladder toward the same red button?

Taylor’s answer, as Farber describes it, was the deterrence gap. Would the United States really go nuclear over small incursions or “small foot faults”? If not, it needed gradations of conventional capability: the ability to punish, deter, and project force below the nuclear threshold. That is the logic behind what Farber calls flexible power. Tomahawk missiles and HIMARS are not nuclear weapons; they are tools for enforcing smaller infringements.

Farber does not choose one theory over the other. He says the United States needs both. A world in which America had only a nuclear button would be “very scary,” because it would make every response binary: existential escalation or restraint. Flexible power creates options, but it also creates its own danger. Once a country enters a chain of proportional escalation without a crisp political target, it can lose political will, Congress, the budget, and ultimately the executive’s ability to continue. “You have to paint the target of what you want to accomplish,” he said.

The Strait of Hormuz is where those theories begin to merge. Farber said that in practical terms, the United States and Iran are the only real actors present, with much of the rest of the world watching, apart from the Gulf Arab states. He singled out the Gulf Arab states’ will to fight, including his claim that the UAE had left OPEC and said it would participate with its own forces, as significant. Their fear, in Farber’s account, is that the United States will lose its will because of interim economic pain.

Reopening or overcoming a blockade of the strait would require more than rhetoric. Farber said it would require more “magazine depth,” more forces in the region, and likely an amphibious force on shore — a major escalation. That is where proportional response begins to approach the logic of massive deterrence. If the objective is limited but the means required are large, democratic leaders must make the political case before the chain of escalation outruns public consent.

Farber gives the U.S. military an extremely high grade as a fighting force. It is, in his words, “the best fighting force in the world that the world has ever known.” He separates that assessment from the bureaucracy around it. The Department of Defense is a government organ, and therefore subject to one-year money from Congress, rotating leadership, changing priorities, and procurement structures that make it suboptimal. But on training, equipping, and projecting force, Farber puts the United States at number one.

The weakness is not battlefield competence. It is industrial depth. Farber repeatedly returns to “magazine depth”: the stockpiles, ordnance, production capacity, and supply chains that allow a military to sustain a fight. In his account, the United States is now trying to rebuild that depth because it believes in flexible power. A pure Eisenhower-style maximal nuclear deterrent would not require large conventional stockpiles. A strategy that deters and responds across many gradations does.

The American political economy is not naturally designed for this kind of defense production. In a dictatorship, Farber said, if building magazine depth is your job and you fail, “you’re dead.” That is a powerful enforcement mechanism. In the United States, the relevant questions include whether the work will be profitable, whether demand will last, and whether Congress will provide money long enough for capitalism to respond.

Farber identified one-year appropriations and continuing resolutions as central constraints. He said the United States averages four or five continuing resolutions a year, and continuing resolutions generally prohibit “new starts.” That is especially damaging when new technology is iterating quickly: if the government is operating under a continuing resolution, it may be unable to begin the very programs needed to respond to new military realities.

He argues for changes in procurement law, more multi-year authorities, and longer visibility into demand. A 10-year contract that remains subject to the availability of annual funds is still frightening to industry. The government needs multi-year commitments for ordnance, Tomahawks, 155mm shells, and other “kinetic articles of war” that the country believes are critical to force projection. He also argues for billets and structures that reduce political interference in areas where the country has already decided the requirements are non-negotiable.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy raised Freedom’s Forge, the story of American industrial mobilization during World War II, and noted that peacetime mobilizations in democracies have a mixed or poor history. Farber agreed. His answer is that the country needs a funding architecture that gives industry enough duration and certainty to build stockpiles before the emergency becomes unmistakable.

Darren Farber applies his “strong and weak at the same time” framework most explicitly to China.

He cites historian Frank Dikötter as a source for the view that China is not a superpower simply by virtue of scale, because the Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate and internally tense. In Farber’s account, illegitimacy produces distrust at the top, and distrust cascades through the party, the state, and the military.

