SecDef Pete Hegseth spoke to his troops the other day, and the WSJ‘s editors remarked on it at some length. Among their remarks was this, toward the end of their piece.

The US military is weathering a one-two punch: a major evolution in battlefield technology coinciding with a nadir in conventional forces as Reagan-era equipment retires. Meanwhile, the US must deter two nuclear peer adversaries (China and Russia) as well as deal with their lesser partners in Iran and North Korea.

One-two punches often precede a knockout blow and the end of a fight, or a nation (for an example of the latter, see Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Poland). The one the US faces, though, can work out extremely favorably for us.

Were our military flush while the technology rollover proceeds apace, political inertia, along with legally committed spending and longer term contracts would strongly militate [sic] against changing course and switching over to greater emphasis on those emerging technologies of immediate and longer-term use on the battlefield, in any upcoming war, and in diplomatic and military efforts to shape the battlefield and the post-battle diplomatic arena.

However, with our military at its current nadir and defense spending similarly reduced, a golden opportunity to shift our military equipage, manpower training, and our fighting (and diplomatic) tactics, strategy, and doctrine to better meet the developing current and future conflict environments has presented itself. With limited funding, there’s less inertia to continue business as usual in acquisition and training for our military components. The ability to shift to those more productive efforts is made commensurately easier.

The one-two punch that confronts us today truly is a crisis. The People’s Republic of China—one of those nuclear peer adversaries—understands the nature of crises: its word for the term is a two-ideogram construct consisting of the ideograms for Danger and Opportunity. The present one-two punch is one of those crises for us.