The Daily Signal - US Military Is 'Right There on the Edge.' Here's What's Driving Its 'Marginal' Status.

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

With aging equipment, a lack of adequate funding, and limited production capabilities, the U.S. military is ranked "marginal" at best. That’s the conclusion of the 2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength, an annual report from The Heritage Foundation that assesses the status of the military and the global threat level to the United States, which was released Wednesday. "It's right there on the edge. It could handle one major war for, we believe, a limited period of time, but it couldn't do anything other than that," said Dakota Wood, the lead editor of the index and a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Wood joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the findings of the latest index. We also cover these stories: The White House is preparing a plan to vaccinate children against COVID-19 pending the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announces that the city will extend its COVID-19 vaccine mandate to all public employees, as well as remove the option to opt out of vaccination through regular testing. Democrats announce plans to alter a proposal that would give the IRS the authority to obtain information on Americans’ bank transactions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, October 21st. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. The Heritage Foundation 22 index of military strength is out. The Daily Signal's Christian Mizzlewick sits down with Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Dakota Wood to discuss the report's implications as well as how America can be best prepared for any military scenario. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave. leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. And now on to today's top news. The White House is preparing a plan to vaccinate children against COVID-19 pending the Food and Drug Administration's approval. During a press briefing Wednesday, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said kids five to 11 years old are likely soon going to be

eligible to be vaccinated. The Biden administration has ordered enough vaccines for for America's 28 million kids to get the shot. Right now, the White House is preparing a rollout plan to equip pediatricians, community health centers, schools, and pharmacies with the vaccine. The Surgeon General said during the briefing that the Biden administration is also preparing material to educate families on questions that they may have about the vaccine per CNBC. We're preparing a national public education campaign that will meet parents where they are with the information about the vaccines. We will work with schools to send letters home to parents. We will

convene doctors in health clinics and support them in delivering vaccinations as soon as they have conversations with families. We will provide faith leaders with materials and toolkits that they can distribute to their congregations. We will create forums for parents to ask questions to health experts. And with all of this, we will make sure that we are reaching parents in their language and through the people they trust. The FDA advisory panel is meeting on October 26 to discuss the details of the pediatric vaccine. If the panel recommends the vaccine should be made available for children,

the next step would be for the FDA to formally authorize it for kids. Then, likely in November, the CDC would provide recommendations for pediatric dosage. CDC director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday that schools should continue mass mandates even if children are vaccinated. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that the city would be extending its COVID-19 vaccine mandate to all public employees, as well as removing the option to opt out of vaccination through regular testing. Here's Mayor de Blasio via MSNBC.

So what is the next step here? You put in the mandate for teachers. Now you're going bigger with it. What's the announcement? It's a mandate now for all city agencies, all city, all city, workers, it's time for everyone to get vaccinated. Our public employees are going to lead us out of the COVID era. Look, what we did with our schools worked. Our schools are incredibly safe and families needed to know their kids to be safe. Well, we all need to know we're going to be safe going forward. We've got to end the COVID era.

Our police officers, our EMTs, our firefighters, all our public employees, a lot of whom come in very close contact with their fellow New Yorkers. They need to be safe, their families need to be safe, but we also need to reassure all New Yorkers that if you're working with a public employee, they're vaccinated, everyone's going to be safe. Prior to the mayor's announcement, only City Department of Education and Health Workers were required to be vaccinated. Under the new requirements, however, all public employees will be required to have at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by October 29th. In order to incentivize employees to get vaccinated, the city is offering a five-year-old. $500 bonus to any public worker who gets a shot at a city-run vaccination site before the 29th. The move is not without controversy.

