America’s odds of fighting a major war are the highest in 80 years, and its military isn’t prepared for one.
This was the finding of a bipartisan panel tasked by Congress to review U.S. defense strategy. Its nearly 100-page report reveals a crisis of confidence in American national security.
The commission chides a Pentagon it considers too plodding, a Congress it considers too partisan and multiple administrations it says have been too complacent to address threats from China, Russia and countries in the Middle East.
“The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago,” the report reads. “It is not prepared today.”
Every four years, Congress gathers a group of outside experts to review the country’s national defense strategy. The goal is to have an independent board assess U.S. national security like an accountant audits a company’s books. To do so, the eight commissioners spoke with lawmakers, U.S. allies, members of the administration and leaders in the Pentagon, including the secretary and deputy secretary of defense.
The report wasn’t due until the end of the year, and the panel finished early so that its findings could factor into the presidential election. Both the timing and tone are an attempt to yank public attention away from domestic issues, such as the border and the economy, said Jane Harman, a former Democratic Congresswoman from California and chair of the commission.
“Public awareness is dismal,” she said, calling America’s security threats “blinking red.”
The commission’s argument is almost as simple as supply and demand. In its eyes, America faces a much more dangerous world, with competitors that are either more willing to go to war, in the case of Russia, or much closer to being a military peer, in the case of China.
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But as those threats have emerged — or even merged given that many of America’s adversaries are now working more closely together — the report argues that the U.S. hasn’t grown stronger in proportion. Instead, the country has proceeded largely as usual, or even with more dysfunction. Examples include budgets that are too small, spending bills passed too late, legacy weapons preferred over new ones and a public either unaware of the challenges America faces or unmotivated to respond.
Even more, while the National Defense Strategy calls for “integrated deterrence,” or using more than just military might to prevent conflict, the commission found that the approach isn’t clearly defined or coordinated.
“The United States is still failing to act with the urgency required, across administrations and without regard to governing party,” the report says.
The commissioners were equally nominated by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and all agreed to the report’s conclusions. Their arguments resemble those made by many defense hawks around Washington, such as Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who says that the country needs to spend far more on defense.
Many of them, including the commissioners authoring this report, use the Cold War as an analog.
During a defense buildup led by President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. spent 6.8% of GDP on defense. It now spends around 3%, though in real terms defense spending reached its all-time high during the wars on terror earlier this century, according to data from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The last commission’s report, assessing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, recommended increasing the defense budget by 3% to 5% each year, a mark the U.S. has not hit though it’s unclear what analysis supports that number. One of the most recent barriers was a deal struck last year to avoid a government default, which capped increases to the Pentagon budget at 1%, a cut when accounting for inflation.
Since the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has passed multiple enormous supplemental security bills — most recently a $95 billion one this April that included funding to support Kyiv, Israel and countries in the Indo-Pacific. These bills don’t technically factor into the annual defense budget, like a garnish not listed in a recipe. But they’ve poured money into America’s defense industry.
‘A solution’
But legislation and money do little to solve what the commission calls America’s biggest issue: the home front. The military isn’t recruiting as many people as it wants, though it’s doing better retaining those who already joined. And during the Cold War, the report argues, higher tax rates for businesses and high earners made it easier to sustain a bigger defense budget. The combination of a less mobilized public, lower taxes and much higher government debt make a defense buildup harder, the report argues.
“We’re not just saying, ‘oh my god, the house is burning, figure it out,” said Harman. “We have ideas.”
Those recommendations fall into a few main categories.
The first is to reassess the Pentagon’s acquisition and innovation systems. Leaders in the Defense Department should review its orders and have more freedom to cancel less relevant purchases.
The Defense Department should also change its buying practices — a point argued by a separate congressional commission earlier this year — to fulfill purchases faster and work more with non-traditional defense companies, which are increasingly building more innovative weapons.
A second point concerns spending. Congress should “immediately” pass a supplemental defense bill so that the U.S. can build more equipment, harden military sites threatened by China and buy more weapons, particularly munitions. Perhaps most abruptly, Congress should also ditch the budget caps holding back defense spending this year.
Lastly, the U.S. should consider politically unpopular ways to pay for these reforms. One would be higher taxes. Another is reforming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are projected to swell by the end of the decade.
The upshot would be a force capable of more than protecting the homeland, fighting one major war and preventing another, which the last two defense strategies have proposed. Given the threat of Russia, China and Iran in the Middle East, America’s military should be able to fight across multiple theaters at once, it says.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t recommend specific spending or force structure targets, instead saying they should be bigger but not by how much.
“We weren’t going to dictate a solution, but it does need to be a multi-theater force planning construct,” said Tom Mahnken, head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and one of the commissioners.
Some of the panelists have served on past review boards, made similar recommendations and seen them ignored. On one page in the report, they list key paragraphs from earlier reports issued in 2018, 2014 and 2010 — each escalating in alarm.
Mahnken, who worked on the last commission, listed shortfalls they identified that later proved prescient: munitions, raising defense spending, the ability for America’s military to fight jointly, or with multiple services working together. These have since become top priorities for the Pentagon and many members of Congress.
“We find that the situation has deteriorated since the 2018 Commission’s report and that many of the previous recommendations were not adopted,” this report says.
Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.
