I was sitting in the quiet, mahogany-lined dining room of the Metropolitan Club last Tuesday, having a rather gloomy branzino with a three-star admiral who shall remain nameless to protect his security clearance and his pending board seat at RTX. The conversation, as it always does in these rarefied circles, turned to the alleged limits of American power.
Pundits are wringing their hands. They look at a map of the Red Sea and see a strategic defeat. They see the Houthis, a ragtag militia in Yemen, essentially holding global shipping hostage while the United States Navy, the most formidable maritime force in human history, plays an endless, exhausting game of whack-a-mole.
But as I looked out over the Potomac, swirling the last drops of a perfectly adequate Sancerre, I realized the critics are asking the wrong questions. They ask how the world's richest nation got bogged down in an unwinnable asymmetric conflict. They consistently fail to ask who is getting rich in the process.
Let us examine the numbers. The detractors point out that the enemy is launching Iranian-designed attack drones that cost roughly $2,000 to assemble from commercially available parts. In response, our Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are firing Standard Missile-2 interceptors that cost approximately $2.1 million each.
To the mathematically literal mind, a thousand-to-one cost ratio sounds like an unsustainable strategy. It sounds like an empire bleeding itself dry to swat away gnats. But this betrays a profound misunderstanding of macroeconomics, a complete blindness to the realities of global prestige, and, frankly, a lack of patriotism.
That $2.1 million does not simply vanish into the ether when the missile detonates over the Gulf of Aden. It goes directly into the lifeblood of the American economy. It pays the salaries of brilliant aerospace engineers in Massachusetts. It supports the thriving lobbying ecosystem on K Street, which in turn supports the Michelin-starred restaurant industry of the greater District of Columbia area. When we fire an SM-2, we are not just downing a piece of fiberglass. We are launching a localized economic stimulus package at Mach 3.
The alternative, I am told by the more tedious elements of the academic left, is to address the underlying geopolitical grievances driving the regional conflict, or perhaps to reconsider our unconditional material support for the war that sparked the blockade in the first place. But who has the time? Diplomacy is messy, unpredictable, and rarely results in a favorable quarterly earnings report for Lockheed Martin.
My lunch companion sighed, gently separating the flesh of his sea bass with a silver fork. He understands the burden of leadership. The real tragedy, he explained, is not that our missiles are too expensive, but that the American taxpayer is too emotionally fragile to appreciate the sheer volume of interceptors we need to procure to maintain the current operational tempo.
The true asymmetric warfare is not that they are using cheap drones to bleed our stockpiles, but that we are using their cheap drones to justify a comprehensive modernization of our naval procurement pipeline.
He is entirely correct. If Xi Jinping is watching the Red Sea—and my sources in Davos assure me he is—what message does it send if we suddenly decide that shooting down cheap drones is somehow too expensive? It tells Beijing that America operates on a budget. It tells the world that our commitment to the rules-based international order is constrained by something as pedestrian as a balance sheet.
We must have the courage to fire the two-million-dollar missile. We must have the courage to fire ten of them. If the Houthis send a flock of migratory seabirds equipped with GoPros, I expect the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower to respond with a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles. Anything less projects weakness.
It takes a certain kind of bravery to sit in a Washington steakhouse and demand that a nineteen-year-old sailor in the Middle East continue to act as the world's most over-engineered flyswatter. But that is the burden of the commentariat. The limits of American power are only what we choose to accept. And I, for one, refuse to accept a world where the United States military cannot spend its way out of a minor geopolitical inconvenience.
It is time for the working classes to tighten their belts, pay their taxes, and recognize that freedom isn't free. It currently retails at just over two million dollars a pop, and the shareholder dividends are nothing short of spectacular.