The Potemkin Village of NatSec Policy
The Potemkin Village of NatSec Policy
The Catastrophe of Continuing Resolutions while Fighting the CCP
When the United States loses its next war, it will not be for lack of courage, “the woke”, or because of that AI/quantum/crypto gadget. Rather, historians will first say the United States lost because for more than a decade plus beforehand, the United States Congress governed by fiscal cataclysm, populist ignorance, and continuing resolutions (CRs). This is going to hurt some feelings, but I’ve talked with a lot of folks in the China and defense policy communities to know I’m far from alone in what I’m about to say.
It’s “China week” this week in the US House of Representatives. So named because it is the week that the House passes a bunch of legislation meant to combat the Chinese Communist Party at home and abroad. There are a couple decent bills (that have spent years getting killed by Chinese-backed special interests), like the BIOSECURE Act and the DJI drone ban. There are also plenty of what Congress calls “messaging” bills as well. These do little for national security or deterrence but look good in your local papers and on talk shows.
Most of this quite frankly is a sideshow.
As the House points to its many bills on various China threats (which may or may not make it to POTUS’ desk), the Speaker has also proposed another six month continuing resolution which the Chair of the House Armed Services has already publicly come out against. And so the fiscal circus comes to town again.
Let me make this very clear: if we run out of ammo, spare parts, and ships because we expended or lost all of them in the Western Pacific with minimal in reserve, then none of those shallow China bills matters very much. You don’t win wars banning Xi’s family from buying stocks, you win them with well-armed and well-trained warfighters. You win wars by not having a fragile, compromised defense supply chain that has been running on minimal manning and production up until the last two years and is still trying to overcome anemia and supply shock. It takes years to build these things up, you can’t do it overnight. COVID and Ukraine have taught us that much. You win wars with good strategy and strong coordinated policy, reliable budgets, training, ammunition, and advanced technology applied to the right operational design. You don’t win it with a media cycle.
We’ve now worked under two National Defense Strategies (one D, one R) that prioritize fighting the PLA. We have watched as attritional warfare with massive expenditures in funds, personnel, equipment, and munitions takes place in Ukraine as the our Allies, defense industrial base, and DoD begs, borrows, and steals to keep them afloat against the Russians (who have also leaned on their allies to augment production).
At least half of all Americans now see the CCP as a threat, this is a substantial increase from both the start of the Biden and Trump administrations. Every month we uncover a new CCP influence or espionage operation in the United States. The Pentagon and others regularly publicly talk about the threat posed to our infrastructure, our forces, and our Allies by the PLA. The American people understand that the CCP is a problem, it is not 2021 or 2015 anymore. Every think tank wargame talks about needing more ammo, more supplies, more of everything to take the fight to the PLA or even just to replace our losses early in a war. Whether it was smooth in execution or not, we are beyond trying to pivot to the Pacific: we are there and we’ve brought a musket’s worth of ammo to a machine gun fight. Despite all of this, our political leadership (especially Congressional leadership as they hold the nation’s purse) are not that interested in doing the hard work of developing a feasible defense budget. We don’t need more messaging bills and hysteria, we need ammo.
Aside from a few Members of Congress and staff, there seems to be little interest in substantive work on fighting the CCP, increasing the DOD budget to sufficient levels to be ready and to deter, or rearranging the existing topline to adjust for new priorities that don’t exactly resemble the Global War on Terror (GWOT). And I know some will argue with me that this is baby steps, but we know the time for baby steps was 2/4/6/8 years ago. Let’s stop lying to ourselves. Every year we have burned in our hyper partisan navel-gazing and brinksmanship has meant another year of the PLA building more and better ships and missiles while ours sit in dockyards awaiting repair, sometimes for years. It means the US Air Force having to prioritize a single bomber fleet over every other aircraft that it needs to deny the PLAAF air superiority over Taiwan and the Western Pacific. It means the Marine Corps getting shorted on one thing after another in its force design overhaul meant to be ready to fight the PLA on day one. There are few things more gut-wrenching to me than losing not because we were bested by the enemy, but because we were bested by our own incompetence. CRs are our version of the neutrality acts that neutered the United States before WWII and history will certainly see them as such if we do not act.
Matt Pottinger once said (I’m paraphrasing) that the CCP is a problem you don’t worry about on Monday and by Friday it’s too late to do anything. Well, we’re getting pretty close to Friday. We can pat ourselves on the back and make campaign ads and do roundtables and press gaggles; but what we don’t pay for in line items today we will eventually pay for in blood when Xi decides to attack Taiwan, the Philippines, or somewhere else. The “American spirit” and the media cycle don’t fill ship magazines; hypersonic missiles do.
