After many decades of indecision and foot dragging, U.S. allies are finally rearming. At NATO’s annual summit in June, the bloc’s members committed to spending at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense and related infrastructure. East Asian countries are belatedly building warships and missiles to counter a stronger, more assertive China. But even as funding rises, factories retool, and arms production ramps up, one question remains unanswered: Who will wield all these new weapons?
NATO states have not solved the fundamental problem of who will fight. One of the key lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war is about numbers. The era of limited counterinsurgency operations and quick precision warfare is over. As more than half a million soldiers face one another across a 1,000-mile front, we have had to relearn an old principle of war: Mass matters. And ultimately, that mass still rests on manpower.
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