After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.
I was no less concerned about the prospect of standing on the National Mall on the day of the parade, a celebration of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which happened to coincide with Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday. The forecast predicted appropriately foul weather for the occasion, and there would be a number of helicopters, of both modern and Vietnam-era vintage, flying over the parade grounds. The Army’s recent track record didn’t bode well for those positioned under the flight path. In the past two years, there had been at least twenty-four serious accidents involving helicopters and nineteen fatalities, culminating with the collision over the Potomac, the deadliest incident in American commercial aviation since 2001.
A crash was not the only thing that I worried about. Acts of low-level domestic terrorism and random shootings take place routinely in this country, and although security at the parade would be tight, I wondered what the chance was of some sort of attack on the parade-goers, or even another attempt on Trump’s life. The probability seemed low, but considering the number of veterans who would be in attendance, I had occasion to recall a 2023 study that found that military service is the single strongest predictor of whether an American will commit a mass killing.
Many of the almost seven thousand troops involved in the event came from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a notorious base, the Army’s largest, that in recent years has been a sort of Bermuda Triangle of unexplained or covered-up crimes, accidents, murders, and sabotage. On New Year’s Day, two former Fort Bragg soldiers whose tours in Afghanistan had overlapped committed separate but nearly simultaneous acts of domestic terrorism. One, an active-duty Green Beret, shot himself in the head and set off a car bomb in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, killing no one else. The other, a former soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division, drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing fourteen pedestrians. The phalanxes of federal agents and police officers guarding the area made a similar attack unlikely, but Trump’s parade did seem like the kind of national spectacle that might attract the attention of ex-military crazies.
Then there were the politics of the parade, the first procession of military forces past the White House since the end of the Gulf War. For weeks, opinion columnists and television pundits had been sounding the alarm over the controversial festivities, which they saw as another sign of America’s downward slide into authoritarianism, into fascism. Comparisons abounded to Mussolini’s Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and Hitler’s Germany. A coalition of opposition groups had organized a day of protests under the slogan “No Kings,” and that morning, in thousands of cities across the United States, millions of demonstrators were assembling, waving signs that said things like stop fascism, resist fascism, and no to trump’s fascist military parade.
I was no more thrilled than they were about the idea of tanks and armored vehicles rolling down Constitution Avenue. Trump’s accelerationist instincts, the zeal of his fan base, and the complicity, cowardice, and inaction of the Democratic Party in the face of the governing Republican trifecta made the possibility of a military dictatorship in the United States seem borderline plausible. But in a reminder that Trump is not wildly popular with the electorate so much as unopposed by any effective political counterweight, groups of foreign tourists predominated among the parade’s early arrivals.
The first people I met in the surprisingly short line to pass through the security checkpoint were an affable pair of fun-loving Europeans. Jelena, a Slovenian, had come in hopes of meeting a husband. “If someone’s going to marry me,” she explained with a laugh, “it will be a Republican man.” Liberals were too elitist for her: “Democrats will ask what school I went to.” Her high-spirited wingman, a Bulgarian named Slavko, was drinking beer out of a plastic cup at eleven o’clock in the morning. He had come “to get fucking drunk and high all day long,” he told me, “and just hang out.”
There were a number of Trump voters in line, but they seemed muted, even reasonable, in their political views, far from the legions of MAGA faithful I had expected to encounter. David and Sandra Clark, a middle-aged couple from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were divided in their opinions of the president. Sandra was not a fan, she said, and David described himself as a “marginal” Trump supporter. They had come to observe the Army’s semiquincentennial, a “momentous occasion,” he said. The day before, Israel had bombed Iran, opening yet another front in the apartheid state’s war against its Muslim neighbors, and the Clarks were concerned about the situation. “It seems like it could get out of hand,” he said. “I’m here to see the protesters,” Sandra put in. “I may join them.”
A few of the attendees trickling in had on red hats that said trump 2028 or make iran great again, but these slogans somehow lacked their intended provocative effect. I looked out over the Mall, where the second-rate exhibits that the Army had set up made a mockery of the parade’s $30 million price tag. Was this supposed to be a show of American military might?
