Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, recently called $733 billion the “floor” for the defense budget in 2020. He is correct.

In the summer of 2017, both Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Joseph Dunford affirmed that the Pentagon would need between 3 percent and 5 percent annual growth above inflation until 2023 to build military capacities sufficient to meet foreseeable threats. Their public assessment of budgetary needs came well before release of the National Defense Strategy, but it was based on the arching focus of that document: the challenges presented by increasingly powerful and aggressive China and Russia. The re-emergence of near-peer strategic competition has significant implications for the Defense Department and the nation at large as they determine how to protect U.S. national interests.

The most important implication is that the country has to properly resource the strategy. Otherwise, said strategy will be nothing but a wish.

This is the warning brought by the co-chairs of the National Defense Strategy Commission to the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room on Nov. 27. Ambassador Eric Edelman and Adm. Gary Roughead, the commission co-chairs, warned the committee that “the available means are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ends.” Or in plainer English, right now Congress is not appropriated enough money to do everything that is called for.

The commission found that 3 percent to 5 percent real growth of the defense budget — the amount called for by earlier by Mattis — remains the best available estimate of what is needed to fulfill the National Defense Strategy. The same rationale prompted Inhofe to make increasing the defense budget is his central line of effort and to state that $733 billion is the floor for defense in 2020.

Unfortunately, the current defense budget does not grow by 3 percent over the next five years. Indeed, it fails even to keep pace with anticipated inflation — meaning that the Pentagon would effectively lose purchasing power in several of the projected years.

Despite these assessments, President Trump has asked the Defense Department to find a way to cut its budget by $33 billion for 2020. Further, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the presumptive next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said he believes the defense budget is already too high.

Roughead would strongly disagree. His November testimony noted: “I believe that there is a sense that the last two years of growth have fixed the problems and nothing could be further from the truth, whether it's in readiness, whether it's in conventional modernization, or nuclear modernization.” Roughead provides some powerful counsel: The last two budget years provided much-needed relief to the defense budget, but are not nearly enough to fix all that ails the military.

The 2019 edition of The Heritage Foundation's Index of U.S. Military Strength shows marginal improvements in the readiness of U.S. armed forces. However, it also shows that there remains a long way to go. According to its assessment, the military is still only marginally capable of meeting current and rising threats.

The budget increases for 2018 and 2019 put the military on a trajectory to recover some of its lost readiness and to kick modernization programs into a higher gear. It is far from a completed task. It is but a fragile beginning, highly dependent on staying the course.

If our country's leaders make the mistake of assuming that the military has been “taken care of” and can afford to have its budget reduced, the country will quickly return to the low levels of readiness that shocked Mattis when he returned to the Pentagon.

An even bigger shock would be if Mattis were to leave the Pentagon with the military at the same or worse levels of readiness, simply because political leaders failed to respond to the clear warning signs that lay in front of them.