Unprepared: National Security in an Era of Risk and an Environment of Dysfunction

The United States could soon be at war and might very possibly lose.

Adapt or Lose

The United States could soon be at war and might very possibly lose. This is not alarmist clickbait, but the recent conclusion of a group of national security experts, each with decades of experience in the field. Every four years Congress empanels an independent, non-partisan commission to review the US National Defense Strategy (NDS). After years of increasing urgency in tone, this year’s Commission was unusually blunt in its assessment. In the Commission’s view, the American people are uninformed about the threats they face, Congress is polarized and self-absorbed to the point of negligence, the Department of Defense retains systems and attitudes that reflect a bygone era of military dominance, and the defense industrial base is failing to produce what the military needs to prevail in large-scale war. With threats to US security rising to a level not seen since the height of the Cold War, the US government has a choice: it can adapt to meet them or risk a devastating military defeat.

No one group, individual, or institution bears sole blame for this situation. Instead, it results from a confluence of factors: a Cold War victory that induced a sense of complacency in both the public and the government; a misplaced trust in economic integration as a driver of change in the nature of the Russian and Chinese regimes; and a period of political hyper-partisanship that has made whipping up voters into a frenzy over cultural issues preferable to engaging in serious debate over threats to American security. As the Commission noted, despite the clear warning signs, for decades the US has been “failing to act with the urgency required, across administrations and without regard to governing party.”

The People, The Government, The Military

The American people are uninformed about the threats facing them, leading to decreasing military recruitment levels and a declining trust in the military as an institution. The Commission notes that the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all failed to meet their recruiting goals in recent years, leading to declining personnel strength in all three Services. But the military has had no trouble meeting its retention goals for those it recruits, implying that those who do join the military find it an attractive profession. The Commission advises the military to redouble its recruiting efforts and find new incentives for service, to include relaxing the rigid personnel systems that turn off many military-age Americans and disqualify many others for service.

It also points out that the military has done a poor job of engaging the public, noting that “the Commission is struck by how often the lack of civic engagement came up in our meetings with the Department of Defense personnel and especially with retired senior leaders.” This lack of engagement with Americans has eroded their trust in the military, which has fallen from 70% in 2018 to only 45% in 2021. To remedy this, the Commission recommends calling for increased levels of public and civil service, backed by incentives for service that resonate with younger Americans. In short, the American people will answer a call to serve if their government explains that it is both necessary for the country and beneficial to those who serve. To this point it has done neither consistently.

Congress has played an especially large role in ensuring the US government is unprepared to meet the threats it faces. There are two reasons for this: hyper-partisanship and lack of political courage. The Commission notes that within Congress “a relatively small number of elected officials have imposed continual political gamesmanship over thoughtful and responsible legislating and oversight.” For reasons of electoral politics, some in Congress find it more rewarding to pick fights over the debt ceiling, hold the defense budgetary process hostage to issues unrelated to it, and spend their time whipping voters into a frenzy over hot button social issues than to debate serious national security legislation.

The solution to these problems is as simple as it is unlikely to be adopted: raise the defense budget, cut costs by reforming other spending programs, and raise taxes. The Commission notes that during the Cold War defense spending ranged from 4.9 to 16.9% of GDP, compared to 3% today. But crucially, the US government paid for this spending through top marginal tax rates above 70 percent and corporate tax rates above 50 percent. Along with raising defense spending, the Commission argues that the Department of Defense must make serious reforms to spend its budget more wisely and efficiently. It notes that the DOD has talented people who are “impeded by systems that are outdated, bureaucratic, or too political to move with the urgency required.” For its part, the military Services need to incorporate new technology faster and at greater scale, field more and more capable platforms, and employ them through innovative operational concepts.

The historical record implies that the Department of Defense will be unable to do this unless forced. Major, effective, and sustainable reform of the DOD has far more often been imposed by Congress than undertaken by the department itself. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the DOD and the National Security Council, and the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which forced the Services to operate jointly, created the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and requires every president to submit a National Security Strategy, were both forced on a recalcitrant executive branch by a Congress that had seen enough of dysfunction that created unnecessary national security risks.

Finally, the Commission notes that the defense industrial base is failing to produce what the Department of Defense needs to win America’s wars. A main reason for this is that both the defense industry and the DOD are failing to incorporate the lessons of the war in Ukraine, leaving gaps on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. Both the Department of Defense and the defense industry, each for its own reasons, prefer exquisite technological solutions to complex military problems. But a main lesson of the war in Ukraine is that quantity has a quality all its own. If the US military continues to demand platforms of such technological capability – and cost - that it can only afford them in limited numbers, it risks being overwhelmed by an opponent with less advanced but far more numerous platforms.

A Dead Russian and a Dead Prussian Would Like a Word

A Russian revolutionary and a Prussian staff officer turned war theorist – both long dead - neatly encapsulate the dilemmas the National Defense Strategy Commission identified. For the American people and Congress, who may think they have the luxury of being uninformed about threats to the nation, or of ignoring them and instead engaging in partisan grandstanding, Leon Trotsky’s words ring out: “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And for the Department of Defense , military Services, and defense industry, who seem determined to fight the way they prefer to fight, not the way the enemy may force them to fight, the words of Carl von Clausewitz are apt:  “the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” If the US continues to believe that it can choose which wars it will fight and how it will fight them, many more Americans than necessary might soon join Trotsky and Clausewitz in the ranks of the no longer living.

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Colonel (Retired) Robert E. Hamilton, PhD, is the Head of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program.