On display near the entrance were three Army workhorses, all of which went into service more than forty years ago and have yet to be replaced despite many billions spent on fruitless research and development. I saw an outdated Bradley Fighting Vehicle, scores of which have been destroyed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and an Abrams tank, an equally antiquated vehicle that the Ukrainians have found even less useful, despite receiving at least thirty-one of them for free. Parked in front of the Capitol was a motionless specimen of the Black Hawk helicopter, whose propensity to crash or get shot down has defined so many pivotal events in U.S. military history. Looking at the chopper, its rotor blades drooping at rest, I grieved for the sixty-four passengers and crew members who perished aboard American Airlines Flight 5342 when an identical aircraft blundered toward them over the Potomac that January night.
An Army physical-fitness contest, a gauntlet of exercise stations and obstacles, had just taken place on the grassy lawn, and I arrived in time to catch the awards ceremony. A five-man team of senior leaders around the age of fifty had finished in the middle of the pack, and one of them, the sergeant major of the Army, a Delta Force old-timer named Michael Weimer, was scowling. “You guys need to up your game,” he told the younger soldiers assembled before him, soaked in sweat, some still out of breath. “We should not have been ninth,” he said of himself and his balding or graying teammates. The lack of physical fitness among young people in America has lately proved to be a significant recruiting obstacle that limits the Army’s ability to reconstitute itself with new personnel, and it was on display here in the relative chubbiness of soldiers in their twenties who were outclassed by Weimer and his leathery buddies.
By midday, the heat was ungodly. Not a drop of the predicted rain fell, and not a breeze blew. Near a much-needed water station was an exhibit of military first-aid kits manned by a delegation from Fort Bragg’s 44th Medical Brigade, which recently saw three of its current or former soldiers convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges related to a racket smuggling ketamine out of Cameroon. After hydrating, I watched the 3rd Infantry Regiment, a ceremonial unit known as the Old Guard, spin and toss their rifles and bayonets to a smattering of languorous applause from a small crowd of South Asian tourists, aging veterans, and subdued MAGA fans.
What kind of fascism was this? Rather than the authoritarian spectacle that liberals had anticipated, the festivities seemed to be more a demonstration of political fatigue and civic apathy. And if Trump intended the parade to be an advertisement of America’s military strength, it would instead prove to be an inadvertent display of the armed forces’ creeping decrepitude, low morale, shrinking size, obsolescence, and dysfunction.
There were, no doubt, good reasons to worry about Trump’s despotic tendencies and his willingness to use armed force to accomplish his political goals. His fickle pretensions to isolationism and reduced military spending were by this time a distant memory. After floating the possibility of cutting the national defense budget in half, Trump had radically reversed course by proposing to increase it to more than a trillion dollars for fiscal year 2026, up from an already mammoth $895 billion (and well above the $740 billion that was allocated as recently as 2021). He had failed to keep his promise to pull the plug on America’s proxy war in Ukraine, and failed to bring Israel to heel. Instead, he had bombed Yemen and Somalia, accelerated assassination programs in Iraq and Syria, and done everything in his power to enable and prolong the genocide in Gaza. At home, Trump had deployed thousands of soldiers to the Mexican border and sent National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to quell protesters opposed to his deportation regime. He had also held a series of rallies at military bases, during which he incited uniformed service members to heckle the media and boo his political foes.
Only four days before the parade, Trump had given one such speech at Fort Bragg, the beating heart of the U.S. special-operations complex, birthplace of the Green Berets, and home to the 82nd Airborne Division and black-ops units such as Delta Force. These elite troops, who have been at war for decades, remain deployed to the fringes of U.S.-sponsored conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Israel, and their wear and tear has never been more apparent. In recent years, Fort Bragg has seen alarming numbers of suicides, fatal overdoses, soldier-on-soldier murders, and shoot-outs with civilians in nearby Fayetteville, as well as many cases of drug smuggling in the Special Forces and the XVIII Airborne Corps. Several weeks prior to Trump’s speech, a federal court in Ohio had accepted the guilty plea of a former Green Beret named Todd Michael Fulkerson for trafficking narcotics from Sinaloa, Mexico, the latest in a long string of Fort Bragg soldiers to be apprehended or killed while using, smuggling, or distributing drugs.
Rather than treat such symptoms of institutional decline with real reform, former president Joe Biden had changed the name of the base to Fort Liberty, which Trump reverted to Fort Bragg as soon as he was back in office. “That’s the name,” Trump told a lusty crowd of cheering soldiers, who had been specially screened to weed out those who were overweight or had suspect political loyalties. “And Fort Bragg it shall always remain.”
