School of War - Ep 146: Eric Edelman and Thomas Mahnken on America’s Defense Strategy Crisis

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Eric Edelman and Thomas Mahnken of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments join the show to talk about what our defense establishment has gotten right, and wrong, in planning for the next war.  ▪️ Times      •      02:10 Introduction      •      02:43 National Defense Strategy     •      06:58 Continuity between administrations     •     08:55 Multiple theater force construct      •      17:31 “A flawed net assessment”      •      28:30 An imbalance of power     •      34:46 Favoring the defense     •      38:42 Resources and cost Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It's difficult to look at events around the world and conclude anything other than we're on a national collision course with something tragic. Meanwhile, year after year, budget after budget, official strategy after official strategy, the U.S. has failed to build a military capable of projecting power where it's needed. Hence the backsliding and the accelerating feeling of things spinning out of control. Some say the right response to this more dangerous world is to write a lot of it off. It's not our problem. to leave Europe, for example, to its own devices and trust that disorder there won't directly affect us. Those curious about this approach should check out the 20th century when we tried this twice and see how it worked out then. Others, like my guest today, argue for a dramatic reversal of our current course and a major defense buildup.

Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. What the experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Eric Aedleman. He is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He's had a long career in public service under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Ambassador

to Finland, Ambassador to Turkey. Eric, I believe this is your second time on the show. And ahead of you, you have your fellow guest, Tom Mankin, coming in at number three, his third appearance. When you get to five, there's a set of steak knives, Tom. Tom is president and chief executive officer of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He also teaches at Johns Hopkins Seis, where Eric, I should say, you're at Sice as well. I have to- I have stopped teaching, but I was there for 15 years. Excellent, excellent. Well, welcome, welcome back both of you. Thank you for joining, and you gentlemen are both just wrapping up your service on the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. Eric as Vice Chair and Tom as a commissioner. You released your findings here

earlier this summer, and it generated some attention. And I wanted to just tee us off by asking a very broad question for those maybe who do not follow these processes closely at home. What is the National Defense Strategy? Where does it fit in the nation's policymaking process? And from there, we'll go to your recommendations. Well, maybe I can start. And Tom, you know, I'm happy to have him chime in and correct me where I get things wrong. So first, the National Defense Strategy is requirement of the National Defense Authorization Act. Department of Defense has to provide one at that outset of every new administration. It is the legacy requirement of earlier requirements that the Department of Defense provide a quadrenial defense review. That was what it was called

in the 90s and early parts of this century. And the Congress decided, starting really in the late 90s with one of the QDRs that was done in the Clinton administration. And it wanted to have a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts provide the Congress with essentially a second opinion of any given administration's effort to craft a defense strategy. And so there was a national defense panel in the late 90s that reviewed the second QDR of the Clinton administration. And then it fell into dissuadeude for a way. while during the Bush administration. And then in 2010, the Congress brought back the idea of having

a panel provided with a second opinion. And so there was an independent panel to provide the Congress in its view of the QDR that was produced in the Obama administration. Then in 2014, a national defense panel to review the second Obama QDR in 2014, a National Defense Strategy Commission that looked at the Trump administration, 2018, NDS. I was the co-chair of that version of the commission. I've actually served on four of these, the 2010, 2014, 2018, and most recent one. I co-chaired the last one with Admiral Gary Roughhead and was vice chair, as you mentioned, of this iteration. I was incredibly fortunate as a vice chair to have an, you know, a vice chair. the Republican side, appointed by Republican members of the Congress, three commissioners

who had served with me in 2018, Tom being chief among them, but also General Jack Keene, former vice chief of the chief of staff of the Army, and Roger Zackheim, the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Institute. So all four of us were recidivists, and then we had four colleagues pointed out by the Democratic side. And I would stress, and I'd like to take the opportunity to say that Jane Herman, our chair, did really, I think, Yelman's service and trying to make this completely a nonpartisan exercise. And so, although we had four people appointed by Dems and four by Republicans, I don't think in our deliberations, you know, it would have been very easy to tell, at least for most of the time, you know, who came from where. And our report did in the end,

