A Course Correction on National Security

The next president of the United States will be confronted with a very different strategic environment than the one that greeted President Joe Biden.

Supporting Ukraine and Israel in wars that didn’t exist four years ago, the U.S. military is stretched, and the defense industrial base lacks the capacity to provide the equipment, weapons, and platforms needed. Every day brings additional evidence that our competitors are cooperating more closely across military, industrial, and economic lines. The viability of the all-volunteer force is in question. Private sector innovation increasingly outpaces the government’s ability to adopt new technology. Perhaps most importantly, as it underpins all other problems, the American public is not attuned to the threats the United States faces or prepared to support what is necessary to surmount them.

China and Russia see U.S. political dysfunction and growing strains of isolationism on both the left and the right and believe that the United States is unable and likely unwilling to stand in their way. Ukraine is the test case of U.S. commitment; the jury is still out.

As chair and vice chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, charged with providing Congress and the president an independent review of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, we recently released a unanimous, bipartisan report. In this report, we found that the strategy is woefully out of date and insufficient to address the urgent threats. We recommend that the next president make major changes in the overall U.S. approach to national security—at the Defense Department and far beyond.

Specifically, rather than tripling down on the national security strategies of the past two presidents, the next administration should get rid of the post-Cold War mentality and plot a new course.

For nearly 40 years, the United States had the luxury of being the world’s global superpower, enjoying uncontested primacy and shouldering the immense international responsibilities that came with it. It wielded overwhelming military force for rapid and decisive victory at a time and place of its choosing with comparatively little loss of life or treasure. The Pentagon could afford to take decades and spend billions of dollars (generally behind schedule and over cost) on small numbers of enormously capable systems to provide nearly invulnerable battlefield advantage. It benefited from the U.S. network of alliances for basing and access but didn’t rely on other nations to supply forces for a decisive edge. The U.S. democratic system of governance and capitalist economic philosophy faced no significant challenge worldwide.

But today, China has systematically built a military capability designed specifically to counter the U.S. advantage, fusing it with diplomatic, economic, and social policies to spread global influence. Our commission studied the methodical 20-year effort by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to build sufficient quantity and quality of conventional weapons as well as space, cyber, and strategic forces to make it a peer competitor. Analyses and wargames show that China has clear advantages in operations west of the international date line, given its ability to contest U.S. logistics, target U.S. ships and other platforms at long range, and outproduce the United States and its allies. The PLA is on track to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping’s tasking to be able to invade Taiwan by 2027. (Xi’s other stated goal is to be the world’s sole superpower by 2049, and China is moving out on that one as well.)

If we did go to war in the Taiwan Strait or the South or East China Sea, we could lose. In fact, China has the cyber-capability to disrupt our critical infrastructure at home—turn off the lights, shut down transportation—and contest our ability to move people and equipment by air and sea with the effect of keeping the United States out of a fight in the Pacific in the first place. This is a similar, but more sophisticated, effort than ongoing Russian cyberattacks on U.S. and European critical infrastructure aimed at disrupting aid to Ukraine.

Russia’s extensive reconstitution and mass mobilization following its 2022 invasion, combined with its willingness to accept massive losses and escalate rapidly, make it a less predictable but still highly capable force—and one that is unlikely to rest if it achieves its objectives in Ukraine.

China and Russia are investing around the world, through the Belt and Road Initiative and proxy security public-private partnerships like the now-defunct Wagner Group, to curry favor and to expand their footprint in locations with military and economic strategic significance. The lack of U.S. military, diplomatic, and investment presence is ceding the field.

More significant still in strategic terms is China and Russia’s stated “no limits” partnership, joined by North Korea and Iran as inaugural junior members. Theirs is the most significant bloc of anti-Western states since the Axis powers in World War II, freely sharing munitions and industrial equipment, trading in sanctioned goods, and providing one another with diplomatic cover for their misdeeds.

