Navigating the Fiscal Storm: A New Course for U.S. National Defense
The United States is sailing through turbulent waters: the post-Cold War unipolar moment has passed, and the 21st-century geopolitical landscape is shaped by sweeping social, political, and technological change. Our current defense policy, a relic from a bygone era, is an expensive and ill-fitting suit that no longer serves its purpose. The fiscal storm is upon us, and profound changes are needed to right the ship.
The Defense Elephant in the Room
The realization that the United States is in fiscal free fall is beginning to sink in. An economic crisis looms, one that bailouts and quantitative easing cannot stop. Regardless of the circumstances, profound changes in defense structure, leadership, and thinking are needed. These changes will inevitably evoke strong responses from Capitol Hill and the defense industry.
The incoming President has three choices:
- Allow service bureaucracies or external events to drive outcomes, resulting in few or no savings. This is akin to letting the ship drift aimlessly, at the mercy of the storm.
- Make marginal adjustments to the defense status quo, avoiding conflicts but achieving little change and only modest savings. This is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—it won’t save the ship.
- Leverage the fiscal crisis to reduce overhead, streamline defense investment, and reset the force structure, increasing capability and promising major savings. This is the bold course correction needed to navigate the storm safely.
This paper argues for the third choice: leverage change to build new, better forces for the 21st century, allowing for deep spending cuts of $400-500 billion. This approach enhances the U.S. military’s competitive advantage in future warfare and improves American national security by ending open-ended interventions without attainable political-military objectives. Assuming Congress acts wisely, the resulting annualized savings can both pay down the national debt and reorient U.S. military power to new forms of warfare.
Grand Strategy and New Thinking
Grand strategy, if it exists at all, consists of avoiding conflict, not starting wars. New thinking in defense and foreign policy prioritizes diplomacy and peaceful cooperation over military power. None of America’s potential opponents, except those with nuclear weapons, pose a direct threat to the American homeland. If international terrorism and criminality remain threats, then border security and tightly controlled immigration should be the top priority in national security.
Senior military leaders and their services cannot be expected to reform themselves and fundamentally change the military status quo—a World War II/Cold War structure that is expensive, single-service focused, and vulnerable to weapons of mass destruction. Peter Drucker, when asked how to change a large business enterprise, answered, “If you want something new, you must stop doing something old. People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete.”
In line with Drucker’s guidance, the incoming President must implement a new national military strategy that diverges sharply from the last 30 years. This strategy must scale back America’s forward presence, mandate adaptation to new forms of warfare, and address the requirement to retain and develop America’s best human capital in uniform.
Toward a New National Military Strategy
For real and meaningful reductions in the current $1 trillion national defense budget to occur, national command authorities must alter the nation’s strategic focus. New national security legislation must move the posture of U.S. forces away from military interventions focused on nation-building, democratization, or alleged threats. Instead, the defense posture should focus on the Western Hemisphere, learning to avoid patterns of behavior antithetical to U.S. interests.
The following five points offer the foundation for a new national military strategy that is both affordable and sustainable within the new multipolar, international system of the 21st century:
• Defend America First: Reserve the use of American military power for defense of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Secure U.S. borders, coastal waters, and airspace. Military power may be used to defend American citizens and identified vital strategic interests at home and abroad. However, unless the United States’ vital strategic interests or territory are directly attacked, Washington will avoid the use of force.
• Maintain Strategic Military Power: Ensure U.S. freedom of action in areas of strategic importance by preserving and enhancing the American military’s core capabilities. Identify, defend, and maintain critical lines of communication and a reduced number of overseas bases needed for the execution of these tasks.
• Declare a “No First Use” Doctrine for Nuclear Weapons: Maintain the scientific-industrial capacity to wage high-end conventional warfare and build nuclear weapons, but recognize that the alleged advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is illusory. Preventive or preemptive war is unwise and immoral and should be excluded from American military strategic planning.
• Establish an Operational National Defense Staff: Develop, update, and implement a refined Unified Command Plan to dramatically reduce unneeded overhead and improve the U.S. Armed Forces’ responsiveness to national command authority. This action requires legislation to place a “Chief of Defense” in the chain of command with real authority, not just advisory responsibility.