During the speech, Trump touted his proposed trillion-dollar defense budget, taunted the reporters in attendance, warned of hordes of immigrants coming from “the Congo in Africa,” denounced the protesters in Los Angeles as “animals,” ridiculed transgender people, and promised the troops a pay raise, even as he repeatedly strayed from his prepared remarks to praise the good looks of handsome service members who caught his eye. “For two and a half centuries, our soldiers have marched into the raging fires of battle and obliterated America’s enemies,” Trump told the crowd. “Our Army has smashed foreign empires, humbled kings, toppled tyrants, and hunted terrorist savages through the very gates of hell,” he said. “They all fear us. And we have the greatest force anywhere on earth.”
From the
Subscribe or log in to access this PDF:
From the Archive
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day.Email address
Related
One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail
On the last days of Gene Hackman
by Joy Williams
[Letter from the Sonoran Desert]
Chasing Photons
In pursuit of a good night’s sleep
Aytaç
In point of fact, the modern American military is a much weaker and more debilitated force than Trump’s braggadocio, and the Defense Department’s gargantuan spending habits, might suggest. The United States has either failed to achieve its stated aims in, or outright lost, every major war it has waged since 1945—with the arguable exception of the Gulf War—and it only seems to be getting less effective as defense expenditures continue to rise. You don’t need to look back to U.S. defeats in Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Vietnam, to illustrate this point. Just one month before Trump’s parade, in May, our armed forces suffered a humiliating loss against a tiny but fearless adversary in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004 protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the quisling Yemeni regime’s collaboration with the Bush Administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones, and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In response, the Biden Administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of air strikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The campaign did not go well. A pair of Navy SEALs drowned while attempting to board a Houthi dhow, and the crew of the USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet after it took off from the USS Harry S. Truman, one of America’s premier aircraft carriers, which a short time later collided with an Egyptian merchant ship.
In January of this year, Trump declared the Houthis a terrorist organization and doubled down on Biden’s war. The administration replaced the commander of the Gettysburg and augmented U.S. assets in the region with another aircraft-carrier strike group, which costs $6.5 million a day to operate; B-2 bombers, which cost $90,000 per flight hour; and antimissile interceptors, which can cost $2.7 million apiece. In the span of a few weeks in March and April, the United States launched hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defenses to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60 percent.
On April 28, American warplanes struck a migrant detention center in the northern Yemeni city of Sadah, then dropped more bombs on emergency workers who arrived in the aftermath. Sixty-eight people were killed. In retaliation, the Houthis launched a fusillade of ballistic missiles at the Truman, which turned tail and steamed away, causing another Super Hornet to slide off the deck into the ocean.
The loss of a second $67 million fighter jet was evidently a turning point for President Trump. In one month, the United States had used up much of its stockpile of guided missiles and lost a number of aircraft but failed to establish air superiority over a country with a per capita GDP one sixth the size of Haiti’s. To avoid further embarrassment, Trump officials declared Operation Rough Rider a success and ordered U.S. Central Command to “pause” operations, effectively capitulating to the Houthis. “We hit them very hard and they had a great ability to withstand punishment,” Trump conceded. “You could say there was a lot of bravery there.” The very same day, yet another $67 million Super Hornet slipped off the deck of the Truman and sank to the bottom of the sea.
On the day of the parade, the National Mall was lined with booths under shade tents where a variety of soldiers and defense contractors were showcasing weapons, ammunition, and gear. Soldiers from the Old Guard had curated a chronological array of firearms on one side of the lawn, from eighteenth-century Brown Bess muskets and Springfield rifles used in World Wars I and II to the M16 assault rifles that were introduced in Vietnam and remain in service today, with slight modifications, as the M4 carbine. I asked Specialist Rodric Mehus if he could show me a prototype of the M7, which the Army has been developing since 2019 to replace the aging M4, and which, like so many new products developed by the bloated defense sector, is bigger, heavier, more complicated, less reliable, and costlier than its predecessor. Mehus did not have one on hand but was prepared to defend the M7 on its merits, praising the increased chamber pressure of eighty thousand pounds per square inch. “I love what that’s going to do to our near-peer adversaries’ body armor,” he said. Mehus brushed off reports that ordinary grunts regard the M7, designed by the German company Sig Sauer, as a clunky dud and complain of its heavy weight. “Soldiers,” he said, “need to get stronger.”