you know, reflect a unanimous consensus of the eight commissioners. Yeah, just, just, just to agree with Eric and just, you know, spell it out. I mean, yeah, the NDS Commission came into being because Congress was looking for an independent, bipartisan look at the administration's national defense strategy. And I'm personally grateful that we managed to achieve a bipartisan consensus, you know, on such a, such an important topic as the national defense strategy. So the basic idea is the president and his staff at the White House establish a national security strategy, each administration, then the national defense strategy is the military component of that sort of nests within the national security strategy, better nest within, given that the president's commander in chief. And then you folks come along and provide, as you put it, Eric, a second opinion. What is the basic worldview of the 2022 Biden, Austin, I guess you would say national defense. strategy. What did it change? If anything, was it change from 2018 and Trump, I guess, is that Mattis in 2018? Or is there more continuity or more change? Like, what's the baseline that your

critique launches off from? Yeah, look, I think there's, first off, there was a lot of continuity between the Trump administration's national defense strategy and the Biden administration's national defense strategy. Maybe more continuity than, you know, partisans of either side would like to admit. The, you know, the previous national defense strategy was, was remarkable because of its emphasis, its recognition of the reality of competition with China and Russia. And with it, you know, the prospects of at that time, 2018, you know, the prospects of a great power war. The Biden administration came into office even more focused on China. And then, of course, course, you know, reality intervened. I mean, reality in the form, unfortunately, of the Ukraine

war and then subsequently in the Middle East. And so I think that's, you know, one of the things that we had to accommodate in our commission's deliberations. It was supposed to the continuity between the previous administration and the current administration. And then also the way that the world has unfolded subsequent to, you know, to those documents. So one of the, I think, headlines out of your report and one of the ways in which it distinguishes its vision of America's National Defense from really both the 2018 and 2022 strategies is that you call for a, quote, multiple theater force construct. And the actual strategy does not. What does that mean? That's quite a mouthful, multiple theater force construct.

It's also kind of, I wonder if it's sort of intentionally vague in the sense that it's not. two-war or two-theater, you know, it's a little broader than that. Say what you mean by that. Say what the actual strategy calls for and why your proposal is in your view superior. Well, maybe I'll start, but Tom has written on this publicly outside of the commission, and so he is, you know, really the expert on the matter. Aaron, as you know, in the wake of the Cold War, the United States developed a strategy that was focused essentially on the ability to wage what were variously described as, you know, two major regional conflicts or major contingency operations, one of which was putatively in the Middle East, essentially an operation against Iraq

or Iran, and one was in Northeast Asia, essentially a scenario on the Korean Peninsula. And that is the construct that the Department of Defense used throughout the 90s and then into the 2000s. to size the force and structure the force that the United States, the joint force that the United States would maintain. In the 2018 strategy, there have been permutations and combinations of this over time, and the 2018 strategy was the first one that explicitly said, we will not structure and build the force to fight two wars simultaneously. We're prepared to fight one major adversary, and we will hold the other.

essentially, you know, at bay with our nuclear deterrent. And the 22 strategy said essentially the same thing. I think in 2018, we were actually raised concerns about this in that review. And I think the concern we have is that when you say that you have a one war strategy, in some sense, it's really a no-war strategy. Because what you're really saying is that you have sufficient forces, extant, in the force, to be able to win one conflict, but you'll be at some risk, maybe high risk. I mean, I think our judgment in 2018 is we would have been at high risk everywhere else in the world. So you, you, what the Secretary of Defense essentially in the position of the, in a crisis being asked by the president, do we have the forces to respond to this act of aggression? And the Secretary of Defense says,

