Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was on target in Sept. 12 floor remarks lambasting President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats for failing to take national defense seriously.
Democrats’ refusal to meet security obligations was put into stark relief by a July 29 report from a special Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which, as McConnell noted, describes sobering challenges that Democrats are determined to ignore.
As we editorialized the day the report came out, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had by then already been sitting on the National Defense Authorization Act for more than six weeks after the Senate Armed Service Committee approved it for full Senate consideration. More than another six weeks later, Schumer has still done nothing, and commander in chief Biden has not publicly urged him to get moving. Even the NDAA falls short of urgent security needs identified by the commission’s report, yet the president and majority leader can’t stir themselves, the former from weeks lolling on the beach, to take even the necessary first step of passing the NDAA, much less acknowledge broader needs.
The strategy commission’s assessment is chilling, beginning with its opening sentence: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” To face such a fight, the U.S. “is not prepared today,” especially in light of, but hardly only because of, the increasingly coordinated challenges posed by a hostile and aggressive alliance of China and Russia. Threats from Iran, North Korea, and Islamist terrorists, among others, add to the chances for war or attacks on U.S. citizens or our nation’s interests.
China’s military spending, especially at sea, poses a high risk to commerce and stability in the Pacific. Yet the U.S. fleet, the main deterrent to such aggression, shrank from 594 ships in the 1980s to fewer than 300 by 2003 and has not risen above 300 since then. Put it another way: Our naval force in the Pacific is half what it was as the Cold War was ending. The strategy commission, “gravely concerned” at the Navy’s “diminishing size,” recommends a fleet of up to 404 manned ships, plus a “sizable number” of unmanned naval vessels and “substantial investments” in “depot and maintenance infrastructure.” Against the Biden budget request for only one, not two, new attack submarines in the Pacific, the commission says more such submarines should be a “core component” of U.S. strategy in the region.
Crucially, the commission recognizes a need, far greater than what Democrats are meeting, for weapons stocks in long-range affordable missiles and bombs without putting so many sailors at risk. It notes that “the Ukraine war has highlighted the vulnerability of large surface combatants to antiship missiles and uncrewed surface vessels.”
That’s just naval power. America’s other armed services are also being short-changed, especially because so much spending is frittered away in “business practices, byzantine research and development … and culture of risk avoidance.” After the Vietnam War, Cold War spending never dropped below 4.9% of gross domestic product and rose to as much as 6.8%, but it now stands at an anemic 3%. The commission recommends removing the Democrats’ military budget caps and putting defense spending on a “glide path … commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.”
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The commission makes clear the U.S. isn’t doing enough to meet worldwide threats. It must stop delaying the necessary first step, which is passage of the well-designed, albeit still inadequate, NDAA. Biden’s party can’t even be bothered to schedule full Senate consideration of a bill that would start curing it of the anemia McConnell cites.
Biden and Schumer are derelict in their duty. If they were serving in the military, they would merit court-martialed. They should stop playing politics with the defense of the nation and its global interests.