President Reagan talked a lot about securing peace through being strong, and there's no question that our military is strong. But that strength is not absolute. It takes a lot of resources and constant innovation to keep up—especially when countries like China continue to grow their military presence around the world. So how do we keep up? This week, we dig into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), and the priorities that Congress must sanction in order to keep our military strong and prepared. In addition, we look at some of the differences in President Biden's defense priorities and the implications.
Ronald Regan: We've heard the phrase peace through strength so often its meaning has become blurred through overuse. The time has come for America to recall once more the basic truths behind the familiar words. Peace is made by the fact of strength, economic, military, and strategic. Peace is lost when such strength disappears, or just as bad, is seen by an adversary as disappearing. We must build peace upon strength there is no other way.
Tim Doescher: From the Heritage Foundation I'm Tim Doescher, and this is Heritage Explains.
Doescher: We've spent a lot of time on Explains discussing various security and defense issues happening around the world, and how the U.S. should respond. From the ever-growing threats coming out of China...
Clip 1: China is now shifting its focus to military preparedness, making what some U.S. military experts perceive to be power moves on multiple fronts.
Doescher: To uncertainty in North Korea...
Clip 2: Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korea's leader delivered a blunt message to the U.S. administration on Tuesday warning that the Biden White House was, "Trying hard to give off gunpowder smell in our land," and that, "If the U.S. wants peace, it had better refrain from causing a stink."
Doescher: Causing a stink? Is that a technical term? How about Iran? What's happening there?
Clip 3: An abrupt end to nuclear inspections in Iran may have been avoided by a last minute deal, but Iran is making its terms clear. And the Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Iran just might start enriching uranium up to 60%.
>>> Index of U.S. Military Strength
Doescher: It's always a little unsettling to be reminded of the very real threats that exist throughout the world. But for many of us, they're hard to keep in context, that's because we have the greatest military in the world.
Doescher: As we heard President Reagan at the top of the episode, we know peace because we are strong, but that strength is not absolute. It takes a lot resources and constant innovation to keep up. So how do we do that? Well, the NDAA, or the National Defense Authorization Act, is probably the best place to start. It's where Congress sanctions most of the activities of the U.S. military, from day-to-day costs like personnel, to major purchases like aircraft carriers. This is where we shape the future of our military strength.
Thomas Spoehr: A lot of people propose, "Hey, there's not going to be a war next year. So we can do without these jet fighters, or we can do without these tanks or these ships, and we'll start developing something new and cooler." Well you're taking a big risk there, you're gambling with the security of United States, which is never a good idea. And so my thought would be proceed slowly, those things for which you can find no use today, okay, get rid of them, but make sure you don't put yourself down a path that you can't get out of when you need to.
Doescher: That's General Tom Spoehr, He's the director of the Center for national Defense here at the Heritage Foundation. He's a good friend of Explains, and this week he and Senior Policy Analyst Fred Bartels join us to talk about what President Biden and Congress must prioritize in order to ensure our way of peace by being prepared to stand strong against potential threats.
Doescher: General Spoehr, Fred thank you so much for coming into the studio today.
Spoehr: Yeah. Happy to be here, Tim, thanks.
Frederico Bartels: My pleasure Tim.
Doescher: It has been, seeing you face to face, man. This is real life. I mean, it's been Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings for an entire year. So this is in-person, live, it's beautiful.
Spoehr: It is nice. Yeah, it's nice to see some flesh.
Bartels: Yeah, you have a smile made for YouTube, not for radio.
Doescher: Oh Fred, man. What a way to start out, this is it man. All right. Well let's start talking about NDAA stuff then, that's a great transition. Yeah, perfect.
Doescher: So I'm going to start with General Spoehr here. The NDAA, it's a big deal that's not covered wall-to-wall in the media. We've got leadership in town here in Washington, D.C. At the beginning of the episode, we heard Reagan speak about his idea of peace through strength. President Trump agreed with that. My question is, is how does President Biden see it? And does Congress agree with that?
Spoehr: Yeah. Great question. And national defense has historically been, in the history of our country, a bipartisan kind of topic where you can find support for a strong national defense on both sides of the aisle.
