War, Iran, Quantity, Attrition

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Michael Raasch at The Daily Mail:

Now, officials are urgently discussing whether Tomahawk missiles in other theaters, like the Indo-Pacific, may need to be shipped to the Middle East as the US continues its offensive against the Islamic Republic. Tomahawk cruise missiles have been a staple of American military might since they were first used in the Gulf War by George H W Bush. But the widespread usage of the bespoke military tech in the US war in Iran has rattled some Pentagon officials who are now sounding the alarm about the depleted Tomahawk stockpiles. The Pentagon hit back against the unnamed officials' concern in a statement to the Daily Mail.

John G. Ferrari and Dillon Prochnickiat AEI:

The parallels to the present are uncomfortable. After the Cold War, the Pentagon actively encouraged the consolidation of the defense industry. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his deputy, William Perry, hosted a now-infamous dinner with the heads of the major defense contractors and told them bluntly that the post–Cold War budget would not sustain them all. The message was clear: Merge or be left behind. The industry obliged. Dozens of firms collapsed into a handful of prime contractors. The dinner became known as “the Last Supper,” and its legacy is the narrow, concentrated industrial base the United States is now trying to surge in wartime. Then came the Budget Control Act of 2011, which imposed automatic spending caps on the federal budget, resulting in defense cuts, as part of a deficit-reduction deal in Congress. Even after the caps were partially lifted in subsequent years, the damage to procurement pipelines, production lines, and inventory depth persisted. The combination of industrial consolidation and fiscal austerity produced the same trade-off the Truman-era Pentagon had made: fewer, more expensive systems and the assumption that wars would be short enough that depth would not matter. Now, as in 1950, a real war is exposing the consequences.

The logic behind that trade-off was not irrational. Precision, stealth, networking, and cutting-edge technology give the American military decisive advantages in short campaigns. The assumption was that the United States would fight brief wars, dominate quickly, and rely on technological overmatch to compensate for smaller inventories. But high-end capability without industrial depth is a fragile foundation for fighting an actual war. When a single interceptor costs millions of dollars and requires long lead times to produce, replenishment becomes a multiyear effort. When cruise missiles are built in limited quantities optimized for peacetime budgets rather than wartime demand, stockpiles evaporate quickly under sustained fire. When the industrial base has consolidated to a handful of suppliers with narrow surge capacity, scaling production becomes an exercise in wishful thinking.

The war with Iran is demonstrating that quantity and attrition still matter. Adversaries understand this well. Iran’s strategy is not to outmatch the United States technologically. It is to impose costs, stretch supplies, and exhaust American magazines beyond our ability to reconstitute them. In a broader strategic sense, China’s military modernization emphasizes mass production of missiles and drones precisely because China understands that sustained combat favors the side that can regenerate combat power quickly. Ukraine and Russia have learned the same lesson in their own war: Modern conflict demands weapons built at the nexus of quality and quantity. The United States must internalize this reality.

Bad Newspaper News

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Taylor Herzlich at NY Post:

The Washington Post suffered the worst decline in print circulation among the top 25 newspapers in 2025 ahead of bloodbath layoffs earlier this year, as Jeff Bezos’ cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement outraged loyal readers, according to new data.

Average daily print circulation at the broadsheet tanked 21.2% in the six months through the end of September 2025 — down to 87,576 from 111,171 the previous year, according to a Press Gazette report citing data from the Alliance for Audited Media.

The Los Angeles Times, owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, saw the second-largest drop in average print circulation, falling 19.8% to 63,492,according to the data.

It was another rough year for print papers across the industry, as the combined average daily print circulation of the top 25 largest newspapers fell 12.5% over the same period, and all but one of the top 25 saw declines.

But WaPo and the LA Times were hit especially hard following significant subscription cancellations after the papers’ editorial boards were blocked from printing endorsements of Harris ahead of the 2024 presidential election, according to the Press Gazette report.

Last month, the Washington Post axed a third of its newsroom — more than 300 journalists, including its entire sports desk — ignoring reporters’ impassioned pleas to Bezos.

Alice Brooker at PressGazette:

The combined average daily print circulation at 25 of the largest audited newspapers in the US fell by 12.5% in the six months to the end of September 2025, according to new data from Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). Figures supplied exclusively to Press Gazette show that only one title among the top 25 by combined print and digital circulations saw a rise in print circulation year on year. However, AAM has flagged that its circulation data does not include all digital newspaper subscriptions, and the non-profit organisation rolled out new digital reporting rules in February 2026.