His example is the disappearance of the Chinese equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a person he described as having gone to kindergarten with Xi Jinping. If even someone that close can disappear, Farber argues, the system cannot be a high-trust environment. He also cited lack of jointness, corruption within the force, corruption in missile crews, and repeated turnover of senior military leadership over the last three years.

For Farber, legitimacy is not an abstract moral asset. It is operational. High trust, he said, comes from esprit de corps, belief in the mission, and belief in the legitimacy of what one is doing. That is one of America’s enormous strengths. By contrast, he argues, Xi wakes up uncertain who is on his side, including within the Standing Committee. Farber described U.S. clandestine services as having rebuilt meaningful capability after earlier degradation and asset losses, and said the United States is making “enormous strides” in co-opting that environment.

China’s strength is industrial mass. Farber does not minimize it. China’s population size and industrial capacity are so large that the question becomes whether magazine depth can overcome institutional weakness. That is why, in his account, the United States must add magazine depth of its own. China may be internally brittle, but that brittleness does not prevent it from bringing the United States and its allies “to the precipice.”

Farber’s prediction is sweeping: he believes China will fall in his lifetime, and Iran will fall in his lifetime. When O’Shaughnessy asked what it means for China to fall, Farber answered that he believes it will eventually be “run like Taiwan.” He compared China to the Soviet Union, which appeared technically formidable and monolithic until near the end; he said Pentagon planning documents still described Soviet strength shortly before the collapse. His explanation is constitutional and moral: a system that permanently assigns monopoly power to one party is fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate, and therefore eventually falls.

But the same legitimacy that Farber sees as an American advantage also creates an American vulnerability. America’s enemies use American freedoms effectively. Farber described social media as a major psychological operation against the United States, amplified under the rubric of free expression. The hard question, he said, is whether the United States will have to “degrade a portion of our freedoms” to protect itself from adversaries that exploit them.

O’Shaughnessy asked what that degradation might look like. Farber pointed to disinformation inside the four walls of the country. The general expectation of free speech creates room for falsehoods, and modern amplification can create “an alternative world where people are disconnected from reality.” He does not present an easy remedy. Instead, he places it inside the American constitutional design: the founders built gridlock intentionally, with separate legislative chambers, different terms, and an independently elected executive. That makes the United States slow, but in Farber’s view it also makes it harder to capture during mass hysteria than parliamentary systems where one party can control the legislature and choose the prime minister.

His conclusion is blunt: whatever America’s weaknesses, it is fundamentally legitimate, while China and Iran are not. He rejects claims that authoritarian societies are eclipsing the United States as a civilizational model. “You are not free there,” he said. “You can’t say what you want.”

Farber’s main lesson from Ukraine is that the commercial world now feeds directly into military capability at speed. Drones existed as far back as the Vietnam War, he said, but they became a new article of war when they became commercially viable, cheap, and pervasive. Their low cost made losses acceptable. They provided signals intelligence. They could deliver lethality through weaknesses in existing systems. Their value came not from being invented by a military bureaucracy, but from being cheap enough and available enough to use at mass.

He argues that wars can move faster than markets. The evolution of Ukrainian drones over roughly three years has been “unbelievable,” with dozens of iterations and new capabilities. Part of the reason is that commercial supply chains allow people to build and modify systems from garages. The modern battlefield is not only “Top Gun” imagery or exquisite platforms. It can include equipment and components that resemble things available at Best Buy, repurposed into asymmetric force.

That lesson informs his view of new defense companies. The United States has seen a surge of entrepreneurial defense activity, with Anduril as the most visible example and many other companies working on drones, submarine boats, missiles, targeting, and related capabilities. O’Shaughnessy asked what must happen for these “neo-primes” to become central suppliers whose products are actually relied on more than those of legacy primes.

