This bipartisan strategy is totally mismatched not just to the Department of Defense but to our fiscal capacity and to the political will of the American people.
Tasked to come up with a national-defense strategy by Congress, a bipartisan commission of defense experts worked with the RAND Corporation and put together what it calls an “All Elements of National Power” approach to defense.
It has some sobering top-line findings:
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U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of great power conflict.
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The Joint Force is at the breaking point of maintaining readiness today. Adding more burden without adding resources to rebuild readiness will cause it to break.
But it doesn’t extend that sobriety to its recommendations. The U.S. National Security Strategy long ago abandoned the idea of a two-war construct, that the U.S. was ready to fight two major-theater conflicts simultaneously. Yet this commission says it wants to propose a “Multiple Theater Force Construct,” anticipating that we could be fighting more than two major wars at once.
By far the most distressing section of the document is on military personnel. The report acknowledges that the U.S. is having severe retention and recruitment issues and that barely one-fifth of young people would even be able to pass the (minimized) physical requirements of military service. It blames “public narratives” about the dangers of military service. And
Negative experiences of recently separated and serving military personnel—such as the publicized challenges in securing safe housing and food scarcity; racial, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination and harassment; mental health challenges, such as posttraumatic stress disorder; and the impact of moves on spouse employment and child education—further contribute to both the recruitment of new military personnel and the retention of service members.
Although this is all drawn up in progressive language, the root of our military-recruitment challenge has been the breaking of the chain in our traditional military families, caused primarily by the low morale of the last generation of veterans. What caused low morale? Well, 20 years of senior staff lying about the conditions in Afghanistan certainly didn’t help. Neither has the cultural separation of the brass from the grunts. (Think General Milley wanting to study “white rage.”)
Ultimately, the United States overstretched and seriously overturned two generations of military recruits after 9/11, and this has led veteran fathers to steer their children away from military service. Like all documents drawn up by progressive institutions this report implies that solving the deeply complex problem of American military recruitment is mainly the job of propagandists.
The Commission believes that the narratives related to military and public service must change. American society must understand the value of service—both military and civilian— and effective narratives should highlight how service to the nation contributes to society.
Ultimately what has been produced was unworthy of the effort. The political rationale of this report is to simply dismiss all those critics of the overstretch and drift of American foreign policy — whether restrainers, or “prioritizers” like Elbridge Colby — and instead produce a long wish list that amounts to pre-mass mobilization for multiple conflicts.
There is no real plan here for obtaining the monetary or personnel resources for such an enormous mission. And pursuing it is likely to exacerbate the very problems it identifies in our current readiness posture. Most disconcerting of all, there is no consideration of how our adversaries would respond — or thought given to whether they would respond at all — to what would be the largest-ever peacetime military buildup by the United States.
Conservatives should know better than anyone how easily governments overpromise and under-deliver. The extravagant, all-corners-of-the-world strategy outlined for Congress by this commission is totally mismatched not just to America’s Department of Defense but to our fiscal capacity and to the political will of the American people. It is merely a wish list of a body of “experts” who no longer have skin in the game and who risk nothing by making promises they will never be called upon to keep.
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to reflect that the recommendations above are those of a bipartisan committee working with Rand experts.