The coordination among this group of authoritarian states means that a conflict that erupts with any of them anywhere could quickly become a multi-theater or global war. The “one theater-plus” force construct from the past two administrations, designed to fight a great power in one region and deter aggression elsewhere, falls far short.

The miasma of aggression from Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militant groups across the Middle East, fueled by old hatreds amplified by Israel’s military operations in Gaza, indicates that the United States will have to remain engaged and postured across the Middle East despite policymakers’—and the public’s—desire to turn the page.

Other concerns continue to simmer but could boil over. Terrorism remains alive and well; Islamic State affiliates have carried out major attacks in Iran and Russia this year, plus dozens more across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. An older threat—that of nuclear conflict—seems increasingly possible. Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening to use theater nuclear weapons, and China is vastly increasing its nuclear stockpile. North Korea remains bellicose, and Iran has crept dangerously close to a nuclear breakout capability. The relatively stable nuclear balance of the Cold War, governed by mutual assured destruction, is teetering on instability.

Finally, the ever-increasing pace of technological change creates new challenges and opportunities to whoever can harness it most effectively. Yet it is far from clear that the U.S. government can adopt technology produced outside its labs at the speed required. All of these dynamics point to the desperate need for the next president to embark on a new approach to national security from the past two administrations.

We strongly believe that the United States should continue to play a leading role around the world to safeguard its national interests, preserve a global economic system that works in its favor, and stand up to growing authoritarianism.

The commission proposes five changes that can be implemented through the national security and defense strategies of the next president and by Congress through legislation and appropriations: building a balanced, coordinated effort across all elements of national power; placing commercial innovation at the heart of military modernization; posturing a force to match the threat; investing smarter and investing more; and forging a national consensus on security and service.

The United States used to have an “all of nation” approach to national security. The State Department, not the Pentagon, developed the containment strategy that won the Cold War and promoted democracy behind the Iron Curtain. U.S. manufacturing supplied the world. U.S. economic aid and investment built partnerships, exported American values, and checked Soviet influence. The public understood the threat and shouldered the burdens.

Today, our national security challenges all look like nails, and the Defense Department is by far the largest hammer in our toolkit. Through neglect and underinvestment, most of the U.S. government has drifted away from national security. Ask anyone at Defense what priority No. 1 is, and they will tell you it is strategic competition with China. Ask the same question at State, and, if you’re lucky, you’ll hear one of the 19 objectives listed in the Joint Strategic Plan—only one of which involves diplomacy for great-power competition. The departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Homeland Security, Education, and others have made important contributions to an “all elements of national power” approach, along with domestic priorities, but lack the focus, resources, and authorities needed to secure the United States.

Our approach should emphasize planning and practicing with allies as well as strengthening them—diplomatically, industrially, and militarily. The United States can’t deter and defeat the China-Russia-North Korea-Iran partnership alone; the closer we engage and more we strengthen our allies, the better off we will be.

Second, on innovation, the Pentagon was built around a model of funding military-relevant research and development and plowing the results into procurement of weapon systems. In 1960, U.S. defense spending accounted for 36 percent of global R&D. By 2019, that had fallen to 3.1 percent. Today, the private sector outpaces the Defense Department in 11 of the 14 technology areas the Pentagon has labeled as critical for success.

The department’s business model hasn’t kept up. Efforts to change—the Defense Innovation Unit; the Replicator Initiative, tasked with providing thousands of autonomous systems in 18-24 months; and the creation of the Office of Strategic Capital to use loans and loan guarantees for defense investment—are laudable and much needed. But they remain the exception, not the rule.

Ukraine can update drone warfare against Russian electronic warfare on the scale of weeks by closely integrating the military alongside domestic small businesses on drone design and manufacture. The U.S. defense system runs on a five-year budget designed to prevent moving funds and with mountains of red tape that discourage new market entrants. Change is based on incremental updates to existing programs, even when they are ill-suited to future needs. The United States needs a revolution in innovation adoption—and a revolution in the risk-averse, exquisite legacy systems culture and business model at the Pentagon and in Congress.

