Conservative Opinion by: Matthew Continetti.
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The Pentagon’s defense budget is customarily a source of contention between the left and right. While the $773 billion requested for 2023 sounds like a huge sum, the budget provides for — in addition to security aid for Ukraine — items like countering China, supporting clean energy and combating suicide in the military. Straight Arrow News contributor Matthew Continetti argues President Joe Biden is underfunding the DoD given global threats and inflation:
Pentagon ditched the “two-front” war preparedness strategy under Barack Obama. Meanwhile, U.S. defense spending as a percentage of the economy has been in decline for decades. Biden has shown little interest in changing its downward course.
Biden’s fiscal year 2023 request is for $773 billion. Maybe that seems like a hefty sum. It’s not. Biden’s defense budget is meager compared with the tasks he has set out.
Why? Part of the reason is inflation.
The Biden budget request paints a rosy — and inaccurate — scenario.
My American Enterprise Institute colleague, Mackenzie Eaglen, suggests that a more honest accounting of inflation would raise the military’s needs to at least $794.5 billion next year.
That still isn’t enough, however.
Eaglen recommends a 9% increase in the Biden administration’s top-line to $846 billion in FY 2023. That is before Congress and its appropriators become involved to match defense investments against national security threats. Her proposal makes sense.
But it won’t happen for several reasons.
The first is inertia. None of the threats we encountered or fear we might encounter in the post-Cold War world have provoked the people’s representatives to increase defense spending to Reagan-era levels. The political willpower doesn’t exist. We’ve muddled through for 30 years, this thinking goes. No need to stop now.
The second brake on defense spending is the progressive bias against hard power. Obama’s and Biden’s skepticism toward the military has had an effect not only on materiel but also on the culture of the national security establishment. Progressives see the Pentagon more as a vehicle for social policy and geopolitical featherbedding than as an instrument of deterrence and the national interest. America grows weaker even as its leader calls for greater global activism.
Someone needs to make the case for a major U.S. defense buildup in response to the challenges of China, Russia, and Iran. And they need to do it soon.
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