Nearby, under a large pavilion in front of the Smithsonian Castle, was a sleek model of the MV-75, a tilt-rotor aircraft manufactured by Bell Textron that has both fixed wings and proprotors, enabling it to lift off vertically and then fly like a plane. Megan Reed, a smiley thirty-eight-year-old public-affairs manager for Bell, told me that the MV-75 was slated to replace the oldfangled Black Hawk, which entered service in 1979. Its principal selling points include a fly-by-wire system, which replaces manual controls with a computer interface, and reduced weight made possible by its composite airframe. “You guys aren’t the ones who made the Osprey, are you?” I asked. I was referring to an older tilt-rotor aircraft so infamous as a death trap that, among soldiers and Marines, its name was practically a punch line. “Yes,” she said after a pause. “We are.”
Production of the Osprey is coming to an end in 2027, but four hundred or so remain in service, mostly in the Marine Corps, which, like the Army, has recently suffered a run of deadly accidents. In March 2022, an Osprey crashed in a valley in Norway, killing four Marines. Three months later, another Osprey went down in southern California, killing five more. In August 2023, three Marines died in the wreckage of an Osprey on Melville Island in Australia. Three months after that, an Osprey plunged into the East China Sea, and another eight service members lost their lives, leading the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as the nation of Japan, to ground their respective fleets of Ospreys, a safety measure that coincided with a broader stand-down of the Army’s aviation operations.
Reed’s more senior colleague, Robert Freeland, director of government relations for Bell, told me that the Osprey—which costs about $90 million per unit—actually has a better safety record than other U.S. military aircraft. Freeland, a trim fifty-four-year-old who served as a pilot in the Marines, said that the Osprey attracted disproportionate criticism because of its novel tilt-rotor technology, and that many helicopters crashed just as often, if not more, when they were first introduced.
The Army, for its part, has been losing conventional helicopters—Black Hawks, Apaches, and Chinooks—at an unprecedented rate. In an average year, six U.S. soldiers die in mishaps involving Army aircraft, so the deaths of nearly two dozen people in crashes between 2023 and 2024 set off alarm bells. Some of the accidents involved the Army’s most elite troops and occurred during the course of covert operations. In June 2023, a Chinook suffered a hard landing in Syria, injuring twenty-two operators from a Delta Force kill team that has been stationed in Iraq and Syria for the past decade to carry out assassinations, the kind of targeted killings that Biden rarely spoke of but that Trump likes to boast about. Ten of the operators, who are trained at an estimated cost of $1.5 million each, had to be evacuated from the country. Five months later, amid a buildup of U.S. troops to support the genocide in Gaza, a Black Hawk crashed off the coast of Cyprus, killing five members of the secretive, night-flying 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Only days before the Potomac River catastrophe this January, which occurred while the Black Hawk’s young pilot was taking an annual proficiency test in navigating Washington’s complex airspace while wearing night-vision goggles, the Army acknowledged that it had an “ineffective safety culture.” A big part of the problem seems to be a shortage of qualified pilots, exacerbated by a wave of retirements among the most experienced of them, as well as downsizing due to sluggish recruiting.
The Army’s land components are similarly impaired by anemic enlistment figures and obsolete technology. Across the steamy Mall, which was increasingly littered with plastic cups and aluminum cans, a Bradley troop carrier was parked at the intersection of two footpaths. This infantry fighting vehicle has been in service since 1981, and in spite of its myriad vulnerabilities and limitations, efforts to replace it have resulted in a series of billion-dollar boondoggles that have produced no viable alternatives, leaving the Army stuck with the Bradley, which is large, heavy, noisy, easy to target, and extremely expensive. It can’t maneuver well over rough terrain and gets stuck in dense soil. The United States has sent several hundred Bradleys to its proxy forces fighting the Russian army in Ukraine, many of which were immediately lost in the catastrophic 2023 Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive, in which untold thousands of press-ganged conscripts were sent to die in a futile effort to breach Russian defenses. Since then, Russian forces have seized or destroyed many of the rest.