Our third recommendation is the need to align posture to meet the threat. With two active conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and a third contingency in Asia to deter, a “one theater-plus” construct is insufficient. Even if we focused all effort on China, as some pundits and members of Congress suggest, we would still need a force that could compete with China’s presence across the global south, defend the U.S. homeland, and fight to win in space and cyberspace.

The commission proposes a multi-theater force construct. This doesn’t mean we need triplicate capabilities from all of the military services for each region. It does mean that, in greater conjunction with our allies, we need to maintain a baseline presence in the East Pacific, at the heart of NATO, and in the Middle East capable of projecting power and deterring aggression with forces that can be surged when needed. It also includes a residual presence—military and otherwise—in Africa, the Americas, and the Arctic. We also propose maturing operational concepts that apply technological advantage and draw on space, cyber, and information warfare, alongside traditional forces, to overcome our numerical deficits vis-à-vis our great-power competitors.

A multi-theater force will require manning, equipping, maintaining, and resupply beyond what the U.S. and allied industrial bases can currently provide. Congress recognized the need to rehabilitate the defense industrial base in the April 2024 supplemental, and the Defense Department has scrambled mightily to ramp up U.S. production and coordinate international efforts to supply Ukraine—but far more will need to be done to fight a protracted campaign in one front, let alone multiple.

Fourth: Amid all this, we must be smarter in how we spend our national security dollars. A huge step toward more effective spending would be ending the annual self-inflicted wounds imposed through congressional “continuing resolutions” that freeze existing spending in place of passing a new budget. Another would be to rethink the unhelpful division of appropriation accounts that pit “defense” and “nondefense” spending against each other, as if the defense budget were the sum total needed for security—ignoring the role of diplomacy, sanctions, protecting critical infrastructure, educating a defense industrial workforce, and shoring up supply chains and access to critical minerals.

But confronting the most severe threats since the Cold War will also require spending more, proportionally comparable to the amount we spent between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the low point of defense spending during the Cold War in 1979, the United States spent 4.9 percent of GDP on defense. Today, we are at 3 percent and falling (in real terms). Additional investment is needed—and not through printing more money. Increased spending on national security accounts should be paired with increased revenue measures (personal and corporate taxes) and reforms to entitlement spending rather than adding to the national debt.

Congress will never take the steps to spend what is needed or raise taxes or trim entitlements without the support of an informed American public. Our fifth recommendation is that citizens need to understand the magnitude and complexity of the threats and that the normalcy of their lives is tied up in the United States and its allies preserving the international system they have built over decades.

Recent polling shows that only about 1 percent of Americans think that national security is the biggest problem facing the nation. Compounding the situation is that public trust in the military dropped from 70 percent in 2018 to 48 percent in 2022, while the importance that people place in patriotism has shrunk by half since 1998. This is not a populace ready to shoulder the burden of providing for the common defense.

Indeed, the Army, Navy, and Air Force have struggled of late to recruit the number of Americans required to maintain an already reduced force size. We must ask ourselves whether an all-volunteer force—which completely depends on the American public’s willingness to serve—will be able to handle the threats we face.

Neither major candidate for president is talking much about threats to U.S. national security—that conflict could come to the United States or that we might lose a war with China if one broke out. Important debates over support to Ukraine, the conduct of Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, or the advent of artificial intelligence rarely feature explanations of why these things matter to the United States and its ability to secure our interests. It is a failure of leadership across both parties on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that the public doesn’t understand why U.S. global leadership is needed or that the next war could be affect us at home.

Achieving a national consensus will take time and must start from the top. The next president should speak openly and directly about the threats and propose bold responses. Congress should debate needed legislative reforms and how to pay for the national security system we need. Students should learn about the world and opportunities where they can make a difference—whether in the military, other public service, in industry, or elsewhere. Businesses should consider how their ingenuity can promote national security—just as companies shifted production to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. When presented with the facts, the American people will do what is needed. Waiting for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to start the conversation will be too late.

None of this will be easy, but the next president and right-minded members of Congress have the opportunity to chart a new course.