Farber’s answer is that the systems must be exercised. Theaters of war are laboratories for military products. Exercises, simulations, and train-and-equip missions matter, but “the proof is in the pudding” when systems are used in combat. He points to the A-10 Warthog as an example of a platform repeatedly slated for retirement and repeatedly brought back because it remains mission-capable; he said it was remobilized for the Iranian contingency. Real contingency environments reveal what works, what fails, and how the cat-and-mouse game evolves.

That does not mean new systems can be adopted casually. Farber emphasized the moral promise made to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines: the country will train and equip them on systems that give them a chance to win. A new widget cannot simply be inserted into the joint force. It must be exercised and integrated into joint doctrine and the broader concept of warfare.

He said some neo-prime technologies are already being used, especially in targeting and signals intelligence. Projection of force outside drones has not advanced as far. But targeting itself is strategically significant. In World War II, the United States could produce enormous mass, but the efficacy of that mass was low; carpet bombing covered entire areas. Today’s force is highly precise, but the quantum of mass is lower because precision is expensive and sophisticated. Farber’s desired center point is more mass at lower cost, augmented by targeting networks, software, and signals intelligence that reduce the amount of precision required onboard each weapon.

Darren Farber argues that Congress should allocate more of the defense budget to risk in order to maintain technological superiority. This is distinct from the battlefield-validation problem. Even when commercial systems improve quickly, companies still need a demand signal durable enough to survive the gap between prototype, integration, doctrine, and procurement.

Farber mentioned a designed FY27 budget of $1.5 trillion, while doubting that the full amount will be appropriated. Within that large surface area, he wants a more coordinated allocation toward high-risk, high-reward future capabilities. He also argues that part of the federally funded research and development center budget should be redirected toward industry to encourage commercial iteration and simulation.

The point is not that every investment should become a great business. Some capabilities may never be tested in war, and Farber explicitly says the United States should not let the tail wag the dog by seeking conflict merely to exercise equipment. But if capital markets are currently funding defense startups faster than the department and Congress can adapt, that does not guarantee permanence. O’Shaughnessy summarized the risk: “Trees don’t grow to the sky.” Farber agreed. Eventually, capital needs returns and exits. Without multi-year authorities and a government demand signal, companies can die in the gap between technological promise and procurement reality.

Farber invokes the Manhattan Project to size the ambition. It was, he said, 1% of GDP. He does not call for a single identical project, but he argues that the United States will need comparable fractions of GDP — “a couple hundred bips” of effort — in selected areas, with multi-year worldviews rather than annual improvisation.

This is where his industrial argument and his geopolitical argument meet. If the United States believes it needs flexible power, it has to fund the articles of flexible power in a way that industry can act on. If it believes commercial technology is now a direct input into war, it has to create paths for commercial companies to survive long enough to be tested, integrated, and procured. And if it believes deterrence depends on depth, the relevant metric is not whether a prototype works once, but whether the country can produce, sustain, and replace it at scale.

Farber does not treat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as the only, or even the most likely, path to Beijing getting what it wants. He cites Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, Mandarin speaker, and Xi watcher, as someone who views Xi as a risk-taker. Farber accepts that risk, especially if Xi sees Taiwan as the apotheosis of his life’s achievement: the completion of the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of what Farber called the counter-narrative to CCP rule.

But he sees a political route as more likely than an amphibious invasion. If the Kuomintang wins an election in Taiwan, Farber said, China may not need to fire a bullet. He characterizes the KMT as a rapprochement and accommodation party: a party of “we don’t want war, we want peace.” In that scenario, Beijing could achieve much of what it wants through political alignment rather than force.

The military route, by contrast, is difficult. Taiwan’s terrain is hard. An invasion would ostracize China globally. Farber does not think it makes strategic sense unless Beijing is running out of options, Xi is near the end of his life, or the perceived historical mission becomes urgent enough to override cost. He does not dismiss the possibility; he says the likelihood rises under those conditions.