Spoehr: And President Biden has kind of subscribed to that. So in his campaign, and now that he's been in office, he hasn't said much, but what he has said is that he does not believe that national defense needs a significant cut. Now, the proof is in the pudding. We'll see what he actually does. There's a lot of people in his party that are pushing him to reduce defense spending. I don't think he's going to do that. Some of the prominent voices in Congress are also saying they don't see a big cut in defense spending. And I think if they were to do something like that, that would be a hammer that the Republicans could probably use against them as well.
Doescher: Yeah. Fred, you've done a lot of work on this, your awesome report recommendations on how to appropriate all of our different needs in the military, the NDAA. I think we're spending somewhere around $700 billion with a B. Tell me, do you think that number is going to remain the same here? Are we looking at less, more? What do you think?
Bartels: So the budget has been around $700 billion for the last few years, and that was in order to buy the military out of the readiness crisis that was created under the Obama administration. During the Obama years the idea was that you can let go a little bit of current readiness and try to invest in the future, and you would assume that by now that future would have panned out.
Bartels: But the end result was a readiness crisis where you had forces that were not ready to accomplish their missions. And you did not have the new equipment rolling in. You had a lot of R&D, some that was fruitful, some that was unfruitful. And that is the question now of how the Biden administration is going to tackle that improved readiness, and is still the necessity to prepare for gray power competition into the coming years.
Doescher: It seems like we actually have a chance here in having some real influence as to how to spend this money the proper way, given that the Biden administration is more open to fewer cuts and more focus on preparedness.
Spoehr: I think that's true. And I was listening to Congressman Mike Rogers the other day, he's the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee. And he made a great point that they're not going to pass a National defense Authorization Act without Republican votes. Because there are some Democrats that we could be in world war three, and they are not going to vote for a National Defense Authorization Act.
Spoehr: And so if Congress is going to pass such a thing, they're going to have to have Republican votes. And in order to get Republican support, they are going to have to address the top priorities that are pretty much a common view in this town about what the military needs to do to prepare for the next 20 to 30 years.
Bartels: An interesting segue on that point is that Adam Smith, who was the current chairman of the House Armed Services, in his first year as chairman last year, he tried to get a bill through conference that Only had Democratic support. And I believe that he learned the lesson that that is not possible. So there needs to be bipartisan cooperation from the top line to the minutia on how they are investing every single dollar in that way from military construction to the top line itself.
Doescher: Well, let's get into some of the specifics of the NDAA in terms of recommendations. And I know Fred, you've done a lot of work on this, so you guys can throw it back and forth to each other, but I was reading in preparation for this, the sister of Kim Jong-un, Kim Yo-jong, she's been a real player in the direction of North Korea. And she recently warned Washington should, "Refrain from causing a stink if it wants to sleep in peace for the next four years."
Doescher: We know they have nuclear weapons, and we obviously know Russia and China, they've done a lot of work to modernize their nuclear arsenals. Talk a little bit about that because we do know that China and Russia have modernized. What does that mean in context of us? So we're behind them right now?
Spoehr: Way behind. And so we haven't made a new nuclear weapon in 30 or 40 years. And it's not just the fact that our facilities are old, but our scientists that used to do this, they're either dead or retired. And so we have to work off like their memoirs.
Spoehr: On the other hand, Putin's arsenal is 86% modernized, and that is made in the last five or so years. And so we're not in a dangerous position because all of our nuclear weapons we believe would work today, but they are in danger of becoming obsolete and irrelevant.
Doescher: Would people on the left agree?
Bartels: Agree? Yeah. Care? That's a different question.
Doescher: Care or agree, wow.
Bartels: Because there is a shared understanding of the state of our nuclear deterrence. The political question is how much determines do you believe is enough to actually deter the adversaries that you have? And that is a question that you don't ever want to get it wrong.
Doescher: I remember, let's see here, I think it was 2010, it was my second year of law school. I was reading about, for the first time, I had never been really in on this issue at all, but I was reading for the first time about how outdated our Navy is or was then. Have we made any strides since 2010? You include this in your report that we need to update it. How far behind are we with the Navy?
