Phil and Jack have taken exception to my call for a $1 trillion defense budget.
Phil says we can’t afford it. No argument from me. But I don’t think we can let unnecessary spending crowd out necessary spending. It’d be one thing if we said we are going to maintain a modest defense budget completely insufficient to the twin threat from Russia and China and perhaps lose our edge in advanced weapons and, on the other side of the ledger, domestic spending were going to be drastically reduced. But domestic spending is not going to be reduced. So the question, functionally, is whether we will have unsustainable spending with an insufficient defense or unsustainable spending with a sufficient defense. I favor the latter. Fighting a war because our deterrence isn’t what it should be, and especially losing a war, would be much, much more expensive.
Phil also worries about conservatives losing their credibility to argue against massive social spending by the Left. But I think there is a clear difference in the importance of defense and social spending, and defense spending is at the core of what government is supposed to do. Conservatives should feel very comfortable making this distinction. As for elected Republicans, most of them long ago lost their credibility on spending, so they might as well support the kind of defense budget we need.
Just a note on the numbers. I don’t think we should go up to a $1 trillion defense budget immediately — among other things, we don’t have the defense industrial base to sustain that kind of surge in spending. But the nominal numbers are probably going to get pretty big pretty fast, regardless. The budget is $770 billion now. It may take a 10 percent increase just to avoid a real decrease in the budget give what seems like inevitable double-digit inflation. The consensus view tends to be that we need what Jim Mattis called for, a 3-5 percent annual increase above inflation. You do that at anything like the current levels of inflation, and you’re around $900 billion in two years.
Final fiscal point — Republicans should be trying to claw back unspent Covid-relief funds to cover as much of these increases as possible.
As for Jack, he wants to end inefficiencies at the Pentagon and woke training before giving the military a “blank check.” I agree, of course, that we should try to make Pentagon processes as efficient as possible, but even in the best case, what we are likely to get is a version of we have now — an institution that is less efficient than the private sector, but arguably more efficient than the rest of government.
Obviously, I agree regarding the woke nonsense — stamping it out should be a major priority of Republicans when they take Congress. But, similar to the point about the debt above, if forced to choose between a military addled by DEI ideology with an inadequate hypersonic-missile force and a military addled by DEI ideology with an adequate hypersonic-missile force, I’m taking the latter. One advantage of hypersonic missiles is that they aren’t very sensitive or politically correct.
And, finally, I never said Pentagon should get a blank check; in fact, I emphasized how we need to spend on new systems, responsive to the new threats. The F35, which Jack rightly mentions as a symbol of all that’s wrong with military procurement, definitely needs to be downgraded.
Anyway, onward and upward — toward $1 trillion.