cuts totaled at least three times as much. Panetta added that going beyond the proposed $350 billion reduction would “result in hollowing out the force,” and “weaken our ability to respond to the threats in the world.”15
Robert Gates followed Leon Panetta as secretary of Defense. As he was preparing to leave office, Gates told the graduating class at Notre Dame in May 2011 that an adequately funded U.S. military “cannot be taken for granted.” Specifically, he said, “our military credibility, commitment and presence are required to sustain alliances, to protect trade routes and energy supplies, and to deter would-be adversaries.” Gates warned that across-the-board spending cuts—like sequestration—such as those that followed the Vietnam War and the Cold War, would hollow out the military.16
After Gates left office, he spoke more candidly. About sequestration, he told CBS that “there may be a stupider way to do things, but I can’t figure out what it is. . . . The result is a hollow military and we will pay for it in the same way we paid for it every time we have done this in the past. And that is, in the next conflict, and there will be a next conflict, with the blood of our soldiers.”17
Until now, the current form of U.S. military hollowness has been a matter of will rather than of financial embarrassment. The U.S. military as a whole replicates the deficiencies of American seapower that were sketched earlier. Hobbled by budget-induced problems of readiness, maintenance, operational capacity, and an inability to modernize, the military is hard-pressed to carry out the national military strategy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Where two Army corps were once stationed in Europe, the United States today maintains two permanent brigades, with a rotating armored brigade to be added in 2017.18 One corps is made of two divisions and includes between 40,000 and 100,000 troops. One brigade is made up of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. The Army reports that only twenty of its sixty brigades—with members from active duty, reserves, and the National Guard—are combat ready, eleven of which are committed to ongoing missions.19 Russian forces in the regions that abut Eastern Europe are at least twenty times the size of U.S. ground forces. They are equipped with modern and effective weapons, both offensive and defensive.
The Air Force chief of staff, General David L. Goldfein, told Congress in 2016 that, contrary to the nation’s military strategy, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is not fully prepared to handle more than one of the required two major regional contingencies.20 The United States has been shrinking the size and, by failing sufficiently to modernize, the capability of its entire armed forces as our potential adversaries grow in numbers and combat ability.
These facts inclined the Obama administration’s third secretary of Defense, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, to share his immediate predecessors’ views. His experience in the Vietnam War as an Army infantry soldier also contributed to his understanding. He spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in July 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the hostilities of the Korean War: “Many of you—especially those veterans of the Korean War—have seen the costs, measured in precious American lives, that come with sending a hollow force into battle. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past.”21
Hagel meant that we should not repeat the mistakes of the past. We did.
IT’S AN OLD STORY
History warns of the consequences. The falls of the Dutch and English from their positions as great seapowers and great powers are commonly cited. The eclipse of Spanish naval power was more dramatic. It shows how seapower is linked to superpower status and how quickly—and simultaneously—both can unravel.
The Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century was so extensive that a priest, Fray Francisco de Ugalde, earned a small place in history when he told his sovereign, Charles I, that Spain had become “el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol,” the empire on which the sun never sets. The Spanish Empire extended from its northern and southern European possessions, including the Kingdom of Naples, to the Atlantic islands, widely separated African outposts, and millions of square miles in the Americas. Charles’s son, Philip II, solidified and expanded Spain’s imperial holdings in the islands named for him, the Philippines.
But reach exceeded grasp. Empires must be held together, and only ships could link such large and glittering imperial jewels with the crown in Madrid. Alfred Thayer Mahan writes in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “Spain . . . afforded an impressive lesson of the weakness caused by . . . separation when the parts are not knit together by a strong sea power.”22
Key to the collapse of Spain’s maritime dominance was the disastrous Spanish Armada of 1588. The “Invincible” Armada was ill-prepared and poorly equipped. Built amid consistent royal bankruptcies and a treasury stretched thin by Spanish struggles in the Netherlands, the Armada that sailed for England was short on leadership, training, and tactics. Notwithstanding advances in naval weaponry that improved the range and accuracy of its guns, the Spanish navy’s doctrine required Spanish ships to travel in tight formation.
The Armada, weighed down by its lumbering troop transports, proceeded very slowly and was at a serious disadvantage to England’s swifter and more maneuverable warships.23 In the event, this mattered little. Only six Spanish ships of the 129-vessel invasion force were destroyed as a direct result of naval combat. Dirty weather favored the English. So did the fighting spirit of England’s indomitable queen. Elizabeth I told her forces, assembled at Til-bury to quash a possible Spanish march up the Thames, that “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king—and of a king of England too.”
At least fifty ships were lost during the North Atlantic storms that decimated the fleet as it attempted to return to Spain past Ireland’s west coast. More than 13,500 sailors and soldiers died, not from English cannon fire, but as the result of insufficient supplies, disease, and deficient leadership—a hollow military if ever there were one. Had Spain’s 27,000-strong invasion force reached England, the survival of Elizabeth’s Protestant realm would have been at serious risk.24
While the riches of the Western Hemisphere still flowed across the Atlantic, the Spanish treasury was pushed time and again to its breaking point. The debt of the Spanish Empire had become crippling. The royal bankruptcies of 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1645 weighed heavily on a nation engaged in land campaigns against England, France, and various opponents in the melee of the Thirty Years’ War.25 Spain’s attachment to the Mediterranean tactics of boarding enemy galleys blinkered its high command to the lessons of firepower and maneuverability. The English understood these tactics and applied them on the high seas. The distraction of continental warfare left Madrid seablind.
The Council of Finance’s reluctant and consistently slow financial support to the Junta de Armadas, a royal advisory group with directive powers over the navy, resulted in a naval force that experienced sharp rises and declines in size and capability. As do his successors the world over, Martin de Aróztegui, the secretary of the Spanish navy, argued that the consistent provision of money was the “principal foundation” of naval preparations, and without proper funding nothing could be accomplished.26 David Goodman writes in his analysis of the decline of Spanish naval power that every aspect of Spain’s naval planning and preparation was subject to delay and collapse owing to insufficient funding. It is rare to encounter documents, he writes, that are free from warnings of serious consequences if funds were not forthcoming.27
By 1663, the Spanish treasury had become so strained that the president of finance, Juan de Góngora, announced that he had not one real to give to the fleet.28 The Junta de Armadas warned that the fleet was being left with “only the bones and scraps” and, shortly after Philip IV’s death, announced it had no funds, only debts.29 The term “hollow force” did not exist at the time, but Spain’s
