The Senate Armed Services Committee has set down a bipartisan marker, adding $25 billion to President Joe Biden’s proposed $715 billion defense budget. The Pentagon said it was adequate to both defend the nation now and to transform the U.S. military to fight future wars.
The final markup of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act sets the total U.S. defense spending at $777.9 billion, with $740.3 billion for the Pentagon, $27.7 billion for nuclear weapons programs administered by the Energy Department, and another $10 billion for miscellaneous defense-related activities.
It was a stunning rebuke of the Biden budget strategy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley defended as “an appropriate balance” between preserving present readiness and future modernization but that Republicans derided as “woefully inadequate.”
“To date, no one has been able to successfully put lipstick on this pig,” said Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, dismissing Milley’s testimony.
“It doesn’t keep pace with China. It doesn’t even keep pace with inflation. In fact, it constitutes a cut of over $4 billion in real dollars,” Rogers said at a July 20 hearing. “Instead of deterring conflict with China through strength, we’re inviting conflict through weakness.”
Republicans and Democrats on the committee rejected Biden’s bare-bones approach on an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 23-3.
In a June appearance before the Senate panel, Milley conceded that one longtime argument against higher U.S. defense spending was no longer true, if it ever was.
For years, critics have questioned why annual U.S. defense expenditures are the highest in the world and total more than the spending of the next 10 countries combined.
Under questioning from Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Milley revealed that classified U.S. intelligence assessments undercut that argument, noting that Russia and China hide the actual amounts they spend on defense.
“In unclassified level, I would tell you that, combined, the Russian and Chinese budgets exceed our budgets if all the cards are put on the table,” Milley told senators in June. “Both governments do not put all their cards on the table.”
To the extent there is a partisan divide over the big boost in Pentagon spending, it largely centers on the question of how long the United States has to prepare for war with China.
And “by prepare for war,” everyone agrees the goal is not actually to fight China but to deter Beijing from invading Taiwan or engaging in other provocative military adventurism by building a much higher-tech, next-generation U.S. military.
No one knows when China might move on Taiwan, which it sees as a renegade province that must be reunited with the mainland. Still, several senior U.S. military commanders have predicted Chinese President Xi Jinping will try to get Taiwan back, by force if necessary, by the end of the decade, if not sooner.
The Biden budget had assumed short-term risk, including divesting the military of expensive systems not suited to war with China, and banked on investments in new war-fighting concepts that don’t yet exist, including swarming drones, robot ships and aircraft, and hypersonic weapons, all connected by vast computer networks and assisted by artificial intelligence.
It is a budget strategy that Milley admitted had “a bias toward the future operating environment and the change in the character of war.”
But most Republicans and many outside experts are unconvinced.
“There are serious risks with this approach,” Stacie Pettyjohn, an analyst from the Center for a New American Security, testified before the House Armed Services Committee this month. “The administration is trying to do too much with too little.”
A new report by the bipartisan think tank conducted war games with the Biden strategy in a series of tabletop exercises and found it wanting.
“This strategy performed poorly against priority threats. It cannot defeat a large-scale conventional invasion of Taiwan or the Baltics, nor can it halt sub-conventional aggression. It also risks significant overstretch and technological overmatch,” Pettyjohn, one of the report’s authors, told the committee.
Of particular concern is China’s rapidly increasing naval might, given that any war with China would be fought at sea.
China’s shipbuilding industry churns out more than a dozen ships a year, including its third aircraft carrier. At the same time, the U.S. Navy has no plan to reach its goal of 355 ships anytime soon and is decommissioning some relatively new ships that failed to perform as advertised.
“This budget puts shipbuilding on a starvation diet,” Inhofe said on the floor of the Senate. “The Navy tells us we need at least 355 ships, probably more than 400. Right now, we’re under 300 ships, and the trend is down, not up.”
Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander and former surface warfare officer, called the current plans “far off at a 355-ship goal that we’re never going to get to when we decommission more ships every year than we actually build.”
Skeptics of sinking more money into today’s weaponry argue that those ships and planes are not what’s going to deter or, if necessary, defeat China.
America’s vaunted carrier fleet, the largest in the world, is seen as increasingly vulnerable to Chinese coastal “carrier killer” missiles, and its newest F-35 stealth fighter jets don’t have the range to attack from great distances.
“Think about this, [a] $75 million airplane F-35 can’t get into some areas that a swarm of drones that cost several $100,000 can,” Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Adam Smith said. “You put together a swarm of drones that can pack an incredible punch. And the truly interesting thing about it is, you can’t see them coming.”
But in the end, the bigger argument is how much U.S. military capability is required to convince China that taking back Taiwan is not worth it.
Is it enough to make the cost very painful, or must the U.S. have the ability to defeat a nuclear-armed China in an all-out war?
“I mean, adversaries far smaller than us have successfully deterred us for years for a heck of a lot less money. Why can’t we do the same thing with China and Russia and not buy into this like, endless expense?” Smith asked Pettyjohn at one point in her testimony.
“It sounds like you’re suggesting a punishment strategy, which one could rely on, but the sort of gold standard of deterrence is deterrence by denial,” Pettyjohn replied. You don’t deter wars by hoping that you have the capability to stop. You actually need to have the forces to prevent them from achieving their objective. We call that ‘deterrence by denial.’”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
