The New Arithmetic of War: Why Victory Now Belongs to Those Who Can Build Faster
In a nondescript facility at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, firefighters train to battle infernos that may never come. Meanwhile, in the contested skies above Ukraine, a $500 drone destroys a $5 million tank. These seemingly unrelated facts illuminate a profound shift in how modern conflicts are fought—and won.
The wars of 2025 are not being decided by tactical brilliance or technological superiority alone. Instead, they hinge on a more prosaic calculation: who can manufacture, maintain, and sustain their forces longer than their adversary can afford to counter them. This unglamorous reality represents perhaps the most significant transformation in warfare since the advent of nuclear weapons, yet it remains poorly understood by policymakers and publics alike.
The Production Paradox
Consider the economics at play in contemporary conflicts. When a cheap, commercially available drone can eliminate armor that costs thousands of times more to produce, the fundamental calculus of military power shifts. Victory no longer flows primarily from possessing the most advanced weapons, but from the capacity to field adequate weapons in overwhelming numbers.
This dynamic has profound implications. Russia's strategy in Ukraine relies on volume—drones, missiles, artillery shells, and human bodies deployed in quantities that exhaust Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine counters not with equivalent mass, but with disruption: deep strikes against logistics, electronic warfare, and technological innovation that multiplies the effectiveness of scarcer resources.
Yet both approaches ultimately depend on industrial capacity. Wars become competitions of maintenance and manufacturing, where success belongs to whoever can sustain production lines, repair facilities, and supply chains under stress. The romantic notion of warfare as a test of courage or tactical genius gives way to spreadsheets tracking bearing production and ammunition stocks.
The Semiconductor Singularity
Nowhere is this production-centric reality more consequential than in the global semiconductor industry. Taiwan produces 90 percent of the world's advanced chips—the components that power everything from smartphones to weapons systems. These chips are, in the words of one analyst, "the steel of World War II" for contemporary conflicts.
The manufacturing challenges are staggering. Semiconductor fabrication requires enormous quantities of water, power, and specialized labor. The machines are so precisely calibrated that improper shutdown can render them permanently inoperable. New facilities take years to become operational, and maintenance requires contractors to fly in from the Netherlands.
America's vulnerability in this domain represents a strategic liability of the first order. If Taiwan falls to Chinese control, the United States loses access to the technology that underpins its military and economic power. The CHIPS Act attempts to address this dependency by subsidizing domestic production, but the timeline for new facilities extends years into the future—time that may not be available if tensions escalate.
The implications extend beyond military hardware. China's pursuit of indigenous semiconductor capability isn't merely about economic development; it's about war-fighting capacity and sanctions resistance. A China that can produce its own advanced chips can time a Taiwan invasion without fear that international sanctions will cripple its technological base.
The Information Battlefield
While production capacity determines what forces can be fielded, information warfare increasingly determines how those forces are perceived—and perception shapes political will, which ultimately determines whether conflicts can be sustained.
The shooting of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January 2025 illustrates this dynamic with disturbing clarity. Analysis of social media activity surrounding the incident revealed that approximately 26 percent of interactions came from inauthentic accounts. AI-generated images and coordinated messaging spread across platforms, designed not to inform but to enrage.
The goal of such operations isn't truth or justice—it's manipulation. Foreign adversaries and domestic actors alike exploit tragic events to deepen divisions, knowing that an angry, fractured society struggles to maintain coherent policy. The battle begins after violent events occur, fought not with weapons but with narratives designed to make audiences "angrier faster."
This represents a fundamental evolution in how conflicts are waged. Information warfare can achieve strategic effects equivalent to kinetic operations. Social media manipulation can influence congressional decisions through constituent pressure. A well-crafted disinformation campaign can accomplish what bombing a munitions factory might—turning public opinion against arms shipments—without triggering a declaration of war.
The challenge for democracies is acute. Authoritarian states can control information flows within their borders while projecting influence operations abroad. Open societies must balance free expression against manipulation, transparency against operational security. There are no easy answers, only trade-offs that grow more uncomfortable as the tools of information warfare become more sophisticated.
The Logistics of Peace
Even peacekeeping—ostensibly the opposite of war—ultimately reduces to questions of production and sustainment. The proposed deployment of 20,000 peacekeepers to Gaza illustrates the unglamorous reality behind humanitarian interventions.
Such a mission requires thousands of air conditioners, beds, and meals daily. Hundreds of generators. Mobile hospitals. Water purification systems. Hundreds of trucks and armored personnel carriers. The deployment process alone involves three levels of readiness verification, regional transport logistics, staging areas, and coordination with host nations.
Most peacekeeping missions fail not at the deployment stage but at sustainment. The ability to deliver millions of gallons of fuel, thousands of tons of food and equipment, and maintain infrastructure over months and years determines success or failure far more than the courage or competence of individual peacekeepers.
This reality applies equally to combat operations. The U.S. military's advantage isn't primarily technological—it's logistical. The capacity to establish air dominance within 36 hours, to target supply chains rather than just front-line forces, to sustain operations across multiple domains simultaneously: these capabilities rest on decades of investment in boring but essential infrastructure.
The Addiction Theory's Fatal Flaw
American policymakers have operated under what might be called the "addiction theory" of strategic leverage. The assumption holds that if China becomes dependent on American AI chips, the United States gains leverage over Chinese behavior—much as utility companies can cut off service to non-paying customers.
