Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania is not the kind of critic who attacks from the outside. A West Point graduate, a Desert Storm veteran, and the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, he has operated at the intersection of military service, global finance, and national strategy for decades. When he says America's military is stuck in the past, the charge carries institutional weight.
In a conversation on the School of War podcast with host Aaron MacLean, McCormick raised two concerns that do not often appear in the same sentence: the readiness of the U.S. armed forces to compete with China and prepare for future conflicts, and a wealth gap he described as approaching 'a version of capitalism I don't think we want.'
The second point is worth sitting with. McCormick did not say capitalism is failing. He said a specific, distorted version of it — one that concentrates gains too narrowly — creates conditions the right has not yet answered adequately. That is a different argument, and a more serious one.
The military critique follows a familiar but urgent logic. Institutions built for the wars of the twentieth century — hierarchical, slow-moving, procurement-heavy — are poorly matched to an era defined by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and adversaries who move faster than congressional budget cycles. The record of the last two decades of American military engagement does not suggest the establishment has solved this problem on its own.
MacLean, who covers national security for CBS News in addition to hosting the podcast, has made this tension a recurring theme: the gap between the hardware and doctrine America has and the conflict environment it is actually entering. McCormick, speaking from inside the Senate, gives that argument a legislative dimension. Concern is one thing. The power to fund, authorize, and reform is another.
The China framing matters here. Competing with Beijing is not simply a question of defense budgets — though budgets matter. It is a question of whether American institutions, military and economic, can move with the speed and coherence that strategic competition demands. A military stuck in the past and a capitalism that alienates the broad middle are not separate problems. They are, in McCormick's telling, related symptoms.
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What McCormick is describing, at bottom, is an institutional lag problem — and institutional lag is what happens when incentives inside large organizations point toward self-preservation rather than performance. The Pentagon is not unique in this. But it is uniquely consequential.
The wealth gap argument deserves the same clear-eyed treatment. Free enterprise is the most reliable engine of broad prosperity the world has produced. The answer to a distorted version of it is not to abandon the engine but to remove the distortions — the regulatory capture, the credentialist barriers, the subsidies that protect incumbents rather than reward merit. McCormick, to his credit, appears to understand the difference. Whether the Senate he serves in does is a separate question, and the more important one.