well, you know, Mr. or Madam President, we do, but you're going to be at high risk everywhere else in the world. So, you know, if it were in the Indo-Pacific, yes, but you'll be at high risk in Europe and you'll be at high risk in the Middle East. And frankly, under those circumstances, how many presidents do you think are going to choose to actually respond to aggression? So I think it is our view that the United States, and I think our view is that reality has imposed this on us, the reality of the war in Ukraine, the reality of what's happened in the Middle East since October 7th. We have, we're a global power with global interests, and we have to have a force that's capable of doing many things at once and basically deterring conflict, hopefully,

in all of these places. So we have to have sufficient forces that can do more than one thing at a time because you don't want to make yourself subject to potential opportunistic aggression if you commit yourself to one fight and have someone join in in another. But again, Tom is really the expert on this having written in foreign affairs and elsewhere on this subject. Well, yeah, I don't know about that, but no, I appreciate it. Look, I, you know, Eric talked about the world as it is. And so I think we considered the world as it is. And the world as it is includes certainly three vital theaters for the United States, the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. And previous administrations have tried at various times in various ways to downgrade or disengage us from those different theaters

unsuccessfully, wholly unsuccessful. And so if we are a global power, and I believe, to my marrow, that we are a global power, then we need to account for three theaters. That's one part of the world as it is. Another part of the world as it is involves the adversaries that we face. And we face China, we face Russia, we face North Korea, we face Iran. And if we just think about them acting on their own, you know, those those adversaries don't respect kind of regional boundaries that we draw up. China is active not just in Asia, but across the world. Russia similarly is not active just in Europe, let alone North Korea or Iran. So if we think about even just, you know, having to face any of those adversaries, such a conflict might, you know, might span theaters. And now is the emerging reality of our adversaries increasingly overtly collaborating with one another. And so that's led to, you know, what I like to call an axis of authoritarianism that we face. And that axis spans theaters. And so any force planning construct that the U.S. develops, I think to our, to our mind, needs to account

for that reality. Not to say that we don't set priorities, but we do need to acknowledge the world as it is, and that's a world where the United States has interest across theaters. The United States faces adversaries across theaters and that those adversaries are increasingly collaborating with one another across theaters. Let me just add one other thing to what Tom said. if I might, which is in addition to our the state adversaries that Tom, you know, listed quite correctly, you know, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, all of whom are now collaborating with each other in intensifying ways. We also still face a threat of, you know, mass casualty attacks from violent Islamist extremist groups. And we just had a reminder of that, of course, with the

cancellation of the Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna. that's a threat that remains out there. That threat, my personal view is has been exacerbated by the Biden administrations, catastrophic and shambolic, you know, withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so that's something we have to be prepared to deal with on a kind of steady state basis while we deal with all these other problems that Tom outlined. So, Tom, you repeatedly use the expression where we're dealing with the world as it is. there is a line of critique of your work for the commission in this report that runs something like, on the contrary, you are dealing with the world as you would like it to be, specifically in terms of American power.

America simply in the year 2024 does not have military resources. It does not have the defense industrial base. It does not, I mean, we can continue the list. Those are two pretty big ones right up the front to maintain. its primary role in the balance of power in these three regions to the extent that it does. Maybe it's a bit Fugazi even in the moment. And as a consequence, we are fantasizing if we think that we are going to be able to effectively deter or indeed, if necessary, win a conflict that is multi-theater in nature. In fact, in the attempt to do so, what we are actually doing is eroding our ability to deter anywhere, particularly in Asia, where for a variety of reasons,

We actually, I think, based on what you write in the report, I think there's probably a point of universal agreement here, where Asia is the primary theater, we will fail to deter a war there because we are overextended. Classical, great power slash imperial, call it what you want, overextension, it has befallen or felled empires, our primary powers in the past, and it looms here. And you commissioners, you have been correctly, as this critique would continue, you have been correctly sounding the alarm about our lack of resources. You're right about the diet. for multiple rounds now. You've been right about the diagnosis. And yet little meaningful work has actually been accomplished to address it. So it's your prescription that's wrong. And the correct

prescription, someone used this word, I think it was U-Tum, is to prioritize. We have to prioritize. And that means allies in Europe and the Middle East simply need to understand that if they're not on their own, exactly, they are substantially on their own and they're going to need to figure it out. because we are going to go to the Pacific and we are going to effectively deter there. Eric Aedleman, Tom Mankin, what say you to this line of argument? Well, I think first off, that line of argument sells short the United States. I think it sells short the American people. I think it sells short the U.S. economy.