• Build New Armed Forces for the 21st Century: America needs a strong military designed to protect the United States in the 21st century, not an anachronistic and expensive industrial-age structure with enormous overhead and few fighters.
Trends in Force Design
Precision strike effects (kinetic and non-kinetic) using a vast array of weapons in all domains enabled by the rapid and timely dissemination of information through networked Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in 21st-century warfare. Russian military success in the recent war between Russia and Ukraine owes much of its success to the integration of many factors.
First, the mobilization of manpower, economic and industrial production. Second, Russian production of key weapons systems rose dramatically after October 2022, immediately after U.S. Commerce Secretary Raimondo told Congress that U.S. sanctions had reduced Russia to using semiconductors from “dishwashers & refrigerators” for their weapons. Third, Russian weapon systems performed beyond Western expectation. Western weapons did not. Washington and its allies infused Ukrainian Forces with equipment and technology on the scale of U.S. Lend Lease to the Soviet Union during WWII, but the weapon systems and equipment could not outpace Russian performance.
Finally, Russian commanders on the battlefield still had to direct their forces, tactics mattered, and the readiness of the Russian soldier to close with and destroy his opponent was critical to battlefield success. Russia’s decision to conduct a strategic defense in depth reduced the sensor-to-shooter time to the point that operational strikes using cruise missiles, glide bombs, rocket artillery, and tactical ballistic missiles were directed by brigade commanders against targets in minutes. What emerged was an ISR-Strike Complex that integrated maneuver and logistics across thousands of square miles to magnify the impact of Russian military power. In this operational setting, the defense triumphed over the offense.
Russian Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS) shot down roughly 35,000 drones, 647 aircraft (all types), and 283 helicopters. Russia’s tight integration of ISR with Strike Weapon Systems (artillery, rockets, missiles, and aircraft-delivered bombs) is responsible for 870,000 casualties of an estimated 1.8+ million Ukrainian casualties. The numbers of Ukrainian dead probably exceed 600,000. Meanwhile, in less than three years of combat, the Russian military sustained 120,000 casualties, including 75,000 soldiers killed in action.
Open disbelief in the possibility that Russian ISR-Strike Complex could defeat masses of armor and aircraft resulted in repeated battlefield failures costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. The point is that ISR and Strike capabilities now shape mission areas that cut across all domains (land, sea, air, and space). Single-service command structures are obsolete. U.S. capabilities must be integrated within the ISR-Strike Complex at the operational level to detect, deter, disrupt, neutralize, or destroy opposing forces decisively. Much of the Ukrainian force that was destroyed resembled our force structures and equipment. This recognition demands a thorough analysis of our own forces, weapons, and employment norms from the standpoint of effectiveness and efficiency.
After WWII, Eisenhower said, “Separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever.” The time to translate Eisenhower’s vision into reality is long overdue. Defense investments, commitments, and missions must be aligned with new forms of warfare that make traditional maneuvers on the battlefield extremely difficult, if not impossible. In other words, it’s time to optimize today’s forces within the trend lines shown below to guide strategic investment/acquisition over time.
Aligning defense investments with the evolutionary trends alters the traditional defense paradigm. Optimizing “capability at cost” inside the Post-Industrial Age structure dramatically increases the operational impact of each dollar spent. Failure to correct contemporary industrial age inefficiencies and duplications reduces operational impact and perpetuates unsustainable “cost exchange ratios” with opponents as seen in Ukraine.
In sports, getting to the ball is not enough. Winning teams move to where the ball is going to be; to where their players can pass the ball for a scoring shot. Teams win by identifying patterns in the game’s evolution, patterns they can leverage. Patterns are not absolute and adjustment to leverage the patterns is required on the way to victory.
Warfare is similar. Hindsight tells us that machine guns and artillery would kill millions of unprotected infantrymen during World War I. But hindsight could have been foresight if viewed through the right lens. In Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the author argues that corporations should create specialized, autonomous organizations to exploit new technologies or risk squandering revolutionary capabilities inside status quo organizations. A special purpose organization designed to lead changes in defense is needed for the same purpose.
