The clock stopped due to the earthquake and resumed after 10 years

National Review

Biden’s budget will weaken our national defense

In 2018, a panel of defense experts commissioned by Congress to assess the Trump administration’s national defense strategy issued an ominous warning about the defense spending crisis stemming from years of political dysfunction in Washington. The committee warned that the consequences “will be measured by American lives, American treasure, and the loss of American security and prosperity.” President Biden apparently did not heed the committee’s advice, although he appointed one of its members, Kathleen Hicks, as his deputy secretary of defense. The committee recommended that the United States increase its defense spending by 3 to 5 percent compared to inflation every year. The newly announced White House budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 allocates only $ 715 billion to the Pentagon, which is actually a slight drop from fiscal year 2021 when inflation is taken into account. As the United States prepares to end its intervention in Afghanistan, scaling back defense spending growth may seem logical, but to believe that you should ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. For several weeks, the warnings of defense planners about an eventual Chinese invasion of Taiwan have been the focus of more intense focus, with two senior admirals warning that such an attack could happen sooner than most people expect. Meanwhile, Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on its border with Ukraine, alarming US officials to the point that Foreign Minister Blinkin was dispatched to Brussels for the second time in a month for consultations with the Ukrainian foreign minister and European leaders, speculating the former NATO supreme commander. Publicly, the extent to which Beijing and Moscow coordinated military pressure campaigns. In short, every aspect of the current attack on the US-led global order validates the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which aims to begin to reorient the US defense establishment away from Afghanistan and Iraq and toward “long-term strategic competitions” with China and Russia. . The Trump document also explicitly called for building an army capable of waging a conflict with Beijing or Moscow while at the same time “deterring opportunistic aggression anywhere else.” The Biden administration says its budget proposal does advance these goals, and in its formal request to Congress states that it prioritizes “the need to counter the threat from China while deterring destabilizing behavior by Russia.” But in 2018, the Committee of Defense Experts, which praised the goals of the National Security Administration, expressed doubts that the Trump administration could achieve the goals of the strategy without a drastic increase in funding after years of Congressional neglect. Committee members wrote at the time that the administration’s budget plans “do not fund a level of military capacity and capacity sufficient to defeat any of the adversaries in the event of war while simultaneously deterring other enemies.” It is worth noting that the White House budget proposals rarely become law in anything resembling their original form, if that happens. It is, above all, an expression of the administration’s budget priorities for Congress. But this makes lawmakers’ reactions helpful to them as well, and this case is no exception. Unsurprisingly, Republican hawks on Capitol Hill are outraged by the Biden administration’s proposal. Senator Mitch McConnell and four of his colleagues sent a letter last week claiming that the plan “undermines the Washington Democrats’ talk about China and calls into question the administration’s willingness to confront the Chinese Communist Party.” As for all the steps Biden has taken to bolster US diplomatic support for Taiwan and counter Beijing’s malign behavior, the senators are right. Biden also raised criticism from his left side, with Senator Bernie Sanders expressing his “serious concerns” about the budget request and Representative Ro Khanna describing it as “disappointing.” A letter to Biden signed by dozens of progressive lawmakers had previously called for a “major cut” in the Pentagon’s budget. Much of the media coverage surrounding the request has focused on the fact that the president has failed to calm either camp, which may lead some to believe that he has arrived somewhere that would allow the United States to confront China and Russia at a lower cost. But while neither side is happy with the White House proposal, only the hawks are right. The problem with the progressive argument against increased defense spending is that it relies on vague appeals to sense that the current budget is too high. In another message, Representatives Mark Buchan and Barbara Lee revived a very insistent discussion point: “We must remain focused on fighting the Coronavirus and not on increasing military spending that already exceeds the next 10 closest countries combined.” It is a message that is easy to understand and therefore politically powerful, but it fails to respond to those who might argue that such a level of spending serves the strategic goals of the United States. In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to do just that, asserting that the current level of US military spending far exceeds what is necessary to combat Chinese military aggression. He wrote: “America’s” superiority “over China is like a shock, given Washington’s qualitative and quantitative superiority when it comes to aircraft carriers, combat aircraft, foreign bases, and military expenditures. He also argues that “Bigness is no substitute for brains,” and that the big budget does not compensate for misuse of funds, such as the Pentagon’s wasteful quest for the failed F-35 fighter jet. The claim that the United States maintains an edge over China is correct in absolute terms, but false when it comes to a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Not only did the People’s Liberation Army lead American forces in the Pentagon’s war games, but it also developed the precise capabilities it needed to outrun American forces during the conflict in Taiwan. Zakaria cites US dominance in a number of areas, but fails to acknowledge that the People’s Liberation Army Navy is now the largest in the world by number of ships, and that Washington’s ability to overwhelm China’s anti-aircraft capabilities to block areas is unclear. Although Biden’s budget request rants to deter any potential military action by Beijing in the Pacific, cutting the defense budget will not enable the United States to meaningfully achieve this goal, but Elbridge Colby, a Trump Pentagon official who played a leading role in Drafting an NDS on Twitter. Until he cut commitments in Europe and the Middle East, he wrote, the United States would likely have to increase spending to “keep up” the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions. While there is profligate spending in the Pentagon, there is no guarantee that cutting the budget will do anything but derail the US national defense posture. To turn Zachariah’s formula upside down: Smallness is not a substitute for brains either. Progressive lawmakers may not be happy with the budget proposal, but by cutting defense spending in real terms, the Biden administration appears to have moved closer to its priorities than Hicks and her fellow panelists advised in 2018.

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