More Spending Alone Won’t Fix the Pentagon’s Biggest Problem
BY ELBRIDGE A. COLBY MARCH 28, 2022 3:34 PM EDT
Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine has led to an upswing in support for a larger U.S. defense budget. This is good. If the U.S. is to credibly underwrite a sensible national security strategy in an era of great power rivalry, the nation needs to spend more on its military.
Some prominent voices are going beyond just pushing for more spending on defense, though, to argue that the U.S. can and therefore should re-adopt an approach of global military dominance, with armed forces able to simultaneously defeat even our most powerful adversaries. This is akin to the policy that the U.S. pursued in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While, higher defense spending is necessary, though, it will not relieve us of the need for a clear strategy, because even significant such increases will not be sufficient to restore the global military dominance we enjoyed in an era without great power rivals. This need is even more pronounced, as the defense budget proposal the Biden Administration just released marks only a 4% nominal—that is, not counting inflation—increase over last year’s enacted total. Instead, we need to reckon with the military version of what economists term “scarcity” and prioritize accordingly, focusing on China as our primary challenge.
The military scarcity we now face is most acute and consequential in our ability to fight major wars with China and Russia in anything like concurrent timeframes. As a practical matter, we lack enough of the key capabilities—such as penetrating bombers, attack submarines, advanced munitions, and the right reconnaissance platforms—to defeat them both at the same time. There are serious questions whether we have enough of some of these key capabilities even to beat one of them, especially China over, for instance, Taiwan. And the fact that we would have to plan that any such war with China or Russia could very well escalate to the nuclear level would only exacerbate these challenges. This means that, if we get in a war with one, we cannot reasonably expect to prevail against the other until we regenerate and reposture our forces.
https://time.com/6161573/us-defense-budget-strategy/
