RICH LOWRY: A $1 trillion defense budget isn’t enough

President Donald Trump likes big round numbers, and he’s endorsed one — $1 trillion — for the U.S. defense budget. This is the right idea, and we’ll need even more soon enough.

It is the president’s wont to declare national emergencies, whether a given situation warrants it or not, but the state of our defenses is a true crisis. While the Pentagon hasn’t recovered from the post-Cold War drawdown and Obama-era strictures on its spending, foreign threats have been rising. This disconnect could, in the worst case, result in the United States losing a major war and its great power status.

We have been neglecting a key theme of American strategic thought from the beginning of the republic, which is that only strength can deter conflict.

The Pentagon has been facing what MacKenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute calls a “doom loop.” If pay raises are off limits and the number of civilian employees never goes down, then it is, perversely, investments in munitions that take the hit. “Deferring modernization results in a shrinking, less capable and mostly more expensive force,” she writes. “The more equipment ages, the more expensive it becomes, as assembly lines close, parts break and replacements are needed.”

As we’ve been running in place, our enemies have been building capacity. Ukraine hawks make much of how the war has degraded the Russian military. In recent congressional testimony, though, Gen. Christopher Cavoli said that the Russian army is bigger than it was at the start of the war, and the 600,000 Russian troops on the front line are roughly double the initial invasion force. Russia is on pace to replace all the weapons systems it has lost in the war so far, and is churning out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles and 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles a year. We make 135 tanks a year.

As for Beijing, according to Eaglen, its military budget has increased roughly 9 percent a year over the past three decades, and her research shows that it is as much as three times higher than publicly acknowledged. As she writes, “China now fields not only the world’s largest navy, but also the world’s largest army, air force and strategic rocket force.”

Given all of this, there’s no alternative to us spending more, and using the dollars, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said of the $1 trillion, “wisely, on lethality and readiness.” Above all, we must undertake the R&D that creates the cutting-edge weapons system for the next 30 years the way the Reagan build-up did in the 1980s.

That said, the Pentagon deserves a good and thorough DOGEing. Its procurement process is a wasteful mess. Too much money serves sclerotic bureaucracies. It needs more innovation and risk-taking. And it should be taking advantage of the opportunity represented by new, hungry, private equity-funded defense firms that can usefully disrupt the old practices.

We don’t want to find ourselves unprepared for a war not of our choosing in the Indo-Pacific with an enemy that has engaged in a world-historic defense expansion, that can better concentrate its forces, and that has a defense-industrial base ready to shift to war footing.

In that circumstance, whatever we have saved over the years by nickel-and-diming our defenses will have been the most expensive budget savings in the history of our nation.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.