The U.S. Army Is In ‘Crisis’

Key Points and Summary – The U.S. Army is not in “terminal decline” but at a “classical crisis”—a decisive turning point.

-Critics see an “obsolete” force, but the author points to historical parallels (post-WWI, post-WWII, and the post-Vietnam “Hollow Army”) where the Army successfully renewed itself.

U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to 2nd Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Task Force Reaper, conduct movement procedures with M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles during the Jade Cobra VI exercise in the U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, Feb. 19, 2025. Jade Cobra VI strengthens military-to-military partnerships, increases readiness, and facilitates security cooperation between the United States and Jordan. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Hector Tinoco)

-Signs of this “metamorphosis,” like the SkyFoundry drone initiative (aiming for 10,000/month by 2026), show the Army is adapting, not collapsing, and will emerge smaller but more lethal.

The U.S. Army at an Inflection Point

Doubts about the U.S. Army’s future are everywhere.

Critics say old gear, obsolete doctrine, an ossified bureaucracy, AI, and near-peer competition weigh it down.

To some, that looks like a crisis—but only in the modern, sensational sense of the word, as a synonym for impending collapse or terminal decline.

In truth, the Army faces a crisis in the classical sense: a decisive turning point in a long struggle when the patient either recovers or dies. And this time, the signs point toward recovery.

The Army has stood at this threshold before, worn down yet ready to renew itself.

This is not a collapse.

It’s a turning point.

The Interwar Blueprint

After World War I, the Army entered its first great modern reckoning.

Budgets vanished, the nation turned inward, and many officers feared the institution’s slide into irrelevance.

An AH-64 “Apache” attack helicopter assigned to 1st Battalion, 211th Aviation Regiment, flies overhead during Training Exercise Hydra on Utah Test and Training Range, Utah, May 7, 2025. Exercise Hydra is a Utah National Guard-led, joint, multi-domain combat training exercise designed to simulate real-world operations across air, land, and cyber domains. The exercise brings together the 151st Wing (KC-135), 419th Fighter Wing (F-35), 19th Special Forces Group, 65th Field Artillery Brigade, and multiple Army and Air Force elements to test joint targeting, rapid insertion, battlefield communication, and dynamic problem-solving.
(Utah Army National Guard photo taken by Spc. Dustin B. Smith)

Yet within that austerity, innovation quietly stirred.

George C. Marshall reworked officer education; Adna Chaffee Jr. tested early mechanized formations; staff colleges cultivated thinkers who saw war as movement, coordination, and learning.

When the world again went to war, those officers supplied the doctrine and leadership that liberated Europe and defeated Japan.

Today’s uncertainty feels much the same.

The drawdown after Iraq and Afghanistan, the blurred sense of mission, and the struggle to match ends with means all echo that interwar drift. Beneath the noise, the same kind of creative ferment is returning—an Army trying to rediscover how to fight under new conditions.

The Early Cold War Reawakening

At the end of World War II, nuclear weapons had left many people with the impression that massive armies of the past were outdated.

Forces were reduced, funding for many programs decreased, and morale and interest waned as other topics drew the public eye. Korea ended that perception. Unprepared for prolonged combat, American forces had been staggered by early defeats in the conflict.

As a result, the Army underwent swift evolution: new professionalism, new mobility, and greater emphasis on firepower and readiness.

Engineers with the 116th Brigade Engineer Battalion conduct M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicle gunnery qualification on March 27, 2018, Orchard Combat Training Center, south of Boise, Idaho. Combat engineers with the 116th BEB trained through gunnery table XII, evaluating their ability to execute collective platoon-level tasks in a tactical live-fire environment; including integrating dismounted soldiers with their assigned BFV. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by 1LT Robert Barney)

By the mid-1950s, it had become a leaner, more mobile element of Cold War deterrence. The lesson would not age—technology can revolutionize warfare, but only soldiers can defend a position.