Last May, the Russians put on an exhibition of their own to showcase all the NATO war matériel that they have captured from Ukraine. Among the tanks, fighting vehicles, and armored carriers displayed at Victory Park in Moscow as examples of the United States’ military fallibility was a Bradley. Sergey Chemezov, the head of the Russian state-owned defense corporation Rostec, gave a statement criticizing the Bradley, emphasizing its limited amphibious capabilities. Russia is hardly known for its technological innovation or bureaucratic efficiency, but the fighting vehicles it has developed over the past decade are reportedly able to cross rivers by floating like boats, powered by water jets mounted on their hulls. “Our [infantry fighting vehicles] are capable of this,” Chemezov claimed, “whereas American vehicles are not.”
By late afternoon, it was so hot and humid in Washington that even the rank shade of a porta-potty provided welcome relief. On a covered stage in the center of the Mall, a chaplain prayed: “Heavenly Father, continue to strengthen our soldiers in body, mind, and spirit as they train to fight and win our nation’s wars.” Army chefs in green smocks lugged out a three-tiered birthday cake with orange, black, and white icing. Lieutenant General Joseph A. Ryan, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, planning, and training, raised a long, glinting saber and brought it down with a sudden whack, not quite severing the cake in two. He then handed the sword, smeared with icing, to a white-gloved assistant, who bore it away ceremoniously. Later there was a concert featuring Scotty Hasting, an Army veteran turned country singer who survived being shot ten times in Afghanistan.
At last it was time for the parade. The thin crowd, which hadn’t thickened much over the course of the day, filtered through a secondary security checkpoint and took up positions along Constitution Avenue, angling for spots in the shade. I saw a woman changing a baby’s diaper at the base of a tree, and a shirtless old man in a cavalry hat standing atop an overflowing garbage can. With the sun still high in the sky at six o’clock, the heat had barely relented. Smoke from a wildfire in New Jersey had turned the overcast sky a dirty brown.
On the north side of the street, in front of the White House, a covered stage had been set up for the reviewing party, protected by bulletproof glass and flanked by tanks below. First to take his seat was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, a “serial entrepreneur and investor,” according to his Air Force biography. The secretary of defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, came out shortly after, wearing a blue suit and camouflage tie, followed by Vice President J. D. Vance, who garnered scattered claps and whistles from the crowd. More-enthusiastic applause greeted President Trump’s appearance onstage, accompanied by a jarring blast of trumpets, but the cheering was still rather sedate. First Lady Melania Trump stood beside him, looking down at the crowd with cold contempt. The whole perverse regime was onstage, including Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio. Seeing them seated there in such close proximity, I found myself wondering how long-range those Houthi drones really are.
Earlier, I’d had visions of Victory Day parades in Red Square, and had imagined something akin to Russian troops goose-stepping behind intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on giant trucks, mighty cheers arising from a vast plaza draped in the regalia of state. But Constitution Avenue is a relatively narrow street, and the first half of Trump’s parade turned out to be more of a kitschy historical pageant and costume show. A short documentary about the Revolutionary War featuring Daniel Driscoll, the secretary of the Army, began to play on the large screens at the rear of the stage. “One thing remains the same,” said Driscoll, who seemed to be reading from an ungrammatical script generated by artificial intelligence. “An undying passion, guts, and love for our country remains deep in the heart of today’s Army.”
Soldiers from the Old Guard, wearing tricorne hats and bright-red uniforms, marched past, amid a flourish of fifes and drums. They were followed a few minutes later by a platoon of soldiers wearing Union Army uniforms, joined by cavalry and a covered wagon, and trailed by a soldier wielding a shovel for scooping up manure. These troops hailed from the 4th Infantry Division out of Fort Carson, Colorado. In May, seventeen of its soldiers were discovered at an unlicensed Colorado Springs nightclub during a Drug Enforcement Administration raid, some of whom were working as armed security. One of them was charged with trafficking cocaine. “Special thanks to our sponsor, Lockheed Martin,” the announcer said. The people around me laughed.
