Are we having fun yet?
A quick scan of existing and emerging threats to the U.S. and its vital interests ought to end any lingering debate. The Pentagon must prepare to fight two simultaneous wars in two widely separated geo-political theaters.
Right now, I don't think we can do it.
Well, no. We can't. And if somehow we could the price we'd pay will be very high. We'd pay in blood for what we refused to pay in money before the shooting starts.
The Obama administration ended the goal of being able to meet even the theoretical ability to fight two medium level wars "nearly simultaneously" in favor of being able to fight a land war without serious naval opposition and a naval war elsewhere without serious ground force needs.
Yes, this current challenge was all predicable when the Obama administration instituted our own "ten year rule" in early 2009 that said we faced no threats justifying preparations for serious threats:
The administration has simply decided not to spend the money for future wars. That's the basic problem.
But we've made that decision to reduce defense spending and make sure this reduction doesn't affect the current war. Given this, the reason for my worry about the long-term spending is the whole "medium term" basis for all these decisions to slight our future (medium term) defenses. We assume no enemies will match us in the medium term. This is undoubtedly correct. But this also sounds too much like we're instituting the British Ten Year Rule from 1919.
It was a perfectly reasonable rule when adopted by the British government in 1919, which stated the British would not face a war in the next ten years. The rule was formally abolished 13 years later, in 1932. But defense spending did not rebound from its post-1919 collapse, and when war broke out in 1939, the British only barely proved they'd done enough to withstand the German offensive in the opening of the war.
Certainly, we won't face such a dramatic collapse in defense spending that the British military endured in the 1920s. My worry is whether we will do any better than the British did in recognizing when our version of the ten-year rule no longer holds true. When our national debt is scheduled to skyrocket even under optimistic administration projections, will we actually ramp up our defense spending once the medium term is over in order to maintain our military superiority? Or will we just continue to act as if the medium term never ends? That's what the British did. But they had the Arsenal of Democracy to back them up when they found themselves at war without the military they needed. We don't have such a back-up source of arms.
We've just instituted the Medium Term Rule on our defense spending. The problems that will flow from this plan won't show themselves in the near term. We can coast on our past progress in building the best military in the world. But have no doubt that our military strength will erode, and this means we are accepting risks in case we have to fight a conventional war in the medium term despite our assumption that we can still win such a war.
We won't cancel the Medium Term Rule until it's too late to do any good.
Excuse the lengthy quote from my own post. But warnings have not been heeded. I'm hoping it isn't too late to fix this.
One of my early published works (from 1997) focused on the insanity of the "nearly simultaneous" caveat for fighting land wars, I'll note.
But the situation got worse. And the threats have expanded. So there you go.
As an aside, I read one article that derided Trump for his defense promises because so far our forces aren't getting bigger. This criticism is way premature.
One, he hasn't had a budget yet.
And two, the first step is not to expand a force that is short on full manning, spare parts, training, and ammunition.
After fixing those unseen problems, then you can expand the force structure. Which also takes time, because Obama didn't build that military.
And so right now we have the military we wished to have back in 2009.
