Last week, the Air Force unveiled its first new strategic bomber in 34 years
— a boomerang-shaped stealth plane called the B-21 Raider that may ultimately
cost taxpayers some $200 billion — and the country barely noticed. Also last
week came reports that China’s nuclear warhead stockpile had doubled since 2020
and could reach 1,500 by the mid-2030s, closer to parity with the US and
Russia.
اضافة اعلان
This also went mostly unnoticed. Maybe we were too
busy freaking out over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
The US, President Joe Biden says, has entered a
“decisive decade” when it comes to geopolitics. He is right. But even amid the
war in Ukraine and China’s growing belligerence toward Taiwan, we mostly seem
to be sleepwalking into it. The administration trumpets its promises to defend
the free world. But it is not yet willing to provide sufficient means — a
dangerous mismatch in an era of authoritarian adventurism.
Some hard facts:
Costs: The US, goes a common talking point, spends
more on defense than the next nine nations combined. That is true but
misleading. It does not take into account significant American disadvantages in
purchasing power and personnel costs. One example: A US Marine private can make
about as much in salary and benefits as a Chinese general.
Trends: Military spending as a percentage of gross
domestic product, at around 3 percent, is well below the plus-4 percent average
of the past 50 years. It will continue to fall for the next decade, according to
projections from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and more of the funding will
be eaten up by inflation.
Scope: America’s defense commitments stretch from
the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait. The military
ambitions of Russia, China and Iran, by contrast, are regional and therefore
easier to concentrate. China now has the largest navy in the world, at least in
terms of ship numbers, with its prime objective the seizing of Taiwan.
Readiness: The air force is short by about 1,650 pilots.
The army is short by roughly 30,000 recruits. More than half of America’s
bombers were built during the Kennedy administration. The navy has spent years
trying to reach a target of 313 ships (it was close to 600 at the end of the
Reagan administration) but still cannot break 300.
… luck is a bad basis for policy. We are now in a new era of great-power competition in which our traditional military advantages cannot be taken for granted.
Competence: The Pentagon is broken. It has never
passed an audit. Acquisition debacles — the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship; the
Air Force’s KC-46 tanker; and the Army’s Future Combat Systems, to name a few —
account for billions of wasted dollars and decades of wasted time. The navy is
struggling to maintain its ships, owing to long neglect of public shipyards,
and our defense-industrial base would struggle to supply the military with
equipment in the event of a war, much less two.
Urgency: We operate on the assumption that time’s on
our side. Last year, the Biden administration trumpeted an agreement with
Britain and Australia to help the latter build nuclear-powered submarines. But
Australia will be lucky to acquire the full complement of subs before the 2040s
because its industrial base is so inadequate.
These issues are compounded by public neglect.
During the Cold War, defense problems were major political issues, so people
paid attention. Now they are treated as technical-bureaucratic issues, so
people mostly do not.
At a minimum, we should ask whether we want
capabilities adequate to our legal and traditional foreign commitments. If so,
we should accept much higher spending, revolutionize our procurement processes,
adopt a mindset of strategic urgency, and develop reliable and sustainable
supply chains. If not, we should pare our commitments and be prepared to live
with the consequences.
Those include the possibility that countries such as
Saudi Arabia and even Japan would acquire nuclear weapons. Do we want that? It
is a debate worth having. At least we should be clear about the trade-offs in a
world where former allies no longer feel they can reliably depend on US
security guarantees against their nearest adversaries.
The picture is not totally bleak. The B-21 program
has reportedly, so far, been running on time and under budget, evidence that
the Pentagon is sometimes capable of getting things right. And the US has been
able to afford much higher proportional defense budgets in the past and should
be able to do so again, provided there’s political will.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has exposed the fact
that our enemies can also have feet of clay. The Chinese military likely
suffers from some of the same deficiencies as the Russians, obscured by a
system that keeps secrets from itself as often as it keeps them from others.
Iran may yet be undone by its internal convulsions.
“There is a Providence that protects idiots,
drunkards, children and the United States of America,” Otto von Bismarck is
supposed to have said. He might have added that we have usually been
exceptionally fortunate in our enemies, too.
But luck is a bad basis for policy. We are now in a new era
of great-power competition in which our traditional military advantages cannot
be taken for granted. Now is the time for real public debate about what we mean
to do about it.
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