The 42nd Infantry Division band’s rendition of “Over There” heralded the approach of a company of paratroopers in drab World War I uniforms, steel helmets, and Pershing boots. These soldiers were from the 82nd Airborne Division, the largest unit at Fort Bragg, which has seen at least twenty soldiers murdered, convicted of murder, or accused of murder since 2020. As they marched past, I was reminded of the long roster of recent homicides, including the murder of Master Sergeant Billy Lavigne, a cocaine-trafficking ex–Delta Force operator whose bullet-riddled body was found dumped in a training range; the case of Staff Sergeant Keith Lewis, a steroid-using Special Forces medic who killed himself after apparently murdering his wife and unborn child; and the baffling demise of Specialist Enrique Roman-Martinez, one of the 82nd’s most prolific purveyors of psychedelic drugs, who was beheaded by unknown assailants while suffering a bad trip on LSD.
In commemoration of World War II, a creaky old Sherman tank crawled past half-empty bleachers, and the Korean War was honored with a short video. “Special thanks to our sponsor, Coinbase,” said the parade’s announcer. This was followed by the arrival of soldiers in Vietnam-era uniforms from the 101st Airborne Division, out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one of the only Army bases, other than Fort Bragg, where service members are more likely than the average American to die of a drug overdose. They marched past completely out of step, arms swinging at varying intervals. Overhead, a formation of Huey, Cobra, and Cayuse helicopters streamed across the murky sky, accompanied by the ironic strains of the 1969 antiwar anthem “Fortunate Son.” “Special thanks,” said the announcer, “to our sponsor, UFC.”
About an hour into the parade, a rising cacophony of heavy metal announced the moment we all had been waiting for: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or, more specifically, the global war that the United States waged in their wake. Low, ominous bass riffs giving way to a distorted wail of electric guitar signaled that this was the juncture in American history when the gloves came off and the real ass-kicking began.
Yet the train of military vehicles that appeared was remarkably tame, a cavalcade of superannuated weapons platforms serving as a reminder of the degree to which the military-industrial complex, glutted with money and pampered by Congress, has run out of new ideas. The biggest pieces in the parade, the circus elephants of the menagerie, were Abrams tanks. These lumbered past with troops waving from the hatches, treads clattering, amid a horrible high-pitched din and the sweet reek of jet fuel. Like virtually all advanced U.S. military technology, the Abrams tank is notoriously high-maintenance, dependent on a complex supply chain, and exorbitantly expensive. The tank, introduced in 1980, reputedly performs poorly in rain and fog, and is vulnerable to cheap hobby drones fitted with explosive charges. We gave thirty or more Abrams tanks to the Ukrainians, but they found them to be more trouble than they were worth in the muddy, foggy terrain, and have used them mainly as stationary artillery pieces, a role at which the aging Abrams also sucks. “We had a case when we fired seventeen rounds into a house,” a disgusted Ukrainian tanker told CNN last year, “and it was still standing.”
A number of eight-wheeled Strykers, a type of battlefield troop carrier, also rolled past. The Stryker is the only new armored vehicle to be widely adopted by the Army since the Eighties, a remarkable statement in itself, proof of nearly fifty years of military-industrial doldrums. Nor did the Stryker impress in its Iraq War debut. Frustrated by its heavy and ineffective armor, large turning radius, janky computer screen, and faulty seat belts, soldiers used to joke that the Stryker was a great infantry fighting vehicle, as long as the weather was dry, it traveled on paved roads, and it didn’t have to fight.
Trump didn’t seem to be enjoying this dismal spectacle any more than I was. He sat slump-shouldered in his chair, looking down glumly at the uninspiring procession. Marco Rubio, one arm flung over the back of his chair, made no attempt to disguise a yawn. But then came a real crowd-pleaser: “Ladies and gentlemen, the U.S. Army Special Forces.”
The crowd around me cheered more enthusiastically than they had all day as a platoon of Green Berets went by, practically walking, making little effort to march in time. (The Army Special Operations Command would later feel compelled to defend this apparent insouciance, issuing a statement on social media that their commandos are trained for irregular warfare and therefore don’t need to know drill and ceremony.) Ever since Trump’s first term, in which he loosened the rules of engagement applicable to special operators and made the defense of war criminals like former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher an integral part of his political persona, a crisis of ethics has beset the Special Forces. Green Berets and Army Rangers have been busted trafficking cocaine on military planes, dealing drugs at Fort Bragg, working for Mexican cartels, stealing military weapons, committing murders for hire, and carrying out at least two mass shootings. In contrast with the preceding formations, which had been as diverse as the United States itself, nearly all the Green Berets were tall, square-jawed, and white, a reflection of the Special Forces’ insular, misogynistic culture and homogenous racial composition. On the reviewing platform, Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa notorious for her trysts with military men, sat up straight and watched them with brightly shining eyes.