And, yeah, so I think that's the one thing that it does. I think another thing that it does is it tends to oversell our adversaries. So I think that view flows from a flawed net assessment of the balance between us and our adversaries. And by the way, any such net assessment should include not just us, but our allies. And so if the real lineup, you know, is America and its allies, let alone its friends, versus this axis of authoritarianism, I'm not sure how you can bet against America and its allies. to the argument that, and if you take that argument seriously, then the United States needs to play an active role working with its allies. And here I'll defer to Eric, the career foreign service

officer who knows much more about alliance relationships than I do. But my experience as, you know, as a scholar and practitioner, has been that our alliances are much more effective when the United States is actively engaged. Indeed, we see it. Right. We see it in the resources. response to Russia's War of Aggression in Ukraine, where our allies are supporting Ukraine also across theaters. It's not just our allies in Europe that are supporting, and even our friends in Europe that are supporting Ukraine, the allies across the globe. So I think that's an important part of it. We can have another conversation about how effectively or efficiently or ineffectively or inefficiently the U.S. government does its job in generating

American power and American military power. That's another part of what we talk about in the Commission's report. There's plenty of room for discussion. There's plenty of room for improvement there. But ultimately, the idea that, you know, the United States is not a global power, should not be a global power, to my mind, underplays America and our allies. I guess I would just add two major points to what Tom said, Aaron. One is, since the Second World War, one of our great comparative strategic advantages as a nation has been the fact that we have a global set of alliance relationships that our adversaries have lacked. We have a multilateral, integrated military alliance in Europe, which kept the peace throughout the Cold War and ultimately brought about

the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. We've had bilateral defense treaties with important powers in East Asia, our bilateral treaties with first and foremost Japan, but also the Republic of Korea. Once upon a time, the Republic of China, Taiwan, but now not a treaty obligation anymore, but other obligations enshrined in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 that came about after we average. brigated our treaty in order to fully normalize relations with the People's Republic of China, treaty relationship with the Philippines, which is now increasingly important, and of course, in Australia. And we have not treaties, but a system of so-called special relationships in the Middle East, notably with Israel, but also the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, others, Morocco. And those defense commitments that we have to our

allies are in some sense indivisible. The idea that we can look at these theaters of operations in some kind of stovepipe and say, well, we're going to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and, as you said, tell our allies in Europe and the Middle East to, you know, fend for themselves by and large. That will have enormous impacts on our allies in the Indo-Pacific, on whom, for instance, we rely for access to the region. And that access is particularly important, given the build up of Chinese capabilities that are aimed at limiting our access to the region. So the notion somehow that these commitments are divisible, I think, is a Camero, honestly. And, you know, I think back to the Obama administration's failure to abide by its own red line on Syria's use of chemical weapons.

Tom may have had the same experience. The people I heard from who were most exercised about that were our Japanese and Korean colleagues, who were worried about what did that mean for the U.S. commitment to defend them in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, et cetera. So that's point one. Point two on the military means at the disposal of the United States. You know, look, our last report in 2018 said the United States, if current trends continued, was at risk of losing a conflict if we got into one. And I could go back and there's a steady stream of reports. I mean, in 2010, our report said that we could see a train wreck coming because the resources

we were devoted to defense were declining in the Obama years and the challenges we were facing were increasing. In 2014, after the Obama administration executed its so-called pivot to AIDS, we were Asia, we said that the Budget Control Act, which imposed across the board 10% cut in the Defense Department budget, was a strategic misstep for which we would pay in the future. In 2018, as I said, we forecast the potential we'd lose a conflict. We came back as a group to look at this in 2023 and 24, and we found everything had gotten worse, but that's not an act of God that we were responding to.

