The Trump administration has inherited a military that, while engaged worldwide in defense of America’s interests, has been suffering from the combination of high operational tempo and the corrosive effects of sequestration.
One of its first priorities should be getting sequestration lifted. But a quick infusion of cash alone will be insufficient to restore American credibility, defeat our adversaries and prepare for the future.
The U.S. military clearly requires more resources if it is to continue to safeguard America’s national interests in an increasingly competitive international environment. Indeed, both the congressionally mandated 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel and the 2014 National Defense Panel achieved a bipartisan consensus that the Department of Defense needed more resources to protect American interests without undue risk. Seven years on from the first and three from the second, the gap between our means and the ends they serve has grown. As a result, the United States faces greater risk.
One source of risk is reduced readiness caused by sequestration. This has led to ships incapable of deploying and aircraft unable to fly. This, in turn, has harmed America’s credibility in the eyes of its allies and its competitors.
Beyond readiness, we face a growing need to modernize U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. The calculus that has governed defense planning for much of the Bush and Obama administrations was that we could afford to take additional risk in preparing for a high-intensity war in order to focus on counterinsurgency. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates frequently put it, we needed to focus on the wars of the present rather than the possible wars of the future.
That risk calculation needs to change. Whereas we have spent the last 15 years focused on counterinsurgency, we are now in a period characterized by the reality of great-power competition and the increasing possibility of great-power conflict.