(The Epoch Times)—About 6,600 U.S. Army soldiers are set to march through the streets of Washington this afternoon, in a parade commemorating 250 years of service.
These soldiers will wear uniforms and present equipment reflecting the distinct conflicts and periods of the Army’s history, starting with the Revolutionary War and including World War II, Vietnam, and continuing up to the present day.
The parade is also set to feature around 150 military vehicles, including dozens of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles. There are also planned flyovers with helicopters and World War II-era planes.
“For two and a half centuries, the men and women of America’s army have dominated our enemies and protected our freedom at home,” President Donald Trump said in a June 5 video statement promoting the event.
“This parade salutes our soldiers’ remarkable strength and unbeatable spirit. You won’t want to miss it.”
The Army will begin the day with a birthday wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery at 8:15 a.m. E.T.
Starting at 9:30 a.m., the Army will host a fitness competition and festival on the National Mall.
The parade itself is set to begin at 6:30 p.m. at the intersection of 23rd St. NW and Constitution Avenue and continue east on Constitution Avenue before ending on 15th St. NW.
Following the parade, the Army has planned a concert and fireworks display on the National Mall.
In an event permit submitted to the National Park Service this week, event planners estimated as many as 200,000 people could participate in the Saturday festivities.
While the parade is billed as a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Army’s formation on June 14, 1775, the event also coincides with Flag Day and President Trump’s 79th birthday.
The president sought a military parade during his first term but faced criticisms. In 2018, a plan emerged to commemorate Veterans Day and the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I with a military parade, but the idea fell through as cost estimates for the event rose as high as $92 million.
The Army has estimated its Saturday event could cost $25 million to $45 million.
While not as costly as the scrapped 2018 plan, this event still has its skeptics.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing this month, Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) asked Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, “If Congress wrote the Army a $45 million blank check, do you think you could find a better way to spend that money than a parade?”
Driscoll replied that the parade represents a unique opportunity to market the Army and boost recruiting for years to come.
“I believe very specifically that telling that story will directly lead to a recruiting boom that will fill up our pipeline for the coming years,” Driscoll said.
Other critics have questioned the timing of this particular parade and accused the president of using the parade as a self-aggrandizing display.
“Trump is throwing himself a $30 million birthday parade just to stroke his own ego,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Army combat veteran, said in a June 5 X post.
This parade comes amid a growing protest movement that began last week in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations targeting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles. In recent days, these protests have begun to spread across the country.
A coalition of activist groups calling itself “No Kings” has scheduled a series of protests across the country on Saturday to counterprogram the parade.
The parade has also garnered pushback for the potential disruptions it may cause for those living and traveling through Washington.
Local government officials have raised concerns about the potential for the Army’s heavy armored vehicles to damage the local roadways along the parade route.
The Army has taken precautions to limit the risk of road damage, including installing metal plates along pivot points in the parade route. The service has also vowed it will cover the cost of any damage. Still, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has expressed concerns about the disruptions that road damage may cause.
“These are, for the most part, local streets. And if they’re rendered unusable, we have to make them usable and then go seek our money from the feds,” Bowser said at a May 29 press conference.
Likewise, the flyovers are set to disrupt planned air traffic around Washington. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to suspend flight operations for Reagan Washington National Airport between 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Saturday.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