That was the act of human beings in the United States Congress and the executive branch who have not prioritized the national defense. I mean, as we describe in our report, we're facing arguably the biggest challenge we've faced since 1945, more complex and in some ways more dangerous than in the Cold War. Yet the resources we're devoting to defense have been declining. That's a choice that we've made. And the same for our industrial base. The reason why our defense industrial base has been shown to be lacking during the Ukraine exercise. And in that regard, I think President Putin did us a favor in

sense because it exposed the fragility of our defense industrial base. But the reason it's fragile is because after the Cold War ended, we took a big procurement holiday, spending decreased. And the defense industry had to consolidate into a smaller number of units capable of producing defense goods. And we're now paying for that. And it is true that if we're going to be a global power and deal with the challenges that we describe in this report, we're going to have to make a major investment in that defense industrial base in order to allow it to be able to surge production because what we've seen in Ukraine and also in the Middle East is that modern warfare, you know, is, you know, it is very costly and it is going to consume enormous amounts of munitions. Let me push a little harder on the specifically on the question of the military balance.

And the very first thing that you said, Tom, that this line of critique undersells the United States. And listeners, the show will be unsurprisingly, you say, I'm with you on a lot of what you say to include the indivisibility of commitment. seems to me to be, or of challenges, seems to me to be hard to argue against these days. There was a, I was wasting time this morning on Twitter instead doing my work. And there's this guy I follow, perhaps you're familiar with his work. Tom Sugert, by maybe mispronouncing that, possibly Sugart. I've never actually met him. But he's affiliated with CNES, former submariner.

And he had a tweet thread this morning, which is, you know, a thing that we do these days, about this, you know, the Chinese containerizing anti-ship capabilities so as to disguise them. and how a ship that potentially, he's a scholar, an expert in these matters, a ship that potentially could be a base or nest for such containerized items, is just sitting right now at a pier something like a mile or two from the Norfolk Naval Base. And it's an alarming, really interesting, actually, thread that, you know, he has no evidence, obviously, that this ship has that kind of thing on it. He simply makes a pretty strong circumstantial case that it could.

And here it is. It's sitting right in front of us, which makes it. makes you think, of course, that, you know, why would we assume that a war, even just with China, occurs in the Western Pacific? It could easily start in the Atlantic, or at least involve a very early component in the Atlantic. So anyway, leaving all that aside, the military balance, I do think there is a dilemma. I don't think you guys would reject that there is a dilemma here that we need to have a serious answer to, which is, it's all well and good to say that, yes, we'll counter allies in the balance of power. The United States, the economy is really, comparatively

speaking not that bad compared to our adversaries. We'd rather be us than them, et cetera, et cetera. Nevertheless, China is doing the equivalent of making a play for Cuba, as though the United States were making a play for Cuba, is making a play for something in its own backyard in a Taiwan scenario, arguably in a conflict with the Philippines too or any number of other scenarios we could think about. And we are not. We are going halfway around the world. We are projecting power at a point away from the United States, it's sort of much further away than Europe, obviously, are probably comparable to the Middle East in terms of logistical challenges, but then a much more serious adversary. So they can put everything they've got into it. But what you guys are saying is actually,

we kind of have an obligation not to. We have an obligation to manage all of these other commitments as well. And so, you know, how can you be so confident? I feel like this line of critique would then utter, how can you be so confident that the balance of power, in fact, is in our favor? even if we even if in a magical world where Jane Harmon and Eric Edelman and the commissioners and Tom Mankin suddenly were emperors for a day in our defense commitments and spending and so forth, did everything you recommend in the report? Well, that's still years to go before we really get to where we need to be. So how do we, you know, shouldn't we be a little alarmed about the balance of power specifically in the Western Pacific? And what on earth are we going to do about it in the short to middle term?

