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This Nightmare Scenario Would Break the U.S. Military

Wes O'Donnell
10 min readOct 20, 2022

When I enlisted in the infantry in 1997, one of my fellow enlistees had just graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in international relations.

Why he decided to enlist when he could have been an officer, is still an unanswered question — but our long talks about the state of the world ignited a spark inside me that would send me down a path of serving in two branches of the U.S. military, intelligence analysis, and a fascination with the ‘what-if’ of global security gamesmanship.

Ah, to be young again… Pictured: The author - from the author’s personal photo collection.

In the long peace following World War II, the United States built what is arguably the finest, most technologically advanced fighting force in human history.

Even if the reasons for going into Iraq were suspect (or completely made up), the lessons learned in the Vietnam War were implemented with a moderate level of success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And America, as an incredibly rich nation, funded research and development for military advances that are, according to one of my sources, at least 40 years ahead of any of our allies or adversaries. Many of these have yet to be revealed to the public.

But technology alone doesn’t win wars…

The United States dropped more bombs on North Korea between 1951 and 1953 than they had dropped in the entire…

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Wes O'Donnell
Wes O'Donnell

Written by Wes O'Donnell

US Army & US Air Force Veteran | Global Security Writer | Intel Forecaster | Law Student | TEDx Speaker | Pro Democracy | Pro Human | Hates Authoritarians

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