New York City's largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, has said it will attempt to take legal action against the mandate. In a Wednesday statement announcing the union's plan to take legal action, Association President Patrick Lynch said, From the beginning of the de Blasio administration's haphazard vaccine rollout, we have fought to make the vaccine available to every member who chooses it, while also protecting their right to make that personal medical decision in consultation with their own doctor. Now that the city has moved to unilaterally impose a mandate,

we will proceed with legal action to protect our member's rights. Democrats have announced plans to alter a proposal that would give the IRS permission to obtain information on Americans' bank accounts. Democrats initially proposed a provision in their $3.5 trillion spending package that would give the IRS permission to receive bank account information on any account that has more than $600

in withdrawals or deposits over the course of a year. But Democrats announced Tuesday that they plan to change that dollar figure threshold. Under the new plan, the amount required for the IRS to collect information on an account would be raised to $10,000 and would not include wage income or Social Security income. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, a Democrat,

told reporters that despite what opponents say, what President Biden and Democrats have proposed is focused on rooting out tax cheating at the top. But many Republicans and bankers remain concerned. CEO of the National Association of Federally Insured Credit Union's Dan Berger called the updated plan nothing more than window dressing in an attempt to shore up support for a flawed proposal. Democrats are promoting the proposal as a way to help pay for their multi-trillion dollar social spending bill. The San Francisco Department of Public Health temporarily closed down the city's sole in and out last Thursday over the store's failure to properly check customers' COVID-19 vaccination status.

Under San Francisco law, proof of full vaccination status is required to enter public spaces like stores and bars, and the onus is on the business to verify whether or not a customer is in compliance. City health authorities say when they learn that the fast food chain's San Francisco location wasn't checking restaurant patron's vaccination status, they sent numerous requests to the location to force compliance before ordering the restaurant to close temporarily, per the guardian. In a statement to NPR criticizing the San Francisco Health Authority's move, in-en-ounce chief legal and business officer Arnie Wensinger said, We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business.

This is clear governmental overreach and is intrusive, improper, and offensive. The restaurant has reportedly opened for outside dining and takeout service, but according to NPR, has no one. plans to begin checking patrons vaccination status. Now stay tuned for Christian's conversation with Dakota Wood on the 2022 Index of Military Strength and America's Military Preparedness. Conservative women. Conservative feminists. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring

you stories and interviews that are particular interest to conservative women. or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kristen Mislowick. Each year, the Heritage Foundation publishes the Index of U.S. military strength, an assessment of the U.S. military and the international threat level to the United States and its interests. The 2022 edition was released Wednesday.

With me today is Dakota Wood, Senior Research Fellow in Heritage's Center for National Defense and Lead Editor of the Index of the U.S. Military Strength. Dakota, thanks for joining me. Oh, Christian, it's great to be with you. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. I want to start with the military branches. Before we dig into the individual branches, what is the overall score of the military this year?

No, it's marginal. So if you had a score of one to five with one being very poor or an R, when we assess the military very weak to five being very strong, it's right in that middle category, right? And the reason we use the word marginal as opposed to okay is you might get the sense with that other word that, well, it's okay. You know, we've got what we need and we're marching off. But marginal really is meant to convey this sense that you're kind of on the edge. You know, if it gets any worse, you're going to be weak and you don't want to be there. And so it's a characterization, right, of the status of the military.

It's right there on the edge. It could handle one major war for, we believe, a limited period of time, but it couldn't do anything other than that. And it actually sends a message to partners and adversaries of not marginal, but you can't really do much, you know, that they're in the world to protect U.S. interests. So it's a middling score, and it's not a good one. Good, not great. Yeah. Well, you just said it's not good. Right.

So which branches in particular are contributing to that middling status? So, you know, we've got Army Navy Air Force Marines, but we also add in the U.S. Space Force. And then we've got a six, not necessarily a branch, but we deal with nuclear deterrence. You know, the strategic capabilities and missiles and submarines and nuclear capable bombers as a separate entity. Because there's a whole enterprise that goes with that. So in this world, actually the nuclear enterprise with the missiles and warheads and technicians and those sorts of things. And the U.S. Marine Corps, we've rated a day. is strong. On the nuclear side, it's because it has been paid so much attention just the last

three or four years, right? And we also caveat are strong saying that if it loses support, then it can tip over into the weak category pretty quickly. But there's bipartisan support, you know, both Republicans and Democrats. We have healthy programs with a replacement bomber, with a replacement ballistic missile submarine. And so the trend is in a really good direction. And with the Marine Corps, they are reinventing that service. I mean, they focused on the Indo-Pacific region and China is the biggest challenge. And they have said that if they can figure out how to operate against a big opponent like China with these, what they call distributed forces, small packets of capability that really pack a punch, but they're spread out

