The coming weeks will determine more than who occupies the Oval Office. They will determine the operational contours of U.S. defense policy for the remainder of the decade. Across the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East, three structural drivers converge: a resurgent, rapidly modernizing People’s Republic of China; a grinding and technology-intense war in Ukraine; and an expanded regional crisis environment in the Middle East following the October 2023 attacks and subsequent campaign in Gaza. The next administration and the still-uncertain Congress must translate those drivers into budgets, posture, and the legal and doctrinal rules that govern use of force. Below I outline the plausible policy trajectories after the election, quantify the capability and budget implications that should concern planners today, and recommend discrete institutional guardrails to reduce strategic risk.

Where the Pentagon has already placed its bets

The Department of Defense’s FY2025 request and recent budget signals make the long-term priorities explicit: integrated deterrence against the PRC as the pacing challenge, a focus on munitions and industrial base resilience, and modernization of nuclear and conventional long-range systems. The FY2025 request included large RDT&E and procurement lines, with explicit callouts for airpower, sea power, and a $29.8 billion munitions line to rebuild inventories and production capacity. The budget also requests billions for microelectronics and the Columbia submarine and B-21 programs to sustain strategic deterrence.

Those moves are not cosmetic. They follow a pattern established in FY2024 where the Pentagon increased munitions investments and accelerated multi-year procurements in response to wartime demand signals emerging from Ukraine. The FY2024 materials request, for example, raised munitions spending and emphasized repeatable procurement buys to stabilize industry capacity. That was an explicit lesson from the logistics and attrition profile of the Ukraine conflict.

Key geopolitical inflection points that will shape policy choices

1) Ukraine and allied resolve. In April 2024 the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved a comprehensive foreign assistance package that bundled support for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. That bipartisan vote underscores how defense policy choices around allied support are not purely executive decisions; they require congressional buy-in and are politically fungible. Continued large-scale support to Ukraine depends on both Washington political dynamics and allied burden sharing.

2) NATO and the transatlantic bargain. Kyiv’s public push to accelerate its pathway to NATO membership and to broaden Western authorities for longer-range fires creates friction between deterrence calculus and escalation risk. NATO partners remain supportive of Ukraine’s eventual membership in principle, but they are cautious about instant invitations that would enshrine Article 5 commitments in the middle of an active war. The result is strategic ambiguity that allies and adversaries will exploit if U.S. posture appears uncertain.

3) Information operations and election-driven coercion. The U.S. intelligence community publicly warned that foreign-state influence operations will not end with the vote. Adversaries will almost certainly attempt post-election perceptions operations to exploit any contested outcome or domestic social fracture. That risk matters for defense policy because it increases the likelihood that foreign actors will attempt to shape U.S. political choices about military assistance, basing, and alliance commitments. Maintaining a credible deterrence posture therefore requires resilience not only in hardware but in information and civic infrastructure.

Possible post-election defense policy trajectories

Scenario A - Continuity and deepening of current lines. If the result favors policy continuity, expect steady implementation of the FY2025 modernization envelope, continued high-end munitions buys, and sustained support to Ukraine and partners in the Indo-Pacific. The operational effect will be a predictable demand signal for the industrial base and continuity in alliance engagements, exercises, and intelligence-sharing frameworks that underpin multilateral deterrence. The fiscal risk in this pathway is political: sustained high spending amid domestic economic pressures will force prioritization choices within the Pentagon between near-term force generation and next-generation investments.

Scenario B - Transactional reorientation. Campaign proposals that emphasize an America-first transactional approach could reshape burden sharing demands, reprioritize industrial policy, and condition allied security guarantees on increased European or regional spending. That pathway would likely keep the strategic focus on China as a pacing challenge but shift the diplomatic method for alliance management. For partners this will create pressure to accelerate European defense spending and contingency industrial investments. It would also raise transition risks if the United States rapidly reorders intelligence or materiel commitments to allies without a clear bridging plan. Reporting in October 2024 already flagged plans by some candidates to expand domestic uses of federal military capabilities for nontraditional missions. Those proposals raise legal, civil-military, and readiness questions that would have immediate implications for global posture.

Scenario C - Rapid policy swings and strategic uncertainty. A divided political outcome in Washington where the presidency and Congress are split can produce stop-start funding, episodic supplemental requests for allied crises, and constrained multi-year procurement authorities. That environment is the most damaging for long-lead programs and for the munitions industrial base which require predictable multi-year demand signals to scale capacity.

Operational and industrial imperatives regardless of outcome

  • Munitions surge capacity. The Ukraine war has taught a blunt lesson: high-intensity conflict consumes precision stocks at a rate that peacetime procurement cannot easily match. A defensible minimum is a policy and budgetary program that preserves surge lines, incentivizes small and mid-tier suppliers, and leans on multi-year procurement authorities to stabilize production. The FY2024 and FY2025 budget documents already begin this work, but execution discipline across administrations will be decisive.

  • Information and civic resilience. Adversary attempts to manipulate U.S. political outcomes require a civilian-military fusion for deterrence of influence operations. The intelligence community, CISA, and state election authorities must be resourced and legally empowered to preempt and attribute campaigns that could alter the political calculus for defense commitments. The ODNI public guidance in mid-October 2024 that adversaries will persist in post-election influence operations is a direct warning to planners to harden decision pathways against external pressure.

  • Legal and institutional guardrails. Proposals to expand domestic uses of the military require new legal clarity. Any broadening of roles for the Department of Defense in domestic law enforcement risks politicizing the force and degrading overseas readiness. The military must be prepared to execute lawful orders, but Congress should codify clear boundaries for domestic employment, including conditions, authorities, and oversight. This reduces the operational-risk of misapplied deployments and protects global posture.

Recommendations for policymakers and defense planners

1) Preserve multi-year procurement authorities and create explicit surge funding lines for munitions and critical microelectronics. This is the single highest-return hedge against sudden shifts in commitment to allies.

2) Insist on transparent allied burden-sharing metrics tied to capability, not simply meeting percentage targets. The United States should calibrate security guarantees to capability contributions that support mutual deterrence, especially in the Indo-Pacific and on NATO’s eastern flank.

3) Invest in counter-influence and attribution capability that fuses open-source detection, forensics, and rapid public attribution to raise the cost for foreign perception campaigns that aim to shape U.S. defense choices.

4) Enact statutory guardrails on domestic military employment to preserve civil-military norms and avoid the operational trade-offs that come with expanded homeland missions.

Conclusion

The post-election period will not be a single inflection but a sequence of choices about budgets, alliances, and legal authorities. Tactical contingencies in Kyiv or the Levant can force near-term reallocations, but the enduring strategic challenge remains the PRC’s modernization drive. Whatever the political outcome, durable defense policy requires three things: reliable industrial base signals, hardened civic and information resilience, and predictable allied consultation. Those three reduce the danger that short-term political shifts become long-term strategic weaknesses.