Read: Trump commandeers the Fourth of July

Absent from the skies over the nation’s capital were unmanned air vehicles such as the MQ-9 Reaper. Less sexy, and much less expensive, than manned combat aircraft, the Reaper has become a pillar of U.S. military operations in recent years. Unmanned systems like it offer a glimpse into the future of warfare and an example of how the military will need to integrate new technologies. Absent also were the Special Operations warriors and their specialized capabilities that have been crucial to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Nor were the various families of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicles deployed in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan in response to insurgents’ growing reliance on improvised explosive devices.

Invisible in another way was the growing importance of the electromagnetic spectrum to the American way of war, including communication, cyber, and electronic warfare. The precision-guided munitions that have allowed us to strike individual terrorists while avoiding innocents are themselves unremarkable in appearance, and the signals from the Global Positioning System satellite constellation that give them their accuracy are invisible.

Moreover, military displays like the one on July 4 obscure the fact that the U.S. armed forces are still largely organized the way they were a generation ago and employ tactics that have seen only marginal change from those employed in past wars.

Read: Trump’s Fourth of July takeover was inevitable

The Independence Day festivities did not include a naval review on the Potomac like the one the Russians conduct every July. If they had, the American people would have seen some new ships, perhaps one of the three stealthy Zumwalt-class destroyers that the Navy is buying, or some of the small littoral combat ships meant to serve a variety of roles. They also might have seen Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines—capable vessels that are nonetheless being purchased in numbers too small to keep our inventory from declining at a time when both China and Russia are increasingly active under the seas.

The United States tends not to parade its nuclear forces in public. Had Trump done so, the public would have seen not row upon row of new missiles, such as those that have appeared in recent Russian and Chinese parades, but rather a force of land- and sea-based missiles and bombers that date back to the late Cold War or its immediate aftermath.

The Independence Day military display, and its imaginary sequel, show that the Defense Department took a quarter-century respite from thinking seriously about the need to fight wars against capable adversaries. In the 1990s, it reveled in notions of the “unipolar moment” and the “end of history.” Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it was consumed with the need to defeat irregular adversaries who lacked the ability to contest U.S. supremacy in any domain of warfare. The need to win the wars the U.S. was already fighting took precedence over the responsibility to prepare for the very different wars America might have to fight in the future. As a result, the growth in military spending after the 9/11 attacks went to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than modernize the U.S. armed forces.