over a large area. If you can solve that problem, then you can transfer that capability to any other theater and any other opponent. And so they have focused, they know what they need to do, and making really great progress. Readiness is up, but they're doing that at a cost. The service is shrinking in size because manpower is expensive, and so they're trying to free up money to pay for new missiles and robots, you know, unmaned systems and those sorts of things. But they're making good. So those are two big players. The Air Force has tipped over into the week category, largely because they can't get their pilots sufficient training. So flight hours, and the number of hours a pilot gets in his machine training as he should, is down 38%. So they're

only getting two-thirds the training they actually need when we compare that to the past a couple of years. Now, why is that? Well, a lot of it comes down to money, right? So it costs money to buy an airplane. It costs money to repair and maintain the airplane. So then when you fly it, you're using up part of the lifespan of that airplane, and you're also then requiring repair parts and technician time and those sorts of things. So flying is just inherently expensive. And so if you don't have the money to fund what they call a flight hour program, then you're going to fly less.

Now, the Air Force would say because we've got great simulators, that compensates for this lack of time in an actual airplane. But when you talk to actual pilots, there is a different emotional experience. You know, being in an on-the-ground simulator and learning what buttons to push and how to respond to warning lights and, you know, use your weapon systems and all that, I get that. But if you flame out on an engine or you make a bad turn, you can restart the program. If something goes bad in the air, right, it's just a different world. So they need that in the air time, actually flying a machine to maintain these combat credible skills. and they just aren't getting that kind of time.

And in the other services, you know, the Navy and the Army, for example, are kind of in that middling ground where they're kind of holding their own. They've got a sense of what they want to do, but they don't have the money that they need to actually buy the ships or to train the units to a level that would really make them competent at scale. You know, I can have a couple of units that are really, really good. But when you get into a war with somebody, you're going to take losses. And so you need more than just a bare minimum of.

number of people or units to be able to do the things that you want to do. And especially in the case of the Navy, a ship like an airplane or a person can only be at one place at one time, right, on the planet. And so if you have a relatively small Navy, given the size of the world, and you look at a competitor like China, which has more ships than the U.S. Navy does, right? And if you look at the distances, you know, only one third of our Navy of approximately 300 ships is available in any given days. You're taking 100 ships

and spreading them all over the planet. Right? And so they just don't, they know what they need, they just don't have the money to buy the equipment and to train the units to the level that they really need to have.

It sounds so much like a funding issue of boils down to money. It is, you know, and I completely understand the criticisms about, and we spend more money than any other single country or group of countries combined, but what's lost in that criticism

Again, is scale, right? That if a lot of your allies, if you stack them all together, don't even get close to what the U.S. is spending, well, it's actually the case that the allies aren't spending enough. They have very weak militaries with very little ability to project power any other place in the world than their own home country. Right. In Cold War, West Germany alone had 5,000 tanks. Today, the combined Germany has fewer than 300. So it's just, you know, it's an indicator, right? So this comparison of what the U.S. spends versus others doesn't take that into account.

And it also doesn't take into account the context of a theater. So if the United States has to project our capabilities 8,000 miles from the U.S. to the South China Sea, but China only has to go 300 miles and they can use a lot of land-based capability to attack our airplanes and ships that are operating at great ranges, You know, there's a balance there, too, right? So it's all context. It's what are we spending money on? What is the cost of labor and people and training in the West and in the U.S. in particular? And how does that compare to the cost of similar things in China or Russia?

You just get, you know, they don't have to worry about environmental compliance and, you know, safety and health standards and pay and benefits and those sorts of things. So if you're going to be a global power, you just have to spend. enough to have the military that is commensurate with that status and those interests. And we're just not keeping pace with that. Right, right. I noticed that Space Force was ranked weak. So why is it doing so poorly? And what's at stake with this poor ranking?

So, you know, it stood up about a year ago. And it did a great job of transferring the space things, the control of satellites, the people that do that mission. transferring those from the other services that it was getting them from. You know, a new service, and I'm going to get some stuff from the Army, from the Air Force, the Navy. So they did a wonderful job at transferring that. But now you look at what they have, you know, the number of satellites that control, the number of people they have to do the job.

