Congressional Pentagon budget debate shows divide on preparing for war with China
Jamie McIntyre
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China is a looming threat, and President Joe Biden’s proposed $842 billion Pentagon budget, a mere 3.2% increase over last year, is going to need to be increased to deal with it.
It’s one of the few things Republicans and Democrats in Congress seem to agree on these days.
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“For the third year in a row, President Biden has sent to Congress a budget request that cuts military spending amid a more dangerous and complex threat environment,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing reviewing the administration’s budget request.
“This year’s budget is the last one that funds capabilities that are likely to be fielded before 2027. That’s the year by which Xi Jinping says he wants the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take Taiwan,” Wicker said.
In testimony before the committee, outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley warned that the U.S. military is at an inflection point in which there will be a fundamental shift in the way wars are fought.
“We must integrate advancing technologies, including precision long-range fires, hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and all-domain sensors. The time is now. We have very little margin to wait,” Milley said. “We must not allow ourselves to create the false trap that we can either modernize our forces for the future or focus only on today. We must do both.”
But doing both can’t mean avoiding the hard choices, the Pentagon argues, and that means admitting a lot of weapons we have now, while they seemed like a good idea at the time, are sucking up billions of dollars and would be of little use in an all-out war with China.
“The focus here is making our military more capable, not making it larger” — that’s the way Pentagon CEO and Comptroller Michael McCord described it when the budget was unveiled.
It’s that idea, sometimes called “divest to invest,” that most rankles many Republicans, who see it as weakening the U.S. military and sending precisely the wrong message to China, Russia, and other potential adversaries such as North Korea and Iran.
“This current budget shrinks the Army, shrinks the Navy, shrinks the Marine Corps. Doesn’t that embolden … Xi Jinping and Putin, not deter them?” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) asked. “The Congress here has been very clear that we want to grow the Navy.”
Nowhere is the divergence of the philosophy between the Biden Pentagon and China hawks in Congress clearer than when it comes to the question of how fast the Navy needs to add ships to catch up to China, which has the world’s largest navy with between 300 and 340 ships, depending on which ships are counted.
The Navy has a congressionally mandated goal of increasing its fleet to 373 manned ships, but it has no plan to get there.
Under the Biden budget, the current 296-ship fleet would shrink to 291 by 2028, because while it funds nine new battle force ships, it will retire 11, including three amphibious landing ships and two of less than 10-year-old littoral combat ships that so underperformed they earned the derisive moniker “Little Crappy Ship.”
The Air Force would retire 801 older fighter jets, including the A-10 ground attack planes, while buying only 345 newer fifth-generation replacements.
The Pentagon argues it’s all about shedding dead weight, but it doesn’t make sense to Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA), the chairman of the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.
“It disregards Congress’s direction to the Navy to maintain a minimum of 31 ships in our amphibious force,” Wittman said. “I’m not a mathematician, but I want to know how do we do addition by subtraction? How does this budget create the capacity and capability to close this gap? How does this send a message to the Chinese that this is a deterrent effect for what we know is coming?”
In his testimony before the House, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he’s trading off sheer numbers for superior capability.
“We also don’t want to have to continue to invest to maintain aircraft and ships that are costly and provide headwinds,” Austin said. “We want that fifth-generation aircraft and capability, and that’s what we’re investing in.”
“With all due respect, quantity has a quality all its own,” Wittman replied, invoking a well-worn military maxim. “It’s great to have exquisite platforms, but we do eventually get overwhelmed.”
And so it goes. Often when the Pentagon tries to retire an older “legacy” weapons system to use the money for something else, Congress, in its wisdom, blocks the effort.
Doing that this year would be a mistake, Milley argued.
“The ships for the amphibs, they’ve been in the yard for years. They’re costing way more money just to repair than they’re worth,” Milley said.
Yes, he conceded, there will be a dip in the number of ships as the Navy shifts to the next generation of ships, but it’s temporary. “You’ll see the curve going up in the not-too-distant future,” Milley said.
“I know that the Chinese have a lot of ships,” he said. “However, we not only have the United States Navy. We have the United States Navy working with the Japanese navy, working with the Australian navy, working with the British navy, working with the French navy. If you start adding up these navies, China is not only outnumbered, but they’re outgunned.”
“And in terms of capabilities — the most lethal capability of the United States Navy today is the submarine. The Chinese navy or the Russian navy is not even in the same ballpark as our submarine force. Our submarine force can bring people to their knees just by themselves.”
The budget is also informed by the lessons of the Ukraine war, which Milley says shows that Pentagon war planners have vastly underestimated the number of precision bombs and missiles even a short war would consume.
One of the big lessons coming out of Ukraine is the incredible consumption of conventional munitions in the conduct of what is really a limited regional war.
“So, a great power war, if that were to ever happen — God forbid it does, the consumption rates would be incredible,” Milley said.
But the United States will likely never find itself in the World War I-style trench warfare that is going on in the front lines of Ukraine because it has something Ukraine does not: a powerful air force.
At the Pentagon, officials talk about not making the mistake of thinking the next war will be anything like the last one.
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“Our military power has to always exceed that of China in all of the domains. And if we do that, then we have a better chance at deterring any kind of conflict with China,” Milley, who will retire in September after 43 years in uniform, said.
“If we do not adapt this military, this joint force in the next five to 10 years, we’re going to be on the wrong side of history,” he warned.