The Weight of the Invisible Crown: America’s Myopic March from Supremacy to Relevance
America’s myopia is not a failure of hardware. It is a failure of imagination. The F-35 and the Nimitz-class carrier are masterpieces of 20th-century warfare, yet they are increasingly vulnerable to 21st-century asymmetries. A $4,000 drone can mission-kill a $4 billion destroyer. A handful of hackers can paralyze a logistics network. Meanwhile, China and Russia have not tried to out-build the American arsenal—they have out-thought it, investing in anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems, electronic warfare, and space-based jammers that erode the very pillars of U.S. power projection. Losing Military Supremacy- The Myopia of Americ...
Worst of all, the myth of supremacy has atrophied America’s ability to deter. When adversaries believe the U.S. will hesitate to risk its prized assets—carriers, bases, satellites—they become emboldened. The myopia is thus self-reinforcing: believing you are invincible makes you fragile; acting invincible invites probing; and every successful probe reveals another crack in the façade. The Weight of the Invisible Crown: America’s Myopic
But the deeper myopia is strategic. For years, American defense planners prioritized counterinsurgency and counterterrorism—wars of choice against non-state actors—while near-peer competitors modernized quietly. The result is a fleet stretched thin, munitions stockpiles depleted by decades of asymmetric conflict, and a defense industrial base that struggles to produce even basic artillery shells at scale. Supremacy was outsourced to a just-in-time logistics model that works beautifully in peacetime but crumbles in a protracted great-power conflict. A $4,000 drone can mission-kill a $4 billion destroyer