>>> Hits & Misses in Biden’s Interim National Security Guidance
Spoehr: Maybe to answer your question, Tim, we have the best Navy in the world, but we have people that are sprinting behind us and we're not going as fast as they are. And so China is building roughly 20 to 30 warships a year. The United States is building five to seven. So we've got the best Navy in the world, but this country is right behind us and they are going great guns. And if we don't pick up the pace, they're going to lap us.
Doescher: Yeah. My brother-in-law was based out in Japan and we went and toured his ship. And I think it's the oldest ship there, in that fleet, 1969, I think the year was. So much has changed since then.
Spoehr: So yeah. Imagine driving a Ford Pinto, a 1969 Ford Pinto, and thinking you're the baddest guy on the block.
Doescher: Yeah, that has to be a priority. So we've got, okay, nuclear modernization. We've got updating the Naval fleet. Go ahead, what do you want to say, Fred? Sorry.
Bartels: What I was going to say as well is that the PLA Navy has reached 350 ships as well. And they are not operating just one Navy. They operate coast guard and a maritime militia as well. You know, all those Chinese fisher boats that you hear about doing illegal fishing, like in the Solomon Islands and stuff like that, that's a completely different class of boats that they're able to utilize to promote their stated policies. And you also have the coast guard that is now under their central military command as well.
Doescher: So let's now just go into China, because I know here at Heritage that's a huge issue. We can't talk enough about China. It affects almost every single part of our public policy here in America. How can we be more prepared to take on China's growing threat against America?
Spoehr: I'm an army person and for me, step one is get organized. And right now, as a country, we need to be better organized to combat China. Because China uses all elements of their national power, economic, diplomatic, political, and yes, military to counter and to compete with others.
Spoehr: The United States that thought doesn't come as easily for us. We like to work on what's the Pentagon doing? What's the Treasury and Commerce doing? What's the State Department doing? And we don't do a good job of harnessing all those elements in a concerted strategy.
Spoehr: I think the political will is now there to get everybody working together. But our system of government, which I love, doesn't lend itself to concerted action as well as, say, an authoritarian regime. Again, I wouldn't trade ours for anything, but we have to be realistic that getting the State Department and getting the Pentagon all working in the same way, comes harder in our system of government.
Doescher: One thing that I'm gaining here is that change takes a long time with military.
Spoehr: Yes. And so I was head of a particular component in the army and I sometimes envied other militaries like the one in Qatar, because if their chief woke up one morning and said, "Hey, we're replacing all the M16 rifles with M4 carbines," he could make that happen in a year.
Spoehr: When you set out to change something in the United States military, it takes a decade. Because it's two million plus, you have to harness the manufacturing of the United States and you really have to set your mind to it. So we don't turn on a dime. You really have to plan and then execute.
Spoehr: And then while you're doing that, administrations change, Congress changes, and so you have to somehow keep your plan intact through multiple leadership changes at multiple different levels, really hard. And then there's technology. So right when you're in the middle of something, somebody comes up, "Hey, here's a new and better thing." And all of a sudden the thing you were working on is no longer relevant.
Bartels: Inertia is a very powerful force at the Pentagon, for good or ill. If you put it in the right direction, it will take a while for it to be pushed away from the right direction. But if it is in a direction that you don't want to get, it's also going to take a while for you to push in a different direction.
Spoehr: Yeah. And before we leave your listeners with all doom and gloom, there is some good news here.
Spoehr: And so unlike two or three years ago where Joe Biden said when asked about China, he said something like, "Come on, man, really?" All of the skepticism about China, that they are a threat, is gone now. And so even the most progressive elements of the Democratic Party, even the libertarian elements of the Republican Party, everyone now is very clear-eyed about China. And China is actually making that fairly easy with their reaction to COVID, how they tried to cover up that whole affair and thwart the investigations, the speech they just gave in Alaska condemning the United States. They are actually making this very easy for us to gain an appreciation of what they're really up to.
Doescher: Fred, I read in your report, and also General, your report as well, the need to end unneeded legacy platforms. What does that mean?