And you compare that to the demand for that kind of support, you know, those services by all the regional combatant commands, the U.S. Central Command and Pacific Command and European Command, on and on, right? And they just don't have enough capacity to deal with all the demands for that kind of support from these other organizations. And what we point out in this report is how much and how rapidly things have skewed toward the commercial sector. So whereas the United States in the past year, the United States government actually launched about, I think there's nine or ten rockets to put satellites into space. on the commercial side, it was like 320 or something along those lines. So in the commercial sector, they're putting all sorts of things in orbit, and somebody has to track that. You know, how do you use those as communication relays?

How do you download imagery? How do you make sure that things don't bump into each other, right? And that's just the U.S. Now with the Europeans and the Chinese and the Russians. So we scored Space Force as weak almost exclusively because of a lack of a lack of. of capacity, their ability to support things at the level that's really needed. And is there cooperation between Space Force or the U.S. government and these private U.S. entities?

Yeah, it is. I mean, and it really is wonderful. I mean, you know, if you're a private company, you would like, you know, contracts from the government to help support that, right? Now, the commercial sector uses space stuff a lot for navigation and communications, agriculture industry, you know, really uses that imagery to understand what's going on in their fields. And there's just so many uses for this stuff. So if you look at dollar value, the U.S. government has a percentage is getting smaller and smaller.

But there is a recognition of the national security aspects of having a meaningful presence in space and leveraging that. You know, it's an operating domain in support of the United States interest. So there is a good relationship between government. and private company. But on the government side, you know, you've got to have the management team and the specialists. You know, a private company can probably offer a much better salary. Yes.

Than if you were a GS employee on the government payroll, right? So you're competing for talent, you know, for skilled labor. With the private sector. With the private sector. It gets more and more complicated with, you know, more and more things going in. I mean, you can see the launch of the billionaires, right? The Jeff Bezos and. others that are putting things into space, and somebody has to track all that.

So the U.S. Space Service, not for a lack of patriotism or competencies or anything like that. We scored weak just because they don't have enough to do the job that we would want them to do. I see. Now, in terms of threats to the United States, you already mentioned that China is one of the most comprehensive threats. It's certainly forefront on everybody's mind. But I was surprised to see that in the index, it states that Russia remains the moment. most pressing threat to the United States. So should we be more concerned about Russia than China? Well, that's kind of both, right? And it's not trying to dance around the issue at all,

but when somebody says, what's the biggest threat? Well, what do you mean by that? You know, is it a very near-term acute, something might happen tomorrow? Or is it more of a broad, comprehensive, profound, you know, challenge at very large scale? And so the differences between how we look at Russia and how we look at China, is really at those ends of the spectrum, right? That Russia has been very aggressive, especially in northern Europe, really probing the sea and air of northern NATO allies and other partners that aren't part of NATO up in that part of the world. They've been very aggressive, obviously, in Syria and in the Middle East. And they're trying to develop a lot of capabilities.

And they've got a new nuclear-capable cruise missile. They've got some underwater torpedoes, which are pretty scary. And they're very aggressive in their rhetoric and what they're saying. They have very large military exercises alongside Ukraine and the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and all. So there's kind of an acute, near-term, something bad could happen sort of challenge from Russia. But they've got a problematic economy. Their public health sector isn't doing very well at all.

They've got their own challenges. But when you look at a global competitor, right? I mean, China's economy, you've got 1.3 billion people. They're making ships like no tomorrow. I mean, they add the equivalent of another country's Navy to their Navy about every couple of years. They already exceed the size of the U.S. Navy at 350 plus ships, plus their Chinese Coast Guard, plus their Chinese kind of maritime militia. So they've got a lot of vessels where if they have 350 to 500, depending on how you count those vessels, versus 60, you know, 6-0 U.S. Navy ships in that part of the world.