of course we should be concerned about the balance of power in the Western Pacific. And that is the most important theater. But I think the point is first that if not the only theater, as you pointed out, I've known Tom Schuagart for a lot for years. I respect him and his work. And I think it's valuable in getting us to think beyond outside of the box. And so while we're thinking about outside of the box, we should avoid thinking about a particular scripted scenario, say for a China-Taiwan conflict,

that conflict could erupt in any number of ways, as you pointed out, a conflict with China could emerge in any number of ways and it could grow in any number of ways. So even, you know, even if you're only concerned about China, which I think is sort of an outdated view, quite honestly, given the cooperation, collaboration between. between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Even if we can imagine that somehow we could magically isolate the China challenge from everything else, that China challenge is not synonymous with the Taiwan Strait. That's an important component of it, but I think we can overfocus.

And again, as just as reasonable human beings who've lived the last, I don't know how many years, I mean, there is a real danger of overfocus here to the detriment of other challenges. And look, we've had multiple administrations that have earnestly tried to get us out of the Middle East. Where is that taking us? Earnestly tried to not get us out of Europe, but essentially, really radically reduce our posture in Europe. Where has that gotten us? I think at a certain point across administrations, both political parties, we need to acknowledge the reality. And the reality is that we are a global power with interests in multiple theaters facing adversaries that are active across theaters. And as Eric said quite eloquently, you know, where we are today as a result of

conscious choices that were made. And I think, think what the commission is saying is we, given the world we're in in 2024, we need to make some different choices. Yeah. I mean, I think it can't be stressed enough. I mean, there's, Aaron, you've been pummeling us with the, you know, the, you know, right wing critique of our work, but there is also a left wing critique of our work, which is that, you know, we're just a bunch of warmongers and we, you know, we want to, we want to just line the pockets of the military industrial complex by, you know, buying them more toys that, you know, only going to get us into trouble and get us into war. I can't stress enough that I think all eight of us on the commission

were animated by the view that the most important thing for the United States to do is deter a conflict and prevent war. The idea of a war in the Indo-Pacific, I mean, is it would be staggeringly costly, both economically and in, you know, not just in treasure, but in lives as well. And to your point about, you know, container ships sitting off Norfolk, one of the points we make in the report is there is no reason to believe that if we add in a conflict that the United States homeland is going to be a sanctuary, you know, the whole land is going to be affected, certainly by non-kinetic means, you know, cyber and other kinds of attacks, but potentially even kinetic, you know, attack. So we want to avoid that, you know, and the way to avoid that

is to create doubt in the minds of adversaries that they can easily obtain their objectives that they're willing to bear. And it's true that the military balance in the Western Pacific has been adverse to the United States and the trends have been going in the wrong direction. and this is something of previous commissions have tried to draw people's attention to repeatedly. And so, you know, for us to easily, you know, get to overmatch against China early is going to be difficult and take, you know, some time. But that doesn't mean there aren't things we can do to impose on them. Many of the kind of dilemmas that they've imposed on us that raise the cost to them and will hopefully create doubt in the minds of Xi Jinping and other decision makers in Beijing

that they want to take an early run at us and engage in some kind of aggression. That's what this is all about. It's about deterrence and raising the potential costs to the point where engaging in aggression does not appear to be a winning strategy for the other side. How do you folks think about, and this comes up in the report, but solutions that are designed for the short to middle run as we hopefully get our act together for the longer run. You know, this discussion of quote unquote hedge forces, the use of autonomous technology,

cheap, cheap, replicable, massed autonomous technology. You know, help listeners think through this dimension of the question, whether in the Western Pacific or otherwise. I mean, it does seem to me to the extent that there's good news here, it's that the consensus right now, I have two of Washington's leading defense experts right now recording this episode. But the consensus seems to me to be that we are back in a moment that favors the defense over the offense, that that seems to be a headline out of Ukraine. Nuclear weapons also sort of favored the defense, very broadly speaking, and that's another issue we should probably talk about. So for all the advantage that China accrues for the fact that its objectives are, a lot closer to mainland China than they are to us. It's still got to get across the water to get there and it's still got to build up beach heads, et cetera, there. What could we do in say 2026 about