Unable to bear the hard-rock maelstrom any longer, I took a break to walk around the Mall for a while. Nearing twilight, there was a feeling of overtime in the air, of extra innings, of purgatory. America’s entry into Israel’s war with Iran, based on the flimsy allegation that the Islamic Republic was developing nuclear weapons, had yet to take place, but I still had the feeling that 2002 and 2003 had never really ended but extended asymptotically toward infinity, trapping us all in a time warp of permanent war that had grown ever more illogical and squalid. I was left with the depressing certainty that the post-9/11 era, which had begun just as I reached adulthood, would last for the rest of my life.
Throughout the day, I had spoken to various Trump voters and tried to sound out their opinions on Trump’s brand of militarism and his foreign policy. Rather than any ethos or ideology that could support the renewal of National Socialism in the United States, I found them to be motivated mostly by tired cultural grudges, xenophobic resentment, social-media memes, and civic illiteracy. Few were enthusiastic about defending Trump’s complete capitulation to Israel and the neocons.
Trump voters know just as well as the rest of us that the terror wars were a mistake. We all know that they were based on lies. We are all well aware that our side lost, and that the defeats were costly, and indeed ruinous. We are going to keep starting new wars anyway, and losing them too. As President Biden said last year of his administration’s air strikes on Yemen: “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
This isn’t a sign of ascendant fascism so much as the nadir of late-stage capitalism, which depends on forever wars to juice corporate profits at a time of falling rates of return on investment. In its doddering senescence, the capitalist war machine is no less murderous than fascism was—witness the millions of Muslims killed by the United States and Israel since 2001—but it has considerably lower production values. In this soft dystopia, our military forces will not be destroyed in a cataclysmic confrontation with the armies of Communism, as befell Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Instead, the defense oligarchs who own Congress will go on pocketing the money allocated to the military, just as they have been for the past forty years, until nothing is left but a hollow shell, a shrinking and sclerotic military so debilitated by graft, suicides, overdoses, and violent crime that it’s incapable of fulfilling its mission, and suitable only for use in theatrical deployments at home beating up protesters and rounding up migrants and the homeless.
Mustering the last of my morale, I trudged back to Constitution Avenue and took my place among the remaining parade-goers. One of the last formations to march past was an Army weapons-testing platoon accompanied by a number of small quadcopter drones. Quadcopters like these have proved pivotal in Ukraine, but the United States hardly makes any. China can churn out an estimated hundred cheap, disposable drones for every one produced in America. In an effort to close the gap, Pete Hegseth has announced new initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing of the devices, but early results have not been promising. A recent report in the New York Times described an exercise in Alaska in which defense contractors and soldiers tested prototypes of U.S.-built “one-way” kamikaze drones with results so dismal they were almost comical. None of the tests described were successful. The drones failed to launch or missed their targets. One crashed into a mountain.
The quadcopters hovering over the testing platoon at the rear of the parade were the X10D model made by Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. Not long ago, Skydio transitioned its business from consumer to military and police drones, targeting markets in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere. After Skydio sold drones to Taiwan, Beijing retaliated last year by cutting off the company’s access to Chinese batteries, prompting the company to ration them to only one per drone. I noticed that one of the Skydio quadcopters hovering over the parade had dropped out of view. I couldn’t see where it had gone. Then one of the soldiers in the testing platoon marched past, holding it up over his head, make-believing that it was still aloft.
The parade petered out so feebly that it was hard to say precisely when it ended. One of the final events of the day was an enlistment ceremony. It did not last long. About two hundred and fifty soldiers had signed up for service, presumably taking advantage of the generous bonuses that the Army has offered to stanch its personnel losses. They stood at attention before the stage, right hands raised, as Trump came forward to administer their oath to defend the Constitution. At seventy-nine, the commander in chief looked awful, his jowly, glowering face more tired and orange than ever, his porcine eyes extra puffy. “Have a great life,” he told the soldiers. He repeated the discordant line, his voice sounding almost sarcastic: “Have a great life.”
By by Seth Harp