This analogy is fatally flawed. Chips aren't utilities; they're generators. They're one-off inputs that can be integrated into hybrid systems and gradually replaced with indigenous alternatives. China can layer domestic software on American hardware, then systematically substitute Chinese components as its own manufacturing capacity matures.
More fundamentally, the Chinese Communist Party's paranoia about foreign influence creates overwhelming incentives for domestic production regardless of economic efficiency. Beijing views indigenous chip manufacturing as essential for both defensive and offensive capabilities. The question isn't whether China will achieve parity in semiconductor production, but when—and the answer appears to be "soon."
The addiction theory's failure illustrates a broader problem in strategic thinking: the tendency to project Western assumptions onto adversaries with fundamentally different priorities. Economic interdependence doesn't guarantee peace. Trade relationships don't prevent war. Russia invaded Ukraine despite gas pipelines connecting the two nations. China will pursue technological self-sufficiency even if American chips are superior, because control matters more than optimization.
The Gambler's Dilemma
This brings us to perhaps the most unsettling aspect of contemporary conflicts: the problem of off-ramps. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a series of escalating gambles, each predicated on assumptions that proved wrong. He bet the initial invasion would face minimal resistance. He bet targeting civilian infrastructure would break Ukrainian resolve. He bet Russia could sustain a costly war economically. He bet Western support would weaken over time.
Some of these bets paid off partially; others failed completely. But like any gambler, Putin faces the fundamental challenge of knowing when to quit. Gamblers struggle to walk away when ahead, and they struggle even more to accept losses. Each failed gamble creates pressure to escalate, to make one more bet that will vindicate all previous decisions.
Russia's economy illustrates the unsustainability of this approach. Inflation officially stands at 10 percent, likely higher in reality. Treasury revenues fell 16.9 percent in the first half of 2025. The labor market shows 2.2 percent unemployment—essentially full employment—creating wage inflation as employers compete for scarce workers. The economy has been restructured around military production in ways that cannot be easily reversed.
When the war ends, roughly 400,000 soldiers will need jobs in an economy that cannot absorb them. Money diverted from civilian infrastructure and consumer goods will need to be redirected, but the industries that would employ demobilized soldiers and produce civilian goods have atrophied. The wartime economic growth is, in the assessment of analysts, "smoke and mirrors"—a house of cards that cannot be maintained.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Escalation can temporarily maintain the superheated economy and allow Putin to save face. The alternative—accepting defeat and managing economic transition—promises immediate pain with uncertain long-term benefits. For a gambler, the temptation to make one more bet is nearly irresistible.
The Taiwan Shadow
All of these dynamics converge on a single question: What happens when China moves on Taiwan?
The answer depends substantially on production capacity. Can the United States and its allies manufacture sufficient munitions, ships, and aircraft to sustain a prolonged conflict? Can Taiwan's semiconductor fabs be protected, or will they be destroyed—either by Chinese attack or by rumored explosives installed to prevent capture? Can American shipyards, which haven't built small warships consistently in decades, suddenly produce the vessels needed for sustained naval operations?
The U.S. military's approach to Ukraine signals how it might respond to a Taiwan crisis. The weak response to Russian aggression—embodied in leaked peace plans that reward territorial conquest and freeze NATO expansion—sends a clear message to Beijing: military aggression achieves territorial gains, and American security guarantees are only as strong as the current administration's political mood.
China is watching. The lesson being taught is that wars can be won through production capacity and political patience. If Russia can sustain its war economy long enough to exhaust Western political will, if information operations can fracture democratic consensus, if the costs of supporting allies can be made to seem too high—then aggression pays.
The Boring Truth
The firefighters at Goodfellow Air Force Base train for scenarios that, statistically, they may never face. They learn to feel doors for heat, to create hydraulic ventilation, to manage the friction loss in water hoses. They memorize aircraft types and passenger capacities. They practice the unglamorous work of maintenance and preparation.
This is the reality of modern military power: not the dramatic moments of combat, but the endless preparation that makes those moments survivable. The machine tools and explosives plants. The ability to make drone motors domestically. The warehouses and rail capacity and fuel stockpiles. The training pipelines that produce skilled workers. The logistics networks that deliver supplies under fire.
Wars are decided by production, air defense, and sustainment—not by vibes or rhetoric or technological demonstrations. The side that can maintain its forces, repair its equipment, and sustain its operations longer than its adversary can afford to counter them will prevail. This is not inspiring or romantic. It is simply true.
The challenge for democracies is that this truth requires sustained political will and long-term investment in unglamorous capabilities. It requires high schools teaching welding and electrical work to supply shipyard labor. It requires accepting that the most important weapon might be the capacity to manufacture ammunition rather than the ammunition itself. It requires understanding that deterrence comes from warehouses and rail capacity, not just from tanks and aircraft carriers.
The alternative is to learn these lessons through defeat—to discover, as others have before, that courage and technological sophistication cannot compensate for inadequate production capacity and exhausted supply chains. The arithmetic of modern war is unforgiving. Those who master it will shape the century to come. Those who ignore it will find themselves outproduced, outmaneuvered, and ultimately outmatched by adversaries who understood that victory belongs not to those who fight hardest, but to those who can sustain the fight longest.