these things that while we're building the shipyards, as it were? Well, and Aaron, I think your points at excellent one. And it's, look, it's not just getting across the Taiwan straight. I think we also need to think about the geography of the Western Pacific that is favorable to us. We have the tendency And it's understandable, you know, to think about the tyranny of distance, the distance from the west coast of the United States to, you know, to the Asian mainland. That does disfavor us. On the other hand, if you look at things from Beijing, the so-called first island chain, which, you know, we named before they adopted the name, let's call it what it is.

That's U.S. allies and U.S. friends going all the way from, you know, from Japan down through Taiwan, through the, you know, through the Philippines. that same maritime geography of the Western Pacific hams in China, hemms in China's control to the Pacific Ocean, to sea lines of communication. And to your point, in a world of precision strike, in a world of unmanned systems, there's great advantage in control of that terrain. And so I think we're, and here is another area where having capable allies like Japan, which is quite capable when it comes to air defense, when it comes to anti-ship capabilities,

submarine, anti-submarine capabilities. As Eric said, a renewed cooperation with the Philippines, our allies in Australia who are quite capable as well, that is advantageous to us. So I think there's a lot that can be done in the short term to take advantage of that favorable geography, including, quite frankly, working even more with our Taiwanese friends and helping them to defend themselves. And not just us, and this goes beyond the NDS commission. So I'd caveat it appropriately, but I think, you know, working with our, our close allies in defense of Taiwan. You know, I would just add one other thing. There are domains where we still

maintain huge advantages over our adversaries under sea, for instance. And that's one reason why past commissions have called for increased production, for instance, of Virginia class attack submarines, But to your point, Aaron, about, you know, building the shipyards, it's one reason why the defense supplemental that was passed in April was so important because not only did it increase our support for Ukraine, but there was a big chunk of money in there for the submarine industrial base that will allow us to increase our capabilities there, notably to make good on our undertakings with the UK and Australia as part of Augustus, which is, I think, one of the more salutary initiatives of Biden administration, but also, you know, to be able to just increase our own

production. I mean, we've called in the past for production of three Virginia class subs a year, up from two that were, you know, forecast that were actually producing about one and a half. You mentioned the supplemental. Roger Wicker, ranking member of Senate on the committee, obviously played a leading role in that, among other related issues on the hill. We just had him on the show talking about his report, 21st century, peace through strength. which calls for 5% of GDP to be spent on defense. It strikes me that from a very big picture point of view, his report and your commission's report are pretty consonant with each other.

There are some interesting, I'm curious to know how you would say. I mean, he calls explicitly in that report for a, quote, two-war force construct, which is a little more specific than where your report came down. So I'm curious how you think about that distinction. But I'm also curious how you think about the 5% number, what number is the right number. And then critically, and you gentlemen are our commissioners and scholars, so it's a little easier for you, I think, to talk about these things than elected officials. How are we going to pay for this stuff? Because it is really a lot of money. So please,

there were sort of a few questions in there, but feel free to tackle it, however you like. Well, just very briefly, because I know we're running out of time. First, I just, I think it's important to say that Senator Wicker's work and our work, you know, went on independently of one another. You know, we, now it's, it's also true. His staff had some sense of what we were doing on the commission because we had an interim report to the Senate Armed Services Committee that we did orally. So they have the benefit of that as they were doing their work. But these were two sort of independent efforts, and I think it's important to make that clear,

although there is a certain amount of overlap, as you point out, in what each group, you know, has argued. On the issue of resources, I think, you know, what we said in our report, if we'd had to try and get unanimity among, you know, everybody on what the top line number should be, we probably would never have come out, you know, with a report. Because I think we all have individual views, higher, lower, or what have you. But I think what we did say pretty effectively is if we make the argument as we do that we are facing a challenge, certainly has been. as what we faced in the Cold War, if not bigger, then it requires at least a kind of level of effort like we had in the Cold War. And in the Cold War, the average that we, you know, spent as a percentage of GDP on defense was something I think like it was 4.9%, so pretty close to that 5% figure that you cited. But it was higher at various points and lower at others. I think it peaked

out in fiscal 51 and 16%, you know, at the beginning of the Korean War. You know, during the Reagan years, it was in the 6 to 8% range. You know, we're down hovering right around 3%. So we've got to have a, you know, a serious investment. It's going to take a few fiscal years to ramp up to get to that level, to get the Department of Defense in a position, frankly, to be able to absorb, you know, a large influx of funding. But, you know, we need to be able to invest in the defense industrial base to allow it

to have surge capacity. We have to have that level of effort. And I think we were unanimous in that. Yeah, look, I think the parallel between Senator Wicker's effort and our effort derives from the fact that I think we both just started with the world as it is, the world as it is in terms of U.S. interests, in terms of threats. And I think the logic certainly led us on a bipartisan and basis to acknowledge the need to do much more in terms of defense resources. The other alternatives just don't make sense. We're not going to just say goodbye to the Middle East and or Europe. We're not just going to walk away from our allies or our territory. So you've got to do something about it. And as Eric said, once you go to that point, then you just sort of need

to triangulate. I don't know what the right answer is, but you need to triangulate it. And so you look at historically when we faced somewhat comparable challenges, how much were we able to do to meet those challenges? And as to, you know, how do we afford it? Well, I mean, I nominally have a degree in international economics, but that's not really a serious thing. I mean, look, the defense budget is politically derived, not economically derived. We have done much more when we've needed to in the past. And oh, by the way, that investment in national defense has also yielded jobs. It's yielded technology. It's, I think, quite frankly, it's one of the few uses of federal spending that actually produces things. And so, you know, and look, we have a Congress that saw fit to

spend $2 trillion on infrastructure during COVID. I mean, it's, if the Congress, whoever's in a majority, whoever's the minority is not averse to spending money, I think the point is that a more threatening world demands greater resources for defense. And that's, look, that's not to say that we can't do things more efficiently, that we can't find efficiencies. I think we're unanimous as commissioners that we absolutely have to do that. But we're not going to meet the threats to American security from change that we find between the pillows of the couch.

We should do that. We should be good, responsible stewards of the American tax. taxpayers dollars, but just efficiencies are not going to get us where we need to go. In our report, Aaron, we said some things, and I'm sure we'll tick off, you know, people right and left, literally. So I think we all agreed that, you know, part of the way that we pay for this to your question, we may need additional revenues. That may mean taxes. But we also have to clearly reform entitlements. If you look at the 20-year congressional budget office projections of the deficit, the main drivers of that deficit, which we I think all agree is a potential

threat to national security over the long term, are Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And those are going to have to be reformed, you know, as well in order to get us where we need to go. But I would just say one thing. The Constitution of the United States, you know, directs the Congress to provide for the common defense. It must do that. It's an obligatory requirement of the Constitution. All the other parts of the federal budget are things that they may do.

So, I mean, I think that is the most important obligation of the federal government is to defend us. Eric Edelman, Tom Mankin, both commissioners on the commission on the National Defense Strategy. This has been a really interesting conversation. Your recent episode,

as well, Eric, when you came and discussed early Cold War nuclear strategy and Tom, both three episodes, but the most recent one is front of mind on strategic fallacies or fallacies and strategic thinking have been much praised, by the way, and I commend them to listeners who haven't, who have listened. I've had one person tell me, Eric, that they listened to your episode to bone up to cram for exams and graduate school, which I'm not sure either of us could actually endorse. Yeah. It wasn't a Thai student, so at least there's that. But anyway, thank you both very much. Really interesting conversation. Thank you, Aaron.

Always a pleasure, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.