Bartels: So Tim right now legacy platform is in the eye of the beholder. It might be a technology that exists. It might be something that we have used for 10 years very effectively, or it might be something that in the past five years, people realized that it wasn't as useful as it would be.
Bartels: Well, every iPhone that is an existing is a legacy technology. Does it mean that it's not necessarily useful? That's not the case. So the question is about defining the terms and understanding what are necessary to still be in the inventory, and what is not, or what has proven through time that it is not that useful. You're placing a bet on what the future of war is going to look like. And historically we lost all those bets.
Doescher: Yeah. I think about shifting money to other more necessary priorities. I always hear, "If we're ever in another war, it's not going to be boots on the ground, it's going to be through the air," kind of a thing. General-
Bartels: Your sprinkler system is always useless unless there's a fire, but you can't predict when the fire's coming.
Doescher: Yeah. But again though, there are priorities, there's only a certain amount of money that you have to spend. And so General, tell me a little bit more, how would you respond to that idea of, "Hey, we should take money away from developing tanks and put it towards our Air Force, or put it towards nuclear modernization?"
Spoehr: I would respond very carefully. Because what you don't want to do is take away a capability that is contributing today on the promise of something that might be here in five or 10 years.
Spoehr: And so I go back to my experience in the army. When we got rid of our old tanks, we got rid of M60 tanks in Germany, we got the new tanks the next day essentially. There was no gap. There was no, "It's in the mail," kind of thing.
Spoehr: A lot of people propose, "Hey, there's not going to be a war next year. So we can do without these jet fighters, or we can do without these tanks or these ships. And we'll start developing something new and cooler." Well you're taking a big risk there, you're gambling with the security United States, which is never a good idea.
Spoehr: And so my thought would be proceed slowly, those things for which you can find no use today, okay get rid of them, but make sure you don't put yourself down a path that you can't get out of when you need to.
Doescher: Tell me a little bit more about where you would like to see the next four to eight years head. If you had your ideal, just pie in the sky ideal, what would you like to see happen over the next four to eight years?
Spoehr: I'd like to see our Congress, our president, and our country get behind having a bigger Navy. Fred talked about the challenges of countering China. We have 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, more than any other country in the world, but we can only usually get one or two in the vicinity of China because we have to cover all the other areas. We have to cover the Indian ocean. We have to cover the Atlantic. We have to do all these other things. And so one or two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the proximity to China is not going to be sufficient. We need a bigger Navy, more capable. That doesn't mean we can or should neglect the rest of the military, but we do need to beef up our Navy.
Bartels: And since you told me that it's pie in the sky, four to eight years, what I want to see is faster development cycles. The example that Tom just spoke about on the development of a different tank, I want that cycle to be shortened.
Doescher: General I've always wondered this, since you've been working here at Heritage, do you miss the army?
Spoehr: I miss the army every day. I'm driving or biking to work, and I see the army guys on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, the bike path there, out running, I miss that. I miss the comradery, the sense of a common mission.
Spoehr: I got to be honest, Heritage is probably the closest thing you can find to that. We're all here united in a common mission. I like it because it's organized, the meetings typically start on time, the coffee's hot. And so if I can't be in the army, and it was time for me to go, I'm happy that I'm here at Heritage.
Bartels: And you're implementing running here at Heritage, aren't you?
Doescher: That's right, the General Spoehr 5k, it's the intern 5k.
Spoehr: Doing my best.
Doescher: It's a famous, famous event around these parts. Well guys, I think the only thing missing from our conversation today was an adult beverage. So the next time, the next time we're going to have to do this maybe down the road at a local establishment.
Spoehr: Sounds great.
Doescher: Thanks for coming in.
Spoehr: Yeah, thank you.
Bartels: Thank you, Tim.
Doescher: And that's it for another episode of Heritage Explains. Thank you so much for listening. We've got Fred's massive report linked in the show notes. Log on, see all 56 of his recommendations on ways that we can be more prepared and more ready to stand up to military threats all around the world.
Doescher: Also, I linked to General Spoehr's Piece, Hits and Misses in Biden's Interim National Security Guidance. This is a great primer, it'll help you synthesize all this complex information and help you tell other people.
Doescher: Michelle's up next week, and we'll see you then.
