The editors of the Wall Street Journal, in reaction to a report from Sen. Roger Wicker, calls for greatly increased defense spending:
Rebuilding U.S. defenses is cheaper than defeat or pre-emptive surrender. “Behind all the numbers,” as Reagan put it selling his defense increase in 1983, “lies America’s ability to prevent the greatest of human tragedies and preserve our free way of life in a sometimes dangerous world.” The choice is whether to rebuild the military to restore our lost deterrence or face defeat in the war that may be coming.
Here’s the basis for their demand:
For all the talking points that America spends more than its competitors, U.S. defense spending is slipping below 3% of the economy, heading toward 1930s territory. Beijing is spending far more than advertised on a military force clearly designed to defeat the U.S. in the Pacific. China’s real defense spending may approach $700 billion annually, by one recent estimate. Beijing pays its soldiers a fraction of what the U.S. pays its troops, so it can focus on buying ships and missiles. Its doctrine of close civilian and military cooperation is a force multiplier, especially in ship building and technology.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is still living off Ronald Reagan’s military buildup from the 1980s, and everything from fighters to the nuclear triad is wearing out at the same time. The Air Force needs to purchase 340 more aircraft above its current plans over the next five years to avoid what the Wicker paper rightly describes as a “death spiral,” with nearly 1,000 aircraft retirements planned over the next five years. The U.S. Navy will have to produce three attack submarines a year to deter Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait and grow the fleet from the oldest and smallest in 80 years.
The report suggests $7 billion to $10 billion annually for a decade to deepen munitions stocks that include antiship missiles, air-defense interceptors, torpedoes and cruise-missile rocket engines. The Pentagon has for years purchased some missiles at the minimum number needed to keep production lines open. The wars in Ukraine and Israel have exposed the inadequacy of the U.S. industrial base.
Also urgent: Hardening U.S. Pacific bases and a missile defense for Guam and American bases in Japan. Ditto for building a pre-positioned arsenal in Taiwan on the model of U.S. weapons stored in Israel, and quickly expanding an archipelago of Pacific bases the U.S. last needed in World War II.
My question is to what end? What they’re describing does not sound like U. S. defense to me but like a continuation of the flawed objective of primacy in ever theater we have been following for decades without. What’s the flaw, you may ask? It hasn’t made us a bit more secure.
My follow-up question would be how do they plan to pay for everything the Biden Administration wants to spend money on and the sort of rearmament they’re talking about at the same time? And how will we accomplish any of it without the industrial production to back it up?
