Roger Wicker introduces a plan to restore American military might.
There’s an old Roman axiom that goes, “He who desires peace should prepare for war.” America is in a 1930s moment, in which the global threat environment is flashing red, but the U.S. seems altogether too comfortable in our unpreparedness.
Senator Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, has decided that the U.S. military needs to bulk up. Today he unveiled a long-overdue $55 billion plan to end three decades of lost wars and military atrophy. If the flag goes up in the South China Sea, as it has in Ukraine and the Red Sea, Wicker wants to be ready.
The big defense budgets of the Cold War were born of necessity. After World Wars I and II, U.S. leaders decided that being pulled into global wars was not in America’s best interests. Their wager was that a big U.S. military, forward-deployed near the bad guys, was the best way to ensure good behavior from bad actors. They were correct. The idea of deterrence was not invented by the Pentagon, but during the Cold War the U.S. certainly perfected it. A war with the Soviets would have decimated our country and left it bankrupt and ruined. Instead, the USSR meekly lowered its flag over the Kremlin, withdrew from East Germany, and dissolved itself. America went on to prosper. What a difference a little resolve makes.
Like the Cold Warriors of old, Wicker has a few big problems to solve. Despite all the irritating jawing about the “military–industrial complex,” American defense manufacturing is a shadow of its former self. Munition reserves have been depleted, the workers who turned wrenches on production lines have fled to more profitable industries, our Navy fleet has shrunk to half its 1980s strength, and the number of big defense companies collapsed in the 1990s from over 50 to just five today. We have a severe shortage of attack submarines, many sophisticated weapon lines have subcontracted parts made in China, the Air Force flies entire fleets of jets that would qualify for antique license plates in most states, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan forced Pentagon officials to cancel important modernization programs to pay for light-infantry combat across the Middle East.
The timing is lousy. China is on the rise and in a de facto alliance with the Russians, who are inching closer to U.S. bases in Europe. The Iranians have been busy little bees in the Middle East, attacking U.S. shipping lanes and driving up the cost of commodities — as if inflation weren’t bad enough. The North Koreans continue to be unpleasant little weirdos with a big army and a lot of artillery. The Cold War was easy in comparison.
I suspect Senator Wicker shares my (perhaps selfish) preference that America not be drawn into a third world war. I put three friends in the dirt over in Arlington National Cemetery and did not enjoy the experience. Deterrence is hard work. And it costs money. It also happens to be much less work and far less expensive in treasure and blood than being pulled into a war.
Wicker’s plan, as it is, is to stop doing things that don’t work and start doing things that do. Returning to Cold War levels of force posture and readiness would work. Continuing with penny-wise, pound-foolish policies, like fielding a bargain military that deters no one and loses to China, would not.
The goals are ambitious. At least 50 more battle-force ships. Hundreds of new combat-coded aircraft. A new emphasis on defense tech, modernization, and logistics — all of which are still relics of the industrial era and Cold War. It would plug our submarine gap, where America cannot field the number of attack and guided-missile subs needed to execute war plans. And it would spark new manufacturing lines that replenish depleted munitions, filled to the brim with American workers, and innovative new enterprises churning out war-winning battlefield solutions at a pace that matches the speed of the commercial sector.
Rebuilding is necessary, but not the only necessity. Both the Pentagon and the supporting defense industry have hired too many middle managers and too few soldiers and engineers. Congressional and Pentagon policy-makers are so obsessed with defense industry profit margins that they would rather buy a $100 million widget from a company making 8 percent in returns than a superior $10 million widget from a company making 20 percent. Some lawmakers treat the Pentagon as if it’s the Postal Service, a place where you can wear a uniform and get a government salary and pension, and if it loses out to FedEx and UPS, so be it. Russia and China would not be so kind in victory.
Our command hierarchy is a bureaucratic labyrinth that oftentimes produces strategic gibberish. Our war colleges sit military dentists next to fighter pilots in classes that teach generic and useless 200-level international-relations seminars, more interested in university credentialing than producing war-winning leaders. We have no national maritime strategy, and we have regulated ourselves out of key industries like shipbuilding and certain weapons production. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, which guides how the government buys things, is an excessively complex mess that would make a mid-level Soviet bureaucrat green with envy at the sheer level of inefficiency it creates. We are terrible at buying software, which will be decisive in the next war, and the Army just introduced a strange policy document that announced its intention to return to dumb buying practices that resulted in multiple billion-dollar boondoggles.
But inadequate force structure, both in age and size, are the most immediate problems, and all others are mild annoyances in comparison. That’s what Wicker has set his sights on. Budget also happens to be a place where Congress has total control. He will need Senate appropriators to go along with the plan. Fortunately, the appropriators aren’t dumb and have seen the same intelligence warnings that have drained blood from faces in classified briefings in recent years.
We inherited a gift from the Greatest Generation. Not just victory over the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, but a largely stable world that allowed the West to prosper, live in peace, and triumph over communism. Some lawmakers treat that world as if it were an accident, rather than a product of hard sacrifices and an iron will to never allow the U.S. military to be second best.
Wicker has produced a blueprint to restore American might, defense manufacturing, and explosive innovativeness. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll accidentally do the right thing and adopt it.