1/31/2024 0 Comments Us defense budgetSecond, defense increases will take time to bear fruit. Read More: Ukraine Needs More Military Aid From NATO This, coupled with China’s galloping military buildup, strongly suggests that far above 5% real growth would be required to do more than laid out in the 2018 Strategy, let alone pursue global military dominance. Consequently, prominent and credible voices have stated that the Defense Department needs at least 3-5% growth above inflation-which has, of course, risen substantially in recent months-to resource even the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which called for sharp prioritization above all of the China challenge. Upward cost pressures are a product of a range of factors, including increasing personnel expenses, the need to maintain and recapitalize decades-old aging platforms, and past decisions to defer modernization. investments in forces for Asia.īut China’s rise is not the only reason defense increases won’t relieve us of the need for a real strategy.įirst, significant increases in defense spending will be necessary just to keep ahead of organic cost drivers in our armed forces. This prospect should not stop us from raising defense spending but we should keep in mind that we are dealing with an economy that may well be able to match or even exceed increased U.S. Even so, China’s expenditure on its armed forces is by historical standards relatively low for a great power, suggesting that Beijing could increase it even further, and possibly do so relatively quickly. Moreover, standard tabulations of China’s military spending are almost certainly undercounts. Beijing’s spending is overwhelmingly focused on Asia, while ours is spread around. Just this month Beijing announced that it would be increasing its military budget by a whopping 7%-yet again. At the same time, we face other threats from North Korea, Iran, transnational terrorists, and possibly others-and they may also try to take advantage of our vulnerabilities.Īt its root, the reason for the scarcity we face is the rise of China, an economy now roughly the size of our own that continues to substantially increase defense spending. This problem is made more pointed by the deepening Sino-Russian entente, which suggests these two powers will be more likely to coordinate their attacks to capitalize on our deficiencies. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Instead, we need to reckon with the military version of what economists term “scarcity” and prioritize accordingly, focusing on China as our primary challenge. 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. 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. pursued in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. can and therefore should re-adopt an approach of global military dominance, with armed forces able to simultaneously defeat even our most powerful adversaries. Some prominent voices are going beyond just pushing for more spending on defense, though, to argue that 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. Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine has led to an upswing in support for a larger U.S.
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