So it's just there's a scale involved here and kind of a weight that they can throw around as they argue over territorial water disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines and, you know, this testy exchange have had with Australia and other countries. and the region. So they're both a challenge. They differ in scale and scope, and we address each of them and their particulars inside the index. Yes. China's certainly been aggressive lately

posturing in Taiwan, and it still is... They've got 150 to 200 incursions of the Taiwanese airspace, these big military drills where they'll fly a lot of bombers and fighters in the airspace around Taiwan. In the news here,

just this past weekend was reports of a Chinese test of a hypervelocity, nuclear capable, meaning nuclear warhead capable, a vehicle, you know, or a platform where they launched it on a very large missile. It circled the planet at 27 times the speed of sound, and then it releases this hypersonic or hypervelocity glide vehicle that would have a warhead on the end of it, a nuclear warhead, and that was still moving at five times the speed of sound, right? And it was their first test missed the target that they were aiming at by about 25 miles, but holy cow, I mean, you've got to account for that and that they will improve their targeting capability. So this is the kind of investment they're making, building their own aircraft carriers, new classes of

submarines, their Navy is growing, as I mentioned by leaps and bounds. So the U.S. Navy, if they can get the funding, which is a major question, they don't plan to have 350 ships until the mid-2030s, possibly 2040. And yet that's what China has now. The U.S. Navy, even if they did get to those numbers, that would be distributed globally, as opposed to focused and concentrated like the Chinese are. So I think there are a lot of elected officials in Washington who just don't account for this and the nature of these competitions and direct funding where we really need it, and that's to have a more capable military with modern equipment that can deal with challenges like Russia and China. And we haven't even got to Iran and North Korea and some of these other places.

Right. Well, staying on China for a minute, let's say the U.S. engaged in some conflict with them. How would the U.S. military fare? It would be problematic. I mean, we've got wonderful people in the military. You know, there's no time better to be joining up. And it's amazing what our young men and women are doing with the reason. resources they have. We asked them to go a lot of places and do very challenging things with old equipment.

I mean, more than 50% of our ships are greater than 20, 25 years old. The average age of an Air Force fighter aircraft is better than 30 years old. I mean, who drives a 30-year-old car? And yet these are the high-performance fighters that were built 30 years ago, right, that were asking our pilots to deal with. A lot of the Army's equipment was built in the 1980s and 1990s. So there are great people. They're having to use old equipment that is shrinking in numbers, right? Shrinking in numbers, and yet they have to operate thousands of miles from home. So if you envisioned a war, for example, between the United States and China, there's a distance thing. How do we project military capabilities six, seven, eight thousand miles away from home?

How many major bases, reports can we operate from to sustain that effort, you know, with food and fuel and ammunition? Can we replace equipment that would be destroyed in combat? Because that's going to happen, right? Whereas in China, because they've been building new equipment at great rates, you know, production, their production capabilities are set for that. And they're only operating a few hundred miles from home so they can use out a land-based thing. So I think it's really up in the air. And I do know that there have been studies produced by organizations like the Rand Corporation and all that say that in a major war, let's say over Taiwan or something, the U.S. would probably lose. And it's because of the delay in getting equipment into theater.

How do you operate it, you know, far from home bases? How do you replace losses? So right now, for the new ballistic missile submarine that's being built, the Columbia class, it takes six and a half years to build one of these ballistic missile submarines. It takes four years to build an attack submarine. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is only produced in one factory in Fort Worth, Texas, you know, one place, right? Abrams main battle tanks. If you thought you'd have use of a tank in the Pacific Theater, they're only produced in one manufacturing facility in Lyme, Ohio, by General Dynamics, right?

So we're at single points of failure. We have minimum sustained rates of production for things like bombs and missiles, you know, just enough work to keep the workers employed. and keep the factory open. Right. But we've been working on that for a few years. Now, if I even wrote you a huge check, well, you can't hire the workers very quickly. You know, it takes five years to train a welder for the specialized welding on a submarine or a Navy ship. And so you just couldn't dramatically increase production capacity once you're now in a conflict.

So we have to be thinking in terms of national security about what might happen years down the road. And this is the ultimate insurance policy. You don't know when you're going to have an auto accident or a hurricane impact or house, and yet you carry coverage, insurance coverage in that event. So we can't predict when a war happens. But when it does happen, it's too late, you know, to build another military. And yet in the history of the United States, we're in a war about every 15 or 20 years, going all the way back to the 1770s.

Yeah. So slow production. And it seems like we're being swiftly out. outnumbered. But in terms of quality, like pound for pound are the vehicles, equipment that we're producing. How does it measure up to their, to do other countries? Yeah, to be in that competition, right. So because China has harnessed its great wealth, you know, is a major economic power,

all the stuff that it is now building is new stuff. You know, it's new design airplanes, new design ships and submarines. And it used to be in the old days, not too long ago, that the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, was inward focused. It was more about security and stability inside of China. And over the last 20 years, it's now started to focus outward. As China becomes more dependent on energy outside of China, access to markets outside of China. Its fishing fleets go to foreign waters. It's buying beef from Argentina.

I mean, it's very interconnected with a global economy. And so its military has been refocused in this outward looking thing. So you have to have newer equipment that is able to do these very modern, complicated sorts of operations and trained to do that. And they have been very serious about that in the last 15 or 20 years. So the new stuff that they are producing is about on par with the United States stuff. Whereas the U.S. military was largely purchased, as I mentioned in the 1980s and 1990s, We do have, again, wonderful talent, and we have very sophisticated pieces of equipment,

but we're not introducing them quickly enough. So the overarching theme for the U.S. military is it's getting old before it gets modern. And we're starting to retire things like ships and old airplanes faster than we're introducing the new replacement items. Right. So you have this downward decline of aging and shrinking, even though wonderful. designers, we're just not introducing new equipment fast enough. So China is almost on par, quality-wise, with the United States. And it depends on the area. It depends on the area we're

talking about. Great in cyber, being very capable in space. Their aircraft are almost as good as the United States. This hypervelocity stuff is pretty scary. And the ships that they're putting to see are all modern builds. Russia is not quite in that category. You know, it's a The economy doesn't compare with China's or the United States, but it realized that it's largely a land power. And so it can field very large land forces to have its way in places like Georgia and Ukraine. And, you know, if it wanted to do something around Belarus and up into the Baltic states and all that. So it puts its money where its real strengths are and that's mostly land power. And there augments that with cyber capabilities and space.

space-based stuff to make it more effective. Right. Seems like a grim picture for the United States. It's not a happy picture. No. Well, what are our advantages? What are we doing good at? Or what could we really invest in to have that competitive edge?

So we are very, very good at conducting complex operations at great distances from home. So there is no other Navy that operates on a global scale like the United States Navy. There is no other Air Force in the world that could do the sorts of things that we saw the Air Force do. the debacle out of Afghanistan, right? I mean, how the Afghanistan departure was handled policy-wise and decisions was just an absolute travesty. But when the Air Force was told, hey, we've got to get these people out, it's amazing what they were able to do, right?

So good on the Air Force and the airplanes and the air crews to be able to coordinate that. You know, they flew in controllers to operate an airfield within the enemy's sector. We had planes arriving and departing like Hawkwood. And so this ability to do things at a large scale across several different time zones and different parts of the world, right? Nobody else can do that right now. Does China have to do that? Well, not really.

I mean, they're playing kind of a home game in the air and water around China for the time being. Yes. Russia really isn't doing anything along our coasts in large numbers. You know, it doesn't go to the South Atlantic and other places, but it doesn't need to. It focuses in what we call the near-abroad, you know, those areas right around Russia, and it's got more than enough capability to do that stuff. So the real challenge is, is projecting U.S. military power into somebody else's neighborhood. And while we can do that and we do it better than anybody else on the planet, how long can you sustain that, especially given that you will start to see some combat losses? I mean, it's just the nature of warfare, right?

And so numbers really matter. You know, what is it? Quantity has a quality all of its own. Uh-huh. And so I might be able to shoot down two or three airplanes for the loss of every one of ours. Yes. But if he has got 10 times the number of aircraft, the numbers still play to the enemy's favor, right? So it's these kind of calculations that planners really need to look at.

And I think there is real cause to be concerned because on our domestic policy side, the defense accounts just aren't funding. to the level that others are. Yeah, I mean, even in the president's proposed budget for this upcoming fiscal year that we're already in, you know, another continuing resolution, so we'll use a quarter year in spending. Across the board, federal agencies have increased something like 16% on average. The Defense Department, 1.8 to 2%. So if we're running with inflation at 3% or better, your spending power, I know this gets

kind of geeky, but what you can buy with that dollar, it gets. less and less and less. So how do you compete for a really talented young folks to join the military as opposed to a commercial enterprise? How do you buy things that are just more expensive than their older counterparts? You know, the cost of outfitting a U.S. soldier today compared to their Vietnam counterpart, it's 16 times more expensive today above the rate of inflation. So that's accounting for how a dollar changes over time. Right. Right. To build a ship is like five times as much accounting for inflation. So our spending just doesn't keep pace, even though we spend a lot. It has to be considered in the context of the world and who you might

go to war against and what you would need to win that fight. And you mentioned Afghanistan, the debacle that was the withdrawal. So what is that, what do the decisions that were made back then say about the U.S. military and also what message does it send our adversaries around the world? Yeah. So the decision to use military power. is always a political decision. You know, the Pentagon just doesn't say to go to war someplace or deploy. I mean, this is a presidential decision. Whether Congress is involved in making that decision, they ultimately are involved because they continue to fund.

You know, they provide the money, you know, that makes those operations possible, right? So this is a political decision that's made to use military power or to bring it home. Once that decision is made, our military is very good about getting, where it needs to be, establishing conditions on the ground, repairing things, and staying in the fight. The past 20 years, when we think about Afghanistan and how we went there in 2001, is who were you fighting against? You know, I mean, these were the Taliban. They didn't have fielded armies and aircraft and navies and the ability to interdict or to stop anything the United States wanted to do. So fighting that fight, we were able to do whatever we wanted to,

wanted to almost without opposition. You know, now absent the roadside bomb attack or the sniper or an ambush or something on forces on the ground, but there was no threat to our air power. There was no threat to offloading ships with capabilities and then driving it or flying it to wherever you wanted it to be, right? So our lessons have to be kept in that setting, right? Going to war against a China or Russia is a completely different issue. Air Defense Systems, modern navies, suites of submarines.

I mean, all these sorts of things when you think about big war, that's what our major competitors have at that state level, right? Yes. So our military is very, very good at doing what it does. They don't have enough capacity to do things at scale. And they're still having to use equipment that, like we were talking about, was purchased 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, the average age of an aerial refueler, you know, the tanker airplanes that refuel other airplane is better than 60 years old, right?

So, I mean, how are you supposed to use technology that was invented in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s against a modern anti-air defense system that is currently in the field today put forward by China and Russia? It's amazing that they're still flying. A testament to the mechanics, right? to keep this stuff really going. So again, I can't speak highly enough of the soldier, sailor, airmen, marine, space force guardian that's out there. The young people we've got coming in are tremendous doing what they have been asked to do with the equipment that they have.

But you can't play that game forever, right? It has Russia and China and Iran, you know, with a nascent nuclear program, the largest ballistic missile inventory in the entire Middle East. North Korea, its people are on start. starvation diets and that they developed a submarine-launched ballistic missile. So you can tell what's important to the regime. It's not the people. It's its military power.

And so we have to take these competitors, these aggressors, these opponents, seriously, based on the real-world capabilities that they're developing and then match those things. Because if you don't, you know, we can talk about arms race or what have you, but it's not that. It's, does the U.S. have interests in different parts of the world? this withdrawal from Afghanistan. China has been leveraging that, telling, you know, Taiwan, are you sure that you can count on the United States to be there for you? Right.

You know, at that thing? So these send messages that sometimes are not very good. They're not reassuring to friends and allies, and they certainly are not deterring our adversaries. Mm-hmm. Now, before we finish up, where can our listeners check out the index for themselves? So if you go to heritage.org slash military, it's the index of U.S. military,

strength for this year coming up 2022 and just a wealth of information. We've got 20 authors. Any statement we make is backed by research. We've got almost 2,300 footnotes if you're really into the research, you know, sort of world and all that. 120 major programs are assessed, half a hundred, 56 or so major graphics that really powerfully illustrate some of the things that we've been talking about. And so that's the website, heritage.org slash military. Excellent. Dakota Wood. Thank you so much for joining me. Great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

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