Anthony Aguilar reads national power through a framework, and the military leg has three tells: what forces you have, what exercises you run with allies, and whether you can still show the flag.
Watch all three at once and the official story falls apart.
"what you see doesn't match what you're being told"
Reuters reports the division-level Ssangyong exercise is cancelled, with the Marine Corps quietly warning Seoul back in June that availability would be constrained.
Cobra Gold, PacRim, the whole Pacific calendar that took decades to build runs on troops currently pointed at the Persian Gulf.
The vocabulary tells the same story.
Planning documents called China a near-peer threat.
Anthony's answer on whether America is still the preeminent military power was one word: no.
His interceptor numbers run darker than the CSIS count we've carried, below 300 worldwide against roughly 800.
Both point the same direction and Lockheed's cheaper replacement doesn't reach scale until 2028.
The detail that stuck with me: after Desert Storm, the Pentagon parked a mechanized brigade in Kuwait precisely because it could no longer mobilize fast.
