The USPS Crisis Is a Foreign Policy Problem Nobody's Talking About

The Logistics of Power

Last Tuesday, a package sent from Phoenix to Dallas took eleven days. Not eleven days because of a storm or a strike — eleven days because the United States Postal Service is quietly disintegrating, and nobody in Washington wants to say it out loud during wartime.

That's the part that keeps me up at night. Not the lost Amazon returns. The logistics.

Every serious strategist understands that wars are won or lost on supply chains. Napoleon learned it in Russia. The Wehrmacht learned it in North Africa. The United States military-industrial complex has spent the better part of a century building the most sophisticated logistics apparatus in human history. But the civilian infrastructure underneath it — the roads, the rail, the postal network — has been left to rot by generations of politicians who thought domestic logistics was boring. Domestic logistics is never boring. It's the spine of operational capacity.

The USPS moves 421 million pieces of mail per day. It reaches every address in America, including addresses no private carrier will touch. It employs 640,000 people. And it is hemorrhaging billions annually while Congress does nothing except argue about whether it should privatize the thing or bail it out one more time.

What Adversaries See That We Don't

Chinese logistics planners study American infrastructure with a granularity that should embarrass us. They've mapped our freight corridors, our port vulnerabilities, our last-mile distribution gaps. A degraded USPS doesn't just mean slower birthday cards — it means slower emergency notifications, slower government correspondence, slower ballot distribution in contested states during crisis periods. The cascading effects of postal system failure in a national emergency are not theoretical. They've been war-gamed. The results aren't published.

I spent three years covering defense procurement in Brussels and Washington, and I watched the same pattern repeat itself: American planners obsess over the flashy hardware — the carriers, the hypersonic programs, the satellite constellations — while quietly defunding the unglamorous infrastructure that makes all of it work. You can have the world's best missile if you can't move the parts to maintain it.

The USPS, specifically, matters because it is the only delivery network with universal service obligation. FedEx won't go everywhere. UPS won't go everywhere. The Postal Service will. In a dispersed conflict, in a pandemic response, in a natural disaster that takes out cell infrastructure — that universal obligation is a strategic asset. Letting it collapse is not an act of neutral budget-cutting. It's an act of strategic self-harm.

The Political Cowardice Is Bipartisan

Republicans have spent decades arguing the USPS should compete or die. Democrats have spent decades treating it as a jobs program while refusing to fund its pension obligations honestly. The result is an institution that serves neither the market nor the public well — propped up by accounting maneuvers and goodwill, neither reformed nor adequately funded.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy introduced a ten-year plan in 2021 that deliberately slowed first-class mail delivery to reduce costs. His logic was technically defensible. His timing — right before a national election — was politically catastrophic. But the deeper problem isn't DeJoy. The deeper problem is that a 250-year-old institution serving a strategic function has been assigned to a political arena where nobody has the courage to make hard choices.

Foreign policy professionals talk about hard power and soft power. They should talk more about postal power. The ability to reach every citizen, to move official documents, to maintain physical communication in a digitally contested environment — these are forms of state capacity that adversaries notice when they erode. China didn't build the Belt and Road because ports are charming. Infrastructure is power. Always has been.

What a Serious Country Would Do

A serious country would treat the USPS the way it treats highway infrastructure: as a public good that requires investment, not as a business that needs to turn a profit. The pre-funding mandate for retiree healthcare — a requirement no other government agency faces — added over $50 billion in artificial losses to the USPS balance sheet over the last two decades. Congress created that requirement. Congress can remove it.

Beyond accounting reform, a serious country would integrate postal infrastructure into its national resilience planning. The USPS has unparalleled physical reach. It has relationships with every local government in the country. During COVID, it distributed test kits. During wildfires, it has coordinated with FEMA. These aren't anomalies — they're demonstrations of what the institution can do when treated as strategic infrastructure rather than a liability.

The question isn't whether we can afford to fix the USPS. The question is whether we can afford the geopolitical cost of letting it fail. And right now, while American forces operate in an expanded Middle East theater and Chinese naval expansion continues in the Pacific, we're choosing to find out the hard way.

That's not fiscal conservatism. That's negligence dressed up in green-eyeshade clothing.