Farber’s larger warning is that Taiwan would not be the end of the story. “The appetite grows with the eating,” he said. If Taiwan were overtaken in a military exercise, he believes other countries with historical disputes would likely be next. He singled out Japan, noting that it has become more vociferous in advocating for strong defense under its new prime minister, whom he described as “a tough lady.” In his view, the historical conflict between China and Japan is real and would likely be exercised if Taiwan fell.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy returned to public opinion and the difficulty of sustaining a war that is unpopular with U.S. citizens. Farber did not offer a clean operational answer for how to produce regime change in Iran short of actual regime change. “If I knew the answer,” he said, the red phone would be ringing.

Instead, Farber focused on time horizons and political will. Regimes can last a long time. A democracy must find a way to outlast the political cycle if it is confronting an adversary whose ideology turns suffering into proof of righteousness. That is “so hard,” he said. It requires a society to agree that some value systems have been hijacked and are incompatible with modernity. Farber called this a clash of civilizations and argued that red Shia martyrdom fanaticism is incompatible with humanity preserving itself, especially if such a movement acquired nuclear weapons.

His strongest argument for action is prophylactic, and he acknowledges why that is politically unattractive. Doing something before a threat becomes existential is easy to second-guess. The risk of going is visible; the risk of not going is probabilistic until it is too late. America did not enter World War II because of abstract concern over Germany, he said; it entered after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and made the case unavoidable. With hindsight, he argues, earlier prophylactic action might have been better because it could have prevented adversaries from accumulating so much power.

That tension leads into his distinction between process and outcome in U.S. politics, which he attributes to a well-known ambassador: Democrats are obsessed with process, Republicans with outcome. Farber sees value in both. Process protects legitimacy, builds coalitions, and creates form. Outcome prevents process from becoming empty ritual. In the current contingency, he said, the United States is not following a conventional process — no familiar sequence of UN Security Council resolution, diplomatic buildup, and then shots fired. But if the outcome succeeds, history may forgive the lack of process. If the process is immaculate and the outcome fails, the purpose is harder to defend.

Farber uses Iraq and Venezuela to mark a shift in American aims. In the second Gulf War, he said, the United States tried to remake an environment in its own image rather than its interest. He then said the United States is now operating more often to remake environments in its interest, not its image. Venezuela is his example: according to Farber, that environment has been functionally remade in U.S. interest without changing the underlying power structure in the same way, and former members of Congress are now taking business trips there — something he said would have been hard to imagine four months earlier.

The unresolved question is whether that interest-based approach is enough when the adversary’s self-understanding treats suffering as victory. If a movement points to its own pain as evidence of faith and success, Farber asks, “How do you win that?” His answer remains: with difficulty, clarity, staying power, and a political definition of success that can survive democratic scrutiny.

Farber’s closing concern is not simply that AI will make militaries faster or more autonomous. It is that AI systems can be co-opted by corrupting the information they learn from. He described reports of people producing fake academic papers and leaving them on established sites that label the work as not peer-reviewed but still make it available. Models can ingest that material.

His example was a test in which someone invented a phenomenon or medical condition, left it on an academic website for about three months, and then asked a large model about it. In Farber’s telling, the model accepted the false premise and told the user they had the invented disease. His concern is what happens when models that are perceived as smarter than humans become part of decision loops in military systems.

The danger is a poisoned foundation of fact. If an adversary can create enough plausible false material for models to ingest, the model’s outputs may become unreliable in ways operators cannot easily see. Farber imagines an “alternative universe” in which models become “complete Towers of Babel” because they have absorbed so much junk that their reasoning rests on corrupted premises.

That brings the earlier themes into a new domain. Propaganda, disinformation, open societies, and military decision-making converge when AI systems depend on public or semi-public knowledge environments. The same freedom that allows information to circulate also allows adversaries to seed falsehoods. The same procurement and integration challenges that slow new weapons also apply to AI systems that may enter targeting, intelligence, or command processes. For Farber, the question is not whether AI is powerful. It is whether the factual substrate underneath it can be trusted when motivated adversaries have every incentive to pollute it.