America Is Getting Older and More Demographically Diverse

 Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Pew:

War Crimes

The Trump administration has allegedly committed and endorsed war crimes.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay at NYT:

President Trump’s threat to “obliterate” power stations in Iran if its leaders failed to open the Strait of Hormuz suggests that the United States is willing to violate international humanitarian law as part of its military campaign, according to current and former human rights officials.

“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday.

He later extended the deadline to Friday.

The president’s threat appears to be part of his erratic messaging campaign, which is often construed as bluster or misdirection.

“Trump is openly threatening a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “And people aren’t saying anything because they’re numb to it.”

By threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, Mr. Trump has once again pushed the United States into territory more familiar to its enemies than its allies.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued four arrest warrants to Russian military officers and officials charging them with war crimes for attacking “Ukrainian electric infrastructure.”

International law, specifically Article 52 of the first additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions, prohibits attacks on civilian objects. These laws are meant to protect civilians and those who can no longer fight, such as wounded soldiers, from the “barbarity of war.”

Breaking News and Age

 From Pew:

Democratic Backsliding

Previous posts have discussed authoritarian moves by the executive branch.

V-Dem  Institute:

Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world. This, and more, is reported in the latest Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg.

“The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. Several of these countries have the economic and political weight to reshape international organizations, norms, and trade, effectively reshaping the global order. I think we are already seeing the effect of that,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
Three major trends in democratic backsliding

The report finds three clear patterns in the current trend of democratic backsliding. The first one is the democratic backsliding in some traditionally stable democracies; the second is significant reversals and often breakdown of democracy in countries that successfully democratized during the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and thirdly, the deepening of autocracy in already autocratic states.

Freedom of Expression, a core aspect of democracy, shows the most drastic global decline, and is the most common target among autocratizing leaders over the past 25 years.

“The second most common target are the liberal aspects of democracy, like rule of law, and checks and balances that prevent the abuse of powers, which are deteriorating in a worrying number of countries. For example, rule of law is deteriorating in 22 countries, including the USA,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
Democracy in the USA deteriorating at unprecedented scale and speed

The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index has declined by 24 percent, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.

The liberal aspects of democracy show the largest decline in the U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid concentration of powers in the presidency, according to the report.

“The current U.S. administration has been undercutting institutionalized checks and balances, politicizing civil service and oversight bodies, and intimidating the judiciary, alongside attacks on the press, academia, civil liberties, and dissenting voices ”says Staffan I Lindberg.

Since election specific indicators are only evaluated during national election years, there has not been a change in those indicators in 2025 for the U.S.

“The 2026 American midterm elections will be a critical test for the quality of elections, and democracy, in the United States. If election indicators also decline, the U.S. will fall even further,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
The democratizers

On a more positive note, the report shows that 18 nations worldwide (10 percent) are currently democratizing, with large countries such as Brazil and Poland continuing their democratization processes. In the majority of these countries, media freedom is improved. Botswana, Guatemala, and Mauritius are the three new democratizing countries identified in the 2025 data.



Download the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026: “Unraveling the Democratic Era?”

Contact Lead author: Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, sil@v-dem.net.

Troubled Public Service

 Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

From the Partnership for Public Service:

In 2025, the Trump administration took direct aim at our nation’s professional civil servants through numerous legally contested workforce reductions, haphazard agency restructuring efforts, the unilateral cancellation of government funding without approval from Congress and the weaponization of some federal agencies. This assault on federal civil servants and our national government has resulted in a demoralized and less engaged workforce that has made our country less safe, unhealthier and less prosperous. And when employee engagement suffers, as it has during this past year, our government’s ability to provide essential services to the public declines.

Last August, the Office of Personnel Management canceled the administration of its annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, an instrument that has measured organizational performance across four administrations, including the first term of President Donald Trump, and fulfilled a legal requirement that agencies survey their workforces and make the data public. Consequently, government leaders have been lacking an essential tool that ensures they are effectively managing their workforce to meet the needs of the public.

As a result of this decision, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service administered its proprietary Public Service Viewpoint Survey to capture the impact of the administration’s actions on government performance and to continue our tradition of holding leaders accountable for improving their workplaces through programming like the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government®.

Unfortunately, the data is clear: The Trump administration has received a failing grade on its management of our government from those who serve our country—the federal workforce.

Our survey data and accompanying anonymous focus groups with federal employees provide stories and experiences of a workforce that has been systemically harassed as well as impeded from providing essential services to the public during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While the results of this survey are not directly comparable with the Office of Personnel Management’s annual FEVS, it contains similar questions and presents the best data source available about the state of federal employee engagement and the impact that it has on essential services for the public. The survey results represent the perspectives of 11,083 employees from across government. To ensure the results are valid and as representative as possible of the opinions of the workforce, we modeled our eligibility requirements and approach to response weighting based on the methodology of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.