Lessons from the “Hollow Army”

Two decades later, the 1970s brought another low. Post-Vietnam, morale collapsed, drug use spread, and recruitment dried up.

The equipment aged, and training lost its rigor. From the outside, the Army looked spent.

But the crisis once again became a catalyst.

Generals William DePuy and Donn Starry rewrote doctrine, introducing AirLand Battle and the idea of striking deep with speed and coordination.

The National Training Center restored realism to large-scale exercises, and new weapons systems—the Abrams, the Apache, the Bradley—embodied the new doctrine in steel and rotors. Within a decade, that same Army dominated in Desert Storm.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Alexander Trott, a paratrooper with 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, fires his MK22 Advanced Sniper Rifle during sniper training at the 7th Army Training Command’s Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, June 7, 2024. A 1-91 CAV sniper team will participate at the International Danish Sniper Competition later this month. The 173rd Airborne Brigade is the U.S. Army’s Contingency Response Force in Europe, providing rapidly deployable forces to the United States European, African, and Central Command areas of responsibility. Forward deployed across Italy and Germany, the brigade routinely trains alongside NATO allies and partners to build partnerships and strengthen the alliance. (U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger)

What outsiders mistook for decay was actually metamorphosis: painful, uneven, and effective.

Today’s Echo of the Past

Now, in 2025, the Army stands at another crossroads.

Critics point to tired platforms, slow procurement, recruiting gaps, and the disruptive arrival of technologies—from loitering munitions to autonomous drones—that are rewriting the grammar of battle.

Ukraine’s skies teem with cheap UAVs; China fields a digitalized force designed to fight at machine speed. To many, the U.S. Army looks ponderous, a creature of another era.

M10 Booker. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

History warns against that judgment. Every transformation has been mistaken for decline. The interwar stagnation gave birth to the thinkers of 1945.

The nuclear eclipse of the 1950s yielded the Army that steadied the Cold War. The post-Vietnam slump forged the force that rolled through Kuwait. The pattern holds: adaptation, never graceful but always honest.

If the Army is in crisis, it is only in the classical sense—a moment when an organism either recovers or dies. And here, recovery is already visible.

The service is trimming what it can—obsolete uniforms, redundant field gear—and testing unmanned and counter-drone systems.

The SkyFoundry initiative, aiming to produce roughly 10,000 small drones per month by 2026, marks a pivot toward speed and scale. Training environments now simulate drone-saturated, data-driven combat zones where survival demands agility. It’s not pretty work, but it’s progress.

Adaptation Under Pressure

Change has always been the Army’s way, even when delayed. It learns through friction, improvisation, and sheer necessity.

Counterinsurgency bred one set of instincts; great-power competition demands another. The task now is to integrate precision, sensors, and networks with the raw human will that still defines combat.

None of this will unfold neatly. Budgets are tight, politics noisy, and rivals observant. Yet the Army’s resilience has never relied on perfect planning.

It will depend on staying power—the long slog of training and adjusting until “ready” once more becomes second nature.

The Hour of Decision

If the past is prologue—and it always is—this crisis of ours will look like yet another turning point in the Army’s history.

Again, the service will find itself poised between two eras: the industrial age it once dominated and the algorithmic age now emerging to challenge it.

That growing tension is not a sign of defeat but of change itself. The Army that comes out of this process will not be an update of what went before. It will be an entirely new creation. Smaller, more connected, and—yes—far more lethal.

The path will be rocky. It always is. But the Army is at its best when the stakes are highest. Every moment when the institution has appeared to break in the past has turned out to be a point of rebirth.

The Army of 2025 is not in crisis, as the word is used in modern usage.

It is instead at that ancient, classical moment of crisis—a turning point in a long campaign when the patient either recovers or dies.

And this time, the vital signs are good. The tools may be different, but the story is the same: a force forged in turmoil, remade by necessity, and ready once more to shape the future on its own terms—and win.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.

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