Opinion | The Budget Biden Ignored This Week

Speaking to Congress in the wake of the outbreak of a conventional war in Europe that has shocked and galvanized the world, the president of the United States plugged spending more on pre-K, paid leave, Pell grants and community colleges.

What he didn’t mention was the defense budget.

President Biden has sounded stalwart notes since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he hasn’t called for what the coming era of increased geopolitical competition with Russia and China clearly demands: much more spending on defense, targeted in new ways.

The West's response to Ukraine is a reminder that economic and financial sanctions can be powerful, and the same is true of soft power and moral umbrage. Yet what is happening on the ground this week is also a reminder that there is no substitute for hard power—for having the men and materiel to deter and, if it comes to that, defeat a foreign adversary.

Russia’s aggression underlines the potential that the U.S. may, at some point, find itself having to fight simultaneous wars in Europe and Asia, to defend NATO and to stave off a China attack on Taiwan or elsewhere. Our forces currently may not be adequate to winning one fight against a so-called peer competitor, let alone two.

This isn't just scaremongering: It's a lesson that experts are already worried about. A researcher for the RAND Corporation, David Ochmanek, said in 2019 that in war games between the U.S.—a/k/a "blue forces"—and China and Russia, “blue gets its ass handed to it.”

The National Defense Strategy Commission explained how a fight between the U.S. and these adversaries would be different from a war against terrorist insurgents or a weak Middle Eastern government. “These two nations,” it noted, “possess precision-strike capabilities, integrated air defenses, cruise and ballistic missiles, advanced cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities, significant air and naval forces, and nuclear weapons—a suite of advanced capabilities heretofore possessed only by the United States.”

It’d be one thing if Russia and China were friendly nations that happened to be developing increasingly advanced militaries—Finland or Canada with area-denial capabilities. Both have made their revanchist ambitions abundantly clear. Russia has acted on them with a war of aggression that has included nuclear saber-rattling.

The U.S. is about to face the most threatening security environment since the Cold War, if it doesn’t already. It is time for U.S. defense spending to reflect the seriousness of the threat and to be driven by real-world strategic considerations rather than inside-the-Beltway budgetary politics.

This doesn't mean handing the Pentagon a blank check. Of course, the Defense Department should still be forced to make choices among priorities and be pushed to reform its inefficient practices. But a country that just spent $4.5 trillion on Covid and was running a nearly $1 trillion budget deficit at a time of peace and prosperity in 2019 can’t claim to lack the resources to fulfill a core government responsibility of providing for the common defense.

The Budget Control Act of 2011—the budget deal cut by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans—gave us sequestration that squeezed the defense budget, at the same time that repeated continuing resolutions added a layer of chaos to any attempts at rational planning. Readiness took a hit and so did modernization.

Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a determined foe of the BCA, said that “no enemy in the field has done as much to harm the readiness of U.S. military than the combined impact of the BCA’s defense spending caps, worsened by operating for 10 of the last 11 years under continuing resolutions of varied and unpredictable duration.”

During these years, the Army and the Navy declined to their lowest end-strength, or number of active-duty personnel, since before World War II, and the Air Force shrank to the smallest it had been since its inception in the immediate aftermath of World War II. An increase in spending in the first years of the Trump administration relieved some pressure, but was hardly transformative. Then, in fiscal year 2020 and 2021, spending actually fell in real terms.

Mattis had recommended increasing the budget by from 3 percent to 5 percent above inflation annually, a number that, with inflation running at 7 percent, now looks much larger. We are well below Cold War-levels of spending, though, and have significant room to grow. Defense spending ran to nearly 7 percent of GDP during the Reagan defense build-up, and has been about 3.5 percent the past few years.

We shouldn’t just keep spending on the same things we are now. The goal should be to adjust to the new threats, including adversaries who can hit us from a distance with the smart weapons that were once our own calling card.

The Army doesn’t necessarily need to be larger. It needs different tools, including many more anti-air and anti-missile capabilities to protect its bases and tank brigades, and more of it will have to be deployed in Europe to be in proximity to the Russian threat.

The Air Force should put an emphasis on long-range, stealthy planes to stay out of range of enemy missiles and to be able to get past enemy air defenses.

The Navy will have to be much larger, more like 500 ships than the current 296. It will be in the lead in a conflict with China and have to operate over vast distances in the Pacific. The chief of naval operations recently said that such a force should have big traditional assets, including 12 aircraft carriers, but also a less vulnerable, harder-to-detect element composed of 70 attack submarines, a dozen ballistic missile submarines and 150 unmanned vessels.

The Navy’s shipyards, which currently fail to keep up to the task of repairing our submarines, desperately need to be upgraded if there’s to be any hope of maintaining such a fleet.

We should push hard for continued technological advances in our long-range, high-precision missiles, and ensure that we have the surge capacity to replenish the supply in crisis.

The nuclear force has to been modernized, both the triad of bombers, ICBMs and subs, as well as the underlying infrastructure.

Finally, we must focus on innovation in cutting-edge areas such as space, cyber, artificial intelligence and directed energy, which one would have associated with science fiction but might tip the balance in a future war.

It’s not a shock that we are seeing the return of great-power competition. It has been the norm through human history and forecast by analysts for some time. The Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy made it a focus. Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has been so brazen, makes the return of high-stakes geopolitics especially stark and threatening. We have to adjust accordingly.

Abraham Lincoln put it well in an 1862 message to Congress, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” And, we should add, when ensuring that we don’t lose our edge over our adversaries, spend anew.