Persistent surveillance linked to modern Strike Weapon systems including tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, rocket artillery, manned and unmanned systems of every kind make the conduct of traditional amphibious, airborne, or airmobile operations impossible in anything but permissive environments. Moving large ground forces, tracked or wheeled together with supporting logistical equipment, ammunition, food, and medical supplies with sea transport over the vast distances of the Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian Oceans is not viable in contested environments. Long-range precision Strike from submersible, surface, or land-based platforms dominate the battlespace. In other words, repeating any of these operations on the scale of WWII would be suicidal.
The implications for ground forces, Army and Marine, are significant. Until these ground forces can find ways to cope with this strategic environment, they should be reduced in size and reorganized. U.S. Army and Marine Corps missions must be reevaluated in the context of future needs and requirements. A modest amount of redundancy in capability can be helpful, but there is simply too much. It would make sense to shift most of the light infantry or motorized infantry missions to the Marines and shift high-end conventional warfare missions to the U.S. Army.
In the meantime, Army end strength and Marine end strength should be reduced to 430,000 and 120,000 respectively. The two services must be viewed as components of the larger ground force. Their roles and missions must be redefined by informed civilian leadership.
Thousands of Marines floating around the world waiting for a crisis to break out is wasteful. We should retain the capability to conduct amphibious operations and to evacuate Americans worldwide. But self-labeling USMC as America’s 911 force is a recipe to promote more relevance, funding, assets, and people that are not needed.
Marines and Soldiers already share equipment sets and train together in the Army’s school system and training centers. In the absence of a requirement to maintain large Marine forces in readiness to conduct amphibious operations, the two services need to conduct thorough roles and mission review since they are likely to operate together in the future.
Marine aviation is costly and difficult to maintain. Mandating the consolidation of Marine jet-driven manned aircraft with the Navy’s airwings would seem an obvious solution in a battlespace where future close air support missions are likely to be performed by unmanned systems.
The U.S. Navy confronts similar challenges. Fleets organized around large surface combatants like modern aircraft carriers are now easy to identify, target, disable, or sink. Submarines and unmanned submersibles are the foundation for American maritime dominance on the high seas, not a fleet on the Midway-Jutland model. Submarines rule the waves.
The incoming Secretary of Defense should direct the reduction of the Navy’s Surface Fleet to 8 Carrier Battle Groups (CVBGs) and rebalance home porting in response to new national priorities. Combatant commanders should also be instructed to reevaluate “presence versus surge” naval requirements given improved long‐range precision strike and ISR capabilities of smart presence alternatives.
Like the Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, the Navy and the Coast Guard are moving closer together in terms of mission profile and required capabilities. It makes sense to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard into the U.S. Navy. If blended seamlessly, the two complement and reinforce one another.
Aerospace forces must also cope with new challenges. Integrated air and missile defenses are more capable now of identifying target forms regardless of aircraft design. These developments suggest alterations in modernization and force design priorities. Hundreds of manned bombers on the B-21 model are not affordable. Alternative platform solutions that are less expensive but still capable of delivering ordinance at high altitude must be found. To this point, the F-35 has proved to be a delicate wallflower that cannot withstand the rigors of practically any operational environment. The future Secretary of the Air Force must address this problem.
Clearly, the Service Secretaries will require flexibility to re-direct any identified savings. In other words, Service Secretaries will need to move money around to better align themselves with the new strategy. An example would involve reassigning Embassy Guards to light infantry formations, or re-investing savings into a future capability or infrastructure. The same applies to operational funding cuts.
Nuclear weapons remain unchanging necessities for national defense until some new breakthrough in technology renders them obsolete. The problem Americans confront is the tendency to think about nuclear war within an emotional framework that is grounded in the past. The rising lethality of individual warheads and the capability to deliver multiple warheads with a single missile system suggests that matching a potential opponent’s arsenal weapon for weapon makes no sense.
Americans should design the nuclear force by determining what is required to make a first strike suicidal for any nuclear power. Then, decide what is needed for that purpose to ensure launch reliability and national protection. Placing large numbers of nuclear weapons and warheads in the American Midwest, America’s breadbasket, should be reconsidered or even replaced by placing more weapons at sea.
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