About the author: Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.
The U.S. is locked in a struggle for mastery of Eurasia that began in the 2010s and emerged into the clear after Russia’s assault on Ukraine. In the long term, Russia seeks to swallow Ukraine and then assault NATO directly. It has increased its military budget by 70% since 2021, and now spends 40% of public outlays on defense.
China, meanwhile, hopes to take Taiwan and then dominate the Indo-Pacific, but clearly that is not the limit of its strategic or operational goals. China has increased defense spending by 7% a year since the Cold War’s end, not accounting for budgetary opacity, fictive accounting, and dual-use policy. Iranian defense expenditures are even murkier, but it has created a world-leading expeditionary-proxy-enabling force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that sustained years of combat operations in Syria and Iraq.
From a dearth of strategy to an undersized force, inferior logistics, and an insufficient industrial base, the U.S. is not keeping up with a world that has become more dangerous, volatile, and exposed to a major-power conflict. The U.S. today spends around 3.5% of its GDP on defense, a share equivalent to that of the late 1990s, when the challenges were vastly different. Budget growth is long overdue.
The next administration, Republican or Democrat, should implement an unprecedented peacetime expansion of the defense budget, bringing military resourcing in-line with American security. A baseline of $1.6 trillion, or 6-8% of GDP, is a reasonable starting point, coupled with a program that culturally prepares the military for war.
The U.S.’s strategic objective is to deter major wars insofar as possible because it is prepared to win them if necessary. This requires both a force capable of fighting an expeditionary war against a Eurasian rival at large scale, along with rapidly deployable forces for smaller conflicts, and an industrial system that can sustain the U.S. and its allies in combat. Indeed, if the U.S. can deter major power war for long enough—and win enough small wars and peripheral conflicts through direct or indirect involvement—it can outlast the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis, whose economic woes will eventually constrain them.
More resources would provide four sorely needed capability overhauls to the U.S. military.
First, greater defense spending to exploit the ongoing revolution in military affairs exemplified by the Department of Defense’s push for unmanned systems would be pointless without extensive pruning of the bureaucracy and contracting modifications. The Replicator initiative is an interesting start, meant to provide the DOD with hundreds of thousands of drones on a short timeline. But it lacks a coherent procurement authority or consistent funding.
The DOD needs to align with the young, innovative, aggressive, and fast scientists and engineers of our industrial and informational base. The way forward is to resolve both issues through a multibillion funding increase over the next five years and an industrial strategy and contracting modifications that enabled smaller producers to compete for cash.
Second, a major increase to the Navy’s shipbuilding account would ensure the Navy can fund a fleet expansion and deliver the Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. The Columbia program will overrun costs by around 20%. The Navy’s shipbuilding and maintenance accounts are already insufficient to keep the fleet’s numbers static. As a result, the service will decommission two carriers, the Nimitz and the Eisenhower, in 2026-2027, before the new Enterprise reaches the fleet. The Navy’s plan to rapidly procure Constellation-class frigates, and thereby bolster its aging surface fleet and replace the littoral combat ship, is also behind schedule. Future ships in class will certainly exceed the $900 million projected price tag.
Without a funding injection, the Navy may well be directed to emphasize its strategic deterrence mission over conventional warfighting. But a major shipbuilding increase would be pointless unless the Navy transitions quickly to new ship classes—including uncrewed ones—and advanced sensors and weapons that can defeat a foe’s most sophisticated land- and sea-based anti-ship weapons.
More funds, rightly applied, would, by contrast, ensure the Navy can budget properly for a relatively modest fleet expansion, including an upgrade to the Arleigh Burke class of guided missile destroyers, while concurrently sending a demand signal to private yards that capacity increases are good investments.
Third, resources for the munitions industrial base would rebuild a real arsenal of democracy and allow the U.S. to sustain allies as needed. Ukraine’s case is illustrative: Although the U.S. and Europe will meet Ukrainian demands next year, a three-year ramp-up has hamstrung American and Ukrainian strategy. This is a clear warning that a major-power war will involve the same issues on a much greater scale, particularly as enemy bombardments eat up interceptors, and long-range missiles run low. Defense industrial support today, particularly through indefinite-quantity contracts running out to 2032, would allow major contractors to justify current production investments in the long-term.
Fourth, increased defense spending would address a backlog in submarine repair and production backlog. U.S. submarines will be crucial for breaking China’s Indo-Pacific defenses. However, U.S. submarines are mired in repair and maintenance delays. The Navy is improving its backlog but has yet to find a sustainable maintenance and production solution, the lack of which would be crippling in wartime. Additional funding would allow the Pentagon to contract with smaller subcomponents producers years ahead of time.
Increased spending itself, however, is not enough. Even more important would be to clear out the dead wood that has allowed this parlous situation to arise and multiply. The U.S. military has not faced a serious strategic threat since the Cold War. Culturally, it has trended toward bureaucracy and programmatic management, rather than emphasizing a warfighting mentality. Officers fit for peacetime administration are often set aside when combat begins. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. rotated commanders multiple times, a reflection of combat reality.
Russia and Ukraine have experienced the same phenomenon. Russia took 18 months to find a sector commander, Alexander Romanchuk, capable of conducting a well-fought defense. Ukrainian Gen. Valerii Zaluzhny lost a number of general officers to nervous breakdowns in the war’s early days and has ruthlessly rotated commanders based on combat performance since, even of high-profile brigades.
The White House should direct the Pentagon to age out a top-heavy command and staff system across the services, rapidly promoting colonels and captains to major combat billets. Navy training systems need to be upgraded to mimic the Army’s National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, Calif.: not just to train Navy formations and commanders, but to weed out the unsuitable and select the competent. Every service should emulate the U.K. Royal Navy’s no-nonsense “Perisher” submarine command qualification course. Failures are removed from the submarine service.
A series of wargames and fleet exercises, conducted over the next two years, would identify the nucleus of command and staff officers needed to fight the next war.
A cultural change is also needed: The next secretary of defense should avoid engaging in any cultural tussles. A soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine’s sexual orientation, religious faith, and gender identity is irrelevant to combat performance, selection for higher rank and position. Supporting every military member based on merit and regardless of these factors is not simply the moral choice, but the only responsible one.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 marked the beginning of a new geopolitical era, in which America’s adversaries seek to overturn its power and shape a world absent considerations of justice and decency. A properly-funded military is half the solution. A war-fighting mindset is equally crucial.
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