“With our Marine Corp pilots having to visit museums to look for aircraft parts…we are dangerously unprepared and our adversaries know it.”
The United States has neglected our conventional military forces and we are now facing the consequences of that error. I wrote an article several years ago about fighting the last war, a mistake that militaries have made throughout history by preparing for the last threat, the last technology, the last war a nation fought. The Maginot Line in France is the most well-known example, with France building a huge fortification, only to see the new German mobile armor simply drive around it.
Even though our officer corps studies this history in our military academies, we have made this mistake just the same. We have neglected our conventional forces in favor of a force structure built to fight unconventional, low-intensity conflicts.
Yes, terrorism is a threat. Yes, we needed to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and now we have to face the Islamic State in the Middle East and elsewhere and ‘wipe it off the map,’ as our commander-in-chief frequently says. And yes, they are an existential threat.
However, there are currently nation states rising whose military forces could weaken our security in the world, and even threaten our existence as a country, if we don’t pay attention to our weakened conventional and nuclear forces.
As Ronald Reagan so famously said, “the best war is the one not fought”. Peace through strength actually works! Yet for the last decade we have been weakening our conventional capability, and we are seeing the consequences for that choice.
The South China Sea is a glaring problem for our National Command Authority. Here you have the rising nation-state of China refusing to abide by international norms and aggressively militarizing the area, which is a well-travelled sea lane for international shipping.
Naval power has been a critical element of powerful nations throughout human history. Yet we have let ours atrophy. China would not dare take the actions they are taking if they feared the U.S. Navy like they used to. Freedom of Navigation is a vital right for freedom-loving people. It is basically equivalent to the rule of law, a concept America inherited from her English ancestors.
During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan brought America briefly to a 600 ship navy. We are now down to around 275, with President Trump’s military buildup focused on building that back up to 355 ships over the next decade. We even have the Navy looking to bring carriers and destroyers out of mothballs to meet this target.
Will this be enough? China was not a factor during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Now the Middle Kingdom is aggressively building its armed forces to a near-par status with the United States. Helping to protect our allies in the Pacific is very expensive and taxing on our naval forces. Perhaps we should encourage our allies to do more as Trump says. Perhaps Japan should rearm and do more for its defense in the face of a rising China.
To top things off, China is moving closer and closer to the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin, holding massive naval exercises in the region routinely. This is obviously intended as a warning to the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon, illustrating that confronting China over its aggressive policy in the South China Sea will not be easy.
It also complicates the entire North Korean scenario which is becoming more dangerous every day with Kim Jong-un’s lunatic actions from missile tests, to public assassinations in other countries, to beating kidnapped American college kids to death. The new South Korean government is even in classic liberal denial over the threat from the North, going so far as to impede the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system on the southern peninsula.
The Philippines is no longer the naval base and close ally of America it used to be, making supply and deployment of forces in the region that much harder.
We have no real idea how China and Russia would act if a conflict on the Korean Peninsula erupted. However, I think it is a safe bet they would not be happy and possibly join with the side opposing the US. After all, we have precedence for this — the Korean War and Vietnam where the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union entered into the war on the side of our enemies, overtly and not so covertly for the USSR.
Does anyone really believe that we have the capability to fight a conflict in the Pacific against North Korea, China, and the Russian Federation? We used to … no longer.
We used to train and equip to fight two wars at once anywhere in the world. That is obviously no longer the case. With our Marine Corp pilots having to visit museums to look for aircraft parts and far too many aircraft down for maintenance and not mission ready, we are dangerously unprepared and our adversaries know it.
In Europe, the Russian rearmament and modernization continues at a rapid pace, in spite of the negative effects on the Russian economy from the Western sanctions and the collapse of the price of oil on international markets. Russia stopped increasing its defense spending this year but it is still on a blistering pace to replace old Soviet equipment with modern, near peer, highly capable equipment. Additionally, Russia and China don’t spend as much as we do for armaments. Therefore, they are getting more bang for the buck so to speak.
President Obama foolishly pulled all American armor from the continent. So, when the Russian Federation began acting in a much more threatening manner by invading Crimea and supporting the rebels in East Ukraine, members of NATO began to get very nervous, especially those from the Balkans and other former Soviet territories or satellites.
Only recently has U.S. heavy equipment began to find its way back to the NATO members on the border with Russia. Approximately 4,500 soldiers are now stationed in Poland and the Balkan countries to provide a trip wire to Moscow if they should desire to regain their former glory in this region. The American troops and their equipment are there on a ‘rotational’ basis as not to violate conventional forces agreements signed with Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of NATO.
It is a fact that at this time NATO could not stop any possible Russian invasion of the Baltic countries. They would be severed from the rest of the alliance along the border of Poland and Lithuania, only 104 km long and caught between Belarus and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which is armed to the teeth with missiles and other offensive weapons.
Would the United States risk nuclear war to save Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia? I think not.
Defense Secretary James Mattis knows all of this of course. He is attempting to play his current weak hand well, the same as Russian President Vladimir Putin has done over the last decade as he attempted to fight for Russia’s national security interests with a weakened and demoralized force.
Donald Trump was spot on. The American military is a shell of its former self. Congress must move forward with the financial authorization to make his blueprint for the rearming of America to move forward post haste. Our nuclear forces have to be modernized and rebuilt as well, to provide a credible deterrent.
While they are moving the ball up the hill completing this gargantuan task, the DOD needs to spend time and resources to remove the political correctness that has infested our military during the Obama social justice decade. Our former Dear Leader spent his energy turning the military into a social experiment for redistribution rather than focusing on its mission of protecting the American people from harm. The one well-defined mission of the federal government laid out in the Constitution was not carried out as it should have been by Obama, Valarie Jarrett, Susan Rice, and the like.
There is a great deal on the Trump administration’s plate. However, if there are a group of professionals anywhere that can bring a credible deterrent effect back to the U.S. military, the people Trump has hired, along with his leadership, can do the trick. We need it done yesterday. Our children’s future depends on it.
