Prioritizing among the many threats our nation faces is important. But we must also rebuild our declining military.
Prioritizing among the many threats our nation faces is important. But we must also rebuild our declining military.
A merica is on the verge of strategic insolvency. It seeks to deter aggression by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran across the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. But today, America’s military is only capable of fighting one war at a time. Worse, if that war were against China, it might well lose.
So how does America close the gap between its strategic ambition and its military ability?
Self-proclaimed “conservative realists” offer a simple response: prioritization. For example, a recent Heritage Foundation report argues that the Department of Defense (DoD) should focus on defending the homeland and countering China while delegating other interests to allies and partners around the world. It says that the U.S. military should be capable of fighting one war with China, and that this strategy is affordable within the current U.S. defense budget.
Prioritization is always necessary, and it is especially needed now because political choices under administrations of both parties have left America’s military without the capability and capacity to achieve the missions to which it has been assigned.
But contrary to the pretensions of so-called realists, prioritization alone is insufficient to address America’s strategic predicament. America must prioritize and rebuild. In the near term, we must posture and employ our military with full knowledge of its limitations. At the same time, we need to make significant, long-term investments in our military to fix those limitations.
America cannot prioritize among its interests by “leading from behind” on all but a few.
Delegating defense against Russia, Iran, and North Korea to allies and partners with “critical but more limited U.S. support” endangers our interests. America and our front-line allies are not better off outsourcing Russia policy to France and Germany, nor are we better off outsourcing Iran policy to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Greater contributions from allies and partners are essential, but they also take time and deft political management to elicit. American leadership fuels allied engagement and support. Drastic or hasty attempts at a new division of labor in NATO, for example, risk backfiring and would likely splinter the alliance.
America cannot compete with China — a challenger on par with or exceeding the Soviet Union — simply by prioritizing an insufficient defense budget.
Those calling for prioritization are quick to demand that DoD “do more with the resources already available to it.” But even the supposedly more modest defense strategy they advocate entails investments that would require higher defense budgets: an expanded and diversified nuclear arsenal, more robust homeland missile defenses, and more submarines, bombers, fighters, and critical munitions, to name a few. Targeting “wokeness and waste” won’t pay these bills.
Today, America isn’t investing in its military like Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War. It’s spending like Bill Clinton after the Cold War ended. Defense spending averaged 5.8 percent of GDP under President Reagan. Today, it is set to decline from 2.9 percent of GDP — already the lowest level in 60 years—to just 2.5 percent in 2034. The idea that prioritization alone will enable America to overcome such a yawning gap in its commitment to national defense is not realist — it’s a fantasy.
America cannot confront the possibility of simultaneous conflicts by simply opting out with a “single-war force planning construct.”
The fact that America has a one-war military today is a problem to be solved, not a reality to be embraced. A one-war military presumes certainty in a security environment in which uncertainty abounds. Worse, it reduces the commander in chief to a gambler, turning every decision to use military force into a catastrophically risky “all or nothing” bet. That’s why the DoD never had a one-war planning construct for the Soviet Union during the Cold War and why the Commission on the National Defense Strategy recommended building a force capable of defeating multiple aggressors simultaneously.
When pressed, so-called realists seem to retreat from the idea of a one-war military. For example, the Heritage report recommends that the DoD maintain or develop “capabilities required to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.” In other words, the DoD should prepare for a limited war against Iran. The report also suggests the DoD might fight in wars to defend Israel, NATO, or South Korea. It merely insists that it should do so with unspecified forces not needed or divested for purposes of countering China or homeland defense.
Prioritization is necessary. But it is not all America can or should do. We must confront America’s military decline rather than being resigned to it. Reagan spoke honestly about the worrying decline of American military power before he assumed the presidency. But he was determined to reverse that decline, not manage it. As we’ve done before, Americans must choose our destiny, not accept our fate. We must adapt to our limitations, not adopt them. We must punch back, not pull back. To restore American military power, we must prioritize and rebuild.
Roger Zakheim is the director of the Ronald Reagan Institute. Dustin Walker is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Respectively, they served as a commissioner and staff member on the Commission on the National Defense Strategy.