By Seth Cropsey
Friday, February 14, 2025
Donald Trump has returned to the White House at a
particularly parlous moment for American interests. Russia’s assault on Ukraine
is unrelenting, with a real chance of sliding into a broader European war.
Israel has mauled key Iranian proxies, but the Islamic Republic retains the
bulk of its long-range missile and drone arsenal and could well sprint for
nuclear weapons. China is in the midst of the largest conventional and nuclear
military buildup since the 20th century, with the obvious goal of gaining
military superiority over the United States and ultimately absorbing Taiwan. A
policy of Peace Through Strength — a return to traditional, muscular American
foreign policy — is the best solution for America’s national-security
predicament. If Mr. Trump is serious about shoring up the U.S.’s international
position and restoring its credibility, he must work with Congress to raise the
defense budget well past the $1 trillion mark.
The Biden administration dragged the United States into
an intense global crisis, beginning with its withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden’s foreign-policy team was convinced that the cost of maintaining a
limited presence in the country was significantly greater than the benefit
Biden would receive for ending America’s longest war. In the event, this
calculation was horrendously incorrect. The Taliban toppled the Afghan
government in a lightning offensive, while six months later, sensing American
and European weakness, Russia invaded Ukraine.
The Biden administration notched only one major
foreign-policy success in its four years. It increased the cooperation between
our Asian allies through a series of basing agreements, informal and formal
diplomatic contacts, and intelligence and information-sharing mechanisms. The
Trump administration should build off this cooperation, formally integrating
allied militaries in Asia to raise the costs of a Chinese assault against
Taiwan.
In every other respect, however, the Biden administration
presided over a strategic disaster. It prevented Israel from taking decisive
action against Iran or its proxies. Only because Israel consistently refused
American strategic advice after October 7, 2023, do Jerusalem and Washington
now face a reasonable strategic position, with Iran on the back foot. In
Ukraine, the Biden administration has drip-fed support to the Ukrainian
military, restraining potentially decisive blows against Russia early in the
war, while never actually articulating a security architecture that could
preserve America’s European interests in the long-term.
Most concerning, however, is the long-term decline of
U.S. military power, accelerated by the Biden administration’s strategic
malpractice.
Budgets provide the context for this crisis. In 1990,
U.S. military expenditure amounted to just under 5 percent of GDP. This bought
a Navy of nearly 600 ships, an Air Force with a robust tactical fighter fleet
and stealth strike aircraft, and an Army that could fight the Soviets in Europe
and deploy to other areas as needed. In fact, the U.S. military was designed to
fight two regional wars concurrently, backed by a dominant nuclear umbrella.
But the post-1991 “peace dividend” reduced defense expenditure to just over 3
percent of GDP by 1999. Perhaps this was reasonable during the ’90s-era holiday
from history, when Russia was weak and fractious, China more interested in
economic integration than military adventurism, and Iran and North Korea
largely isolated from the international system. Yet current defense spending,
at around 3.5 percent of GDP, is far closer to that of the late 1990s than the
Cold War — even as the U.S. faces a renewed cold war that threatens to boil
over into active major-power conflict.
The Biden administration never recognized the demands on
American power. While budgets grew in nominal terms, they never outpaced the
rate of inflation, amounting to a real-terms cut in defense spending. After two
decades of small wars in the Middle East, which traded investments in long-term
high-end air-naval combat capacity for immediate ground-force capacity, and
budget sequestration in the 2010s, the past four years have sharply curtailed
American military power in real terms.
Deterring major-power war requires preparing to fight it.
This demands resourcing a capable American military, one with sufficient
air-naval power to dominate the maritime highways between the United States and
America’s Eurasian rivals, sufficient space power to surveil targets across
Eurasia and facilitate communication between friendly units, and sufficient
land power to stage either limited or large-scale land campaigns as necessary.
It also demands a nuclear arsenal that can maintain strategic superiority over
China and Russia, no easy task given Russia’s persistent emphasis on nuclear
weapons and China’s rapid nuclear buildup.
The Trump administration cannot downplay the sheer cost
of rearmament. The China challenge alone demonstrates this. Today, Chinese
shipyards outbuild their American counterparts by 252 to one. The U.S. Navy
struggles to field its appropriated attack submarines due to maintenance
backlogs. The Air Force lacks the long-range strike aircraft to fill the gap. A
constrained industrial base compounds these issues. The naval industrial base
faces a spiraling crisis, in which old, underfunded yards require more personnel
to staff, but major shipbuilding contractors lack the funding to provide
competitive salaries for shipyard labor. The aerospace industrial base fares
better, but its supply chain is extremely constrained, particularly for key
inputs like engines and missile guidance systems.
Rearmament thus requires not only investment in short and
long-term military procurement, but also extensive industrial investment to
create a defense industrial base that can produce and sustain sophisticated
warships, aircraft, and missiles. Wartime sustainment will also matter. The
current naval industrial base, for instance, takes around three years to repair
damaged warships: This will amount to a de facto loss during any major
conflict.
In the short-term, the Trump administration must increase
the shipbuilding account. High-end warships cost around $3 billion each, a
top-line submarine around $4 billion, a carrier around $13 billion. Even if the
U.S. were to freeze carrier procurement — a poor choice for its naval force
structure — it would still need to appropriate $12–20 billion in the near-term
to jump-start subcomponent construction for its surface warships.
Airframes are also expensive, particularly the long-range
bombers the U.S. Air Force needs to break down the Chinese military. Each B-21,
for instance, will cost around $700 million — adding five bomber squadrons, a
reasonable plan given requirements, will thus cost at least $50 billion. Much
of this money must be appropriated in the next two or three defense budgets to
accelerate production: Hence an air-naval procurement increase only for
platforms of $70–100 billion over the next few years is necessary.
All told, simply for platforms, the U.S. must
inject perhaps up to $150 billion into the next several defense budgets.
Munitions are also costly. While low-cost missiles have
operational benefits, they lack the range, speed, and payload to break apart
China’s anti-air network. The U.S. needs a larger arsenal of long-range,
high-performance cruise and ballistic missiles, ranging from anti-ship and
land-attack cruise missiles that cost $2 million-plus each, to fast hypersonics
that can cost $40 million or more. Air-defense interceptors also matter to
defend U.S. warships and bases. They cost $4–5 million each — the U.S. has used
over 100 to intercept Houthi drones since late 2023. Near-term missile
procurement will require at least $5–7 billion to build a baseline margin of
safety for an initial crisis. This does not count air-to-air missiles,
torpedoes, mines, and other weapons. Hence each defense budget, for the
next few cycles, will need a $10 billion-plus top-up to accelerate munitions
procurement.
Building these weapons requires new facilities, both for
shipyards and aerospace manufacturing. Refurbishing old shipyards requires a
$5–15 billion investment, building a new yard several billions more. All told,
new aerospace and naval facilities will require between $15 billion and $25
billion in investment over the next few years. This does not count the cost of
new workforce training programs, or measures to onshore specific components in
the defense supply chain, raising total costs to north of $35 billion.
A right-sized defense budget must therefore break the $1
trillion mark, both to rebuild our military power and to sustain it.
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