Perhaps because the casualties weren’t high enough most of Congress really didn’t care, but there is at least a correlation in CRs and real dollar budget cuts and training accidents in the US military. When we have to face those same challenges against an enemy with tech that looks and functions a lot like ours, it will become quite clear that hyper-partisanship and CRs got a lot of good people killed. People that those same leaders will then use as talking points for their convenience. Before I continue, let me walk you through exactly how CRs cost us in readiness.
CRs, cuts, and single year procurement screw with demand signal for industry. The defense sector still runs on some version of supply and demand and has for years (up until Ukraine 2022) been running on minimum sustaining rates (MSRs) for most munitions and systems. These are production rates that are the absolute minimum needed to keep a certain production line alive.
It takes time to get those production lines, like any business with highly skilled workers, time to get up and running and there has to be continuous demand signal for companies to invest in them (or a lot of money to do so in spite of that lack of demand). In some cases, the physical technical skill needed to design and produce more of certain weapons system may be lost to time. The inability of Congress to deliver budgets on time and, particularly during the sequestration era, to deliver them without massive slashing cuts, sends the wrong signals (obviously). We can’t just keep engineers and technicians on ice until war breaks out.
So when you get CRs, which usually match the previous topline from the last fiscal year (sometimes you get some extra thrown in for priority operations, which is hard to forecast for) you eat into both the Pentagon and industry’s ability to do what any other business does: plan, forecast, request, produce, and deliver to the needs of the customer. Sure, some will say the new budget will come around eventually, but by the time it does half of the fiscal year will have already been consumed by a CR. This is no way to run a business, let alone the US government and especially not the US military.
Additionally, because those CRs usually match last year’s topline, they don’t often account not just for inflation but also for other increases in the price of munitions, spare parts, etc due to other confounding factors like contract renegotiations, cost overruns, production delays (because you had a CR last year too). Spare parts shortfalls and delays are the most significant impact to readiness other than munitions, and can impact us on Day 1 of a war when half the fleet is down for maintenance.
In aggregate, for the last 15 years, the DoD budget has not truly shifted to reflect strategic realities, it has not had the time or funds to build up stockpiles of munitions that can kill aircraft, ships, and target and strike in denied environments to levels that would be expended in a fight against the People’s Liberation Army. Instead of real, multi-year procurement orders, an executable shipbuilding plan and budget (this is not all on Congress), training programs for workers, a force structure realignment that matches strategy and so on…what we get is a Potemkin village of national security policy that seeks only to fool ourselves, generate press, and make everyone feel like they “did something.”
Some appropriators will blame the DoD for not asking for more (they do), but DoD also asks Congress for what it *thinks* it can get and that isn’t always tied to operational realities. The sequestration and GWOT years broke a lot of morale and lot of brains. So even when funds are available, they aren’t always allocated correctly or are left without a champion especially once district and special interest priorities are factored in. Splitting the policy and appropriations committees remains a serious impediment to any real budget reform or restructuring.
And again, for a lot of these programs (minus shipbuilding) we really didn’t need to raise the topline beyond inflation. We just needed to settle down and actually assess priorities instead of sprinkling a little money around to everyone. Our inability to prioritize and make budgetary sacrifices reminds me of Frederick the Great’s comment about how in defending everything, you defend nothing. We have to pick our battles before the enemy chooses them for us.
So what we have in summary is 15 years (and counting) of a failure to adequately act on strategic realities that we have long known about and ignored and are now trying to compensate by piecemeal legislation largely designed for domestic consumption in an election year while the PLA has no problem funding its modernizing its force at breakneck pace. But hey, Xi won’t be able to buy shares of Facebook on the NYSE or farmland in Missouri after he takes Taiwan, so that makes up for it, right?
I will say that I don’t want to take away from the good impact bills like the DJI ban and BIOSECURE will have on national security. They have been hard fought against a litany of bogus CCP-funded lobbying attacks and will contribute to a safer nation. But the messaging and perspective being sold on this China week is all wrong and misleading to the American people and the policy community. I’m the first one to say soft power matters in our cold war with the CCP, but it only matters if it is credibly backed up with a force capable of deterring, fighting, and winning against the PLA. Without significant changes to DoD and whole of government funding, this China week is not only a joke, it’s an excellent reminder that there is no longer a party of national security and that for all of the good work that has been done in the last 4 years to fight the CCP, we still have a long way to go. And we’re running out of time.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual. And don’t forget to subscribe!