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"This stadium reminds us of the great battles in which those who came before you fought to defend democracy. Belleau Wood. Guadalcanal. Iwo Jima. Inchon. But what you don't see here is all the battles that never occurred, all the wars that never erupted -- because American Sailors and Marines showed up. They deterred conflict. They kept the watch." -- Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, U.S. Naval Academy commencement, 2023
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mass., ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, wants you to be as alarmed as he is about this: If deterrence, which failed regarding Ukraine, fails regarding Taiwan, this might be because adversaries understand that U.S. leaders have allowed the nation's defense industrial base to become shockingly short of capacities commensurate with the world's multiplying threats.
The U.S. Navy is Wicker's foremost concern. Production of stealthy, lethal attack submarines, which Wicker calls "the crown jewels of U.S. military power," should, he says, be doubled. The Navy has only 49, and Wicker says nearly 40 percent cannot be deployed because of maintenance delays.
Just to fulfill the 2021 AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) commitment without reducing the U.S. supply of attack submarines, U.S. production would have to be 2.3 to 2.5 submarines a year. Since before the AUKUS agreement, Congress has been providing funds for two a year, but only 1.2 are being built.
A just-published study by Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain now with the Sagamore Institute, notes that although a Biden administration