The Best-Kept Secret of the 2024 Campaign
America is losing its military edge. What it will take to restore it?
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both keep a deathly silence about it. President Biden is loath to discuss it. Seemingly, no one wants to speak about or hear a frightening truth. But a terrible surprise is on the way. It may not come this year. It may not come next. But the train is roaring down the tracks. To say that America’s position in the world has become more precarious is a grave understatement. We are spending far less on defense, and spending what we do spend far less reasonably, than is necessary to meet the gathering dangers of the moment.
This is not my own conclusion; it is that of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, created by Congress and charged with examining the Pentagon’s strategy for keeping the peace and winning wars. The commission is composed of seasoned nongovernmental national security experts. It is emphatically bipartisan. Its chair is Jane Harman, a Democrat who, during nearly two decades in Congress and a decade running a major think tank, earned a reputation for her savvy on matters of intelligence and national security. Its vice chair is Eric Edelman, former under secretary of defense during the George W. Bush administration (and the cohost of The Bulwark’s “Shield of the Republic” podcast). Its most recent edition came out last month.
Back in 2018, a previous iteration of the commission warned in its report that “the security and wellbeing of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades. America’s military superiority—the hard-power backbone of its global influence and national security—has eroded to a dangerous degree.” The unanimous conclusion of the 2024 edition, published last month, notes that since 2018 the situation has only deteriorated. Indeed, it finds that “the threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war,” a “devastating” near-term major war for which it is “not prepared.”
As recently as 2022, the National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon’s primary policy document, called China a “pacing challenge.” Today, the commission notes that “China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment” (emphasis in the original). With the Chinese government spending as much as an annual estimated $711 billion on its military, the balance of power is shifting in China’s favor.
With 370 ships and submarines, compared to about 300 for the U.S. Navy, China already boasts the largest navy in the world. It has the largest army in the world. Its forces have been largely modernized, especially those which would be critical in any conflict in the Western Pacific. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has called for the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027. Whether the U.S. possesses the forces to deter any such adventure, let alone to defeat it, is increasingly in question.
Then, of course, there is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is true that Russia is bogged down in its botched war of conquest in Ukraine, where it has suffered perhaps half a million casualties and lost thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. But at the same time, it has greatly upped its defense spending, increased defense production, and has laid plans to expand its ground forces on a grand scale.
Already, as the commission notes, Russia has “fielded a 15-percent larger army than it had at the start of the war.” Missiles and drones are flowing in from North Korea and Iran, while China is providing dual-use equipment and massive economic aid. Russia’s conventional military power is backed by the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The consequences of Russian victory in Ukraine—still a real possibility if Western support for Kyiv flags—would be a catastrophic strategic setback for NATO and the United States.
The rogue states of North Korea and Iran both present threats of their own sort that must be attended to. Both countries often act in concert with China and Russia—a new axis of evil opposed to liberal democracy, to the West, and to American leadership. In the event of an outbreak of conflict in one region, the possibility of second and third fronts erupting—to divert and disrupt and overwhelm an American response—cannot be ruled out.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? The most basic fact highlighted by the commission is that the United States is simply not spending enough on national security. During the Cold War, the United States held defense spending as a percentage of GDP at somewhere between a high of 16 percent (during the Korean war) to a low of 5 percent (in the period under Jimmy Carter immediately preceding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Today, we are spending approximately 3.5 percent. This is far from sufficient. The commission’s bottom-line conclusion is bleak: We have “a U.S. military that is minimally operationally ready today but is unlikely to be ready for tomorrow” (emphasis in original).
A major area of weakness is the defense industrial base, which, the commission finds, “is currently unable to produce the weapons, munitions, and other equipment and software needed to prepare for and engage in great power conflict.” The problem here is that there are too few companies involved in production, an insufficient workforce and production infrastructure, and “fragile” supply chains. The loss of overall manufacturing capacity in the United States makes this especially difficult to remedy.
To be sure, just pouring money into the Pentagon is not by itself a solution. A particular area of concern is the Defense Department’s inability rapidly to assimilate new technologies, particularly cheap attritable systems that have become such a distinguishing feature of the Russian-Ukraine war. Here, the American private sector is rushing ahead with a stunning array of new advanced capabilities. These urgently need to be adapted and deployed at sufficient scale. Moving in this direction could actually be a money saver. But the dead hand of bureaucracy—byzantine Pentagon procurement processes—is all too often blocking the way.
Can we steer the ship clear of an iceberg?
Our history is marked by moments in which we did rise to occasion. We rapidly expanded our navy in the years immediately preceding World War II. During the war itself, we succeeded in massively bolstering our production of planes, tanks, and munitions, not to mention the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. In the Cold War, we rapidly produced the first intercontinental missile with Project Atlas, and developed the U-2 and the SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft in record-breaking time. In the Reagan years, we surged our defense spending to help bring about a victorious end to the Cold War.
Do we remain capable of such feats today? Each of those moments required both an appreciation of the looming menace and recognition of the need for urgent action. Unfortunately, today, America is asleep even as the tides of danger roll in. As the commission finds, the American people are
largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely. They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower.
With both the public and our political class polarized and preoccupied with our extraordinary internal divisions, with runaway entitlement spending and interest payments on the national debt devouring our federal budget, with the necessary tax increases treated as kryptonite by politicians of all stripes, the only question is whether we can rouse ourselves—or whether it will take some terrible event, some living nightmare, to wake us from our perilous slumbers.
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