President Donald Trump likes large round numbers and has supported one, $ 1 billion, for the United States defense budget.
This is the right idea, and we will need even more soon enough.
It is the custom of the president to declare national emergencies, whether a certain situation guarantees it or not, but the state of our defenses is a true crisis.
Although the pentagon has recovered from the subsequent reduction to the cold war and the restrictions of the Obama era in its expense, foreign threats have increased.
This disconnection could, in the worst case, result in the United States to lose an important war and its great state of power.
We have bone to neglect a key issue of American strategic thinking from the beginning of the Republic, which only force can be conflict.
As said statesmen John Quincy Adams, “the safest commitment we can have of peace will be prepared for war.”
The Pentagon faced what Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute calls a “fatality loop.” If the salary increases are outside the limits and the number of civilian employees never decreases, then it is, perversely, the investments in ammunition that receive the blow.
“Different modernization results in a reduced force, less capable and mostly more expensive,” he writes. “The more you age the team, the more expectation it becomes, as the assembly lines are closed, the pieces are broken and replacements are needed.”
As we have in the place in the place, our enemies have the ability to build legs.
Ukraine Hawks do much of how war has relegated the Russian army. In the recent testimony of Congress, thought, General Christopher Cavoli said that the Russian army is larger than at the beginning of the war, and the 600,000 Russian troops in the front line are approximately twice the initial invasion force.
Russia is on its way to replacing all the weapons systems that it has lost in the war so far, and is producing 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles and 200 Ballistic and Cruise Iskander missiles a year.
We make 135 tanks a year.
As for Beijing, according to Eaglin, its military budget has increased approximately 9% per year during the last three decades, and its research shows that it is like my three times higher than it publicly recognized.
As she writes, “China now has not only the largest navy in the world, but also the largest rocket force of the army, the Air Force and the strategic rockets of the world.”
Given all this, there is no alternative to what we have more and use the dollars, as defense secretary Pete Hegseeth of the $ 1 billion, “wisely, about lethality and preparation.”
The investment has to enter a marina and construction of larger ships, which has stunted disastrously; We are producing around 1.2 Virginia class attack subs per year on average, and we need to build three.
We should drastically increase our drone production and make more use or AI.
We need more missiles of all children and we get much larger to space, where President Trump’s vision of a golden dome that protects the United States could become reality.
We should stop reducing the size of the army.
And, above all, we must undertake the R&D that creates avant -garde weapons systems for the next 30 years as the accumulation of Reagan did in the 1980s.
That said, the Pentagon deserves a good and complete dooing. Its acquisition process is a disaster. Too much money serves sclerotic desktop crisks. You need more innovation and risk advance.
And I should take advantage of the opportunity represented by new, hungry and hungry defense firms financed by private capital that can use the use that ancient practices interrupt.
We do not want to find ourselves without preparation for a war, not of our choice in the Indo-Pacific with an enemy that has been involved in an expansion of world-historical defense, which can better concentrate its forces and that has an industrial base of defense list.
In that circumstance, what we have saved over the years by noticing the defenses will have the bone of the most successful budget savings in the history of our nation.
Twitter: @richlowry
