A new report to Congress and the president warns the U.S. is not ready for a major war.
FILE - An F/A-18E Super Hornet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy warned we face “the most serious and most challenging” threats in 80 years.
The commissioners, who said they were unanimous in their findings, said the U.S. faces “the potential for near-term major war.” The nation was last prepared to fight a global conflict during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago., the director of the RAND National Security Supply Chain Institute, said Tuesday that he agreed with the commissioners’ dire assessment.The U.S. spent over 11% of gross domestic product on defense in the 1950s. It was down to about 6% in the 1980s. Now,“Our defense industrial base is struggling for a host of reasons,” Cohen said. “This goes well beyond Israel and Gaza. It goes well beyond Ukraine. It goes largely to what we did to the defense industrial base after the end of the Cold War. We need to scale that back up again, but we're struggling under that.” Martin, a retired Navy captain, said today’s American military does a good job with its day-to-day tasks.have gotten a lot of attention, but we also don’t have the technically trained workforce or the factory capacity to make the munitions and critical spare parts for our combat vehicles, he said. “One of the bad habits, I would call a bad habit, of services is they want to build a few really, really expensive things because of the belief that, ‘Well, I've got all this capability. You know, one of these can take on seven of something else,’” Martin said. But effective deterrence takes combat capability stationed in lots of different places, standing by and ready to roll in the event of a crisis.“Quantity has a quality of its own,” he said. There are probably some efficiency savings that could be achieved within the Defense Department, Martin said.Increased defense spending could be paid for by reductions to existing government programs or increased taxes, which Martin acknowledged might not “be a popular, politically palatable” solution. “I guess I would just say that the defense capabilities that we're talking about are what underwrites stability and prosperity,” he said. “That's a collective good. You know, that's something that people don't notice until it goes away.” Martin said the many trillions of dollars we’ve spent over the decades on our military is a relatively small price to pay for what it’s provided our country. “The isolationist impulse is certainly understandable, but I think that, that comes from a failure to recognize how much U.S. prosperity has depended on a stable global environment,” Martin said. The U.S. was better positioned before World War II to quickly ramp up capacity than the country is now, he said. We had excess industrial capability and more available labor coming out of the 1930s than we do in 2024. That’s all the more reason to take action now – in peacetime – to build up our defense capacity, he said.“To a degree, we may find ourselves surprised by what the next big thing is,” Martin said.And China likely doesn’t want to risk the economic calamity that could come from invading Taiwan.It’s also a region that could prove so valuable to other nations that a spark in the Middle East could ignite a conflict that spills far outside that part of the world.Plus, there’s the danger that a U.S. adversary could try to take advantage if they think America is distracted by conflict elsewhere. “If that starts to become a problem where countries are taking sides, then we're dealing with a world war,” Martin said.
Defense Capacity Cold War Defense Spending U.S. Military Global Conflict Defense Industrial Base RAND
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