Asymmetry
Iran's cheap drone threats are beating America's expensive arsenal. He reports the Air Force pulled a dozen B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford after British authorities foiled an Iranian drone plot, which University of Birmingham professor David Dunn told Time is an unprecedented setback; Iran's IRGC uses "violence-as-a-service," hiring untrained, disposable gig-style operators. He argues the drone war has drained U.S. interceptor stocks, prompted a $95 billion multiyear munitions request from the Trump administration and made U.S. victory "a mathematical impossibility," citing Spencer Ackerman that the U.S. is far from being able to force the Strait of Hormuz open and keep it open.
Asymmetric innovation gives an army a lead, not a moat. Ukraine, now the leading drone innovator, moved the enemy casualty ratio from 2:1 at the war's start to 8:1 in the first half of this year, with Russian casualties around 30,000 a month against 27,000 monthly recruits. But historian Timothy Snyder told him Russia copies every Ukrainian innovation within months "at scale" and is exploiting an interceptor shortage (which Galloway calls America's fault) to hit Ukrainian cities — the military version of the business second-mover advantage (Microsoft over Netscape, Visa over Diners Club, Facebook over MySpace, Apple generally).
Great powers that spend more on debt than defense decline. He cites Niall Ferguson's 2025 "Ferguson's Law" (named for 18th-century philosopher Adam Ferguson), noting U.S. interest payments — the fastest-growing budget line — now exceed defense spending, and that sovereign debt crises ended empires from Rome to the Soviet Union; Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address and Admiral Mike Mullen in 2010 (debt as the "most significant threat to national security") made the same warning. His view is that defense cuts are a political third rail because leaders fear looking unmanly, a reflex he blames Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for feeding.
Deep Pentagon cuts are necessary, and the options already exist. He calls for $200 billion a year in cuts and frames the real metric as the fiscal gap, which Treasury puts at 4.7% of GDP — closing it by spending cuts alone would mean a 21% cut to every non-interest dollar — against FY2026 defense spending of about $1 trillion ($838 billion appropriations plus $150 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill) and a presidential request to raise it 45% to $1.5 trillion, above the inflation-adjusted World War II peak. Precedents and options he cites: a 30% defense cut from 1988 to 1997, a 2024 CBO menu of roughly $100 billion a year (18% smaller active-duty force, fewer carriers and fighter squadrons, more allied burden-sharing), a watchdog's ~$40 billion in weapons-program cuts, and Palmer Luckey's claim that ending cost-plus procurement could bring the budget below $500 billion — plus swapping $90 million fighter jets for $30,000 drones.
Casualty aversion plus defense-industry capture built an expensive glass jaw. He contrasts adversaries' willingness to sacrifice soldiers with the U.S. bias toward safety — at least 22 servicemembers dead in the Iran war, and since 1980 accidents, suicide and homicide have killed 7x as many active-duty troops as enemy fire — and says presidents will approve trillion-dollar systems but not LBJ-scale losses (over 500 killed per week at Vietnam's height). His conclusion is that the current conflicts are an opportunity to build a more lethal force while cutting a trillion dollars, with a strong balance sheet as the real "superweapon."