William Greenwalt assesses Congress’ regrettable inaction on defense spending.
As Congress takes its August recess, these are trying times for defense. With so many moving budgetary parts, one can be forgiven for confusion about what is actually going on. There is Trumpian rhetoric of $1.5 trillion in new defense spending split into mandatory and discretionary tranches, Reconciliation 3.0 and 4.0, an Iran supplemental, the National Defense Authorization Act, traditional defense appropriations bills, continuing resolutions (CRs) that are clean or contain anomalies, and of course the overall threat of a government shutdown.
Realistically, the likeliest outcome in this Congress is a CR and, depending on an election that brings the Democrats back to power, perhaps a full-year one. This would reflect a drastic reduction in America’s ability to meet its national security commitments. Ironically, it would also mean that the US and Spain, a historical NATO spending shirker, are on a collision course to spend the same share on defense as measured by percentage of GDP. As President Trump called for Spain’s expulsion from NATO over its lack of security spending, perhaps this is part of a freeloading congressional plan to expel ourselves from our alliances.
But aren’t we on the cusp of the biggest defense budget in history? Well, not really. The Republican Congress is failing to deliver and is rapidly running out of time to do so. Recognizing that and making sense of all the various pieces of the budgetary puzzle are the first steps in having a real defense debate when Congress returns in September.
One must give President Trump credit for setting a spending baseline for America and its allies. NATO (including the US) is committed to a significant increase in defense spending that is also being replicated in Asia. This is a profound achievement that finally meets President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s goal of effective allied spending burden sharing. Still, Presidents Putin and Xi, Kim Jong Un, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have also done their share by acting like caricature Bond villains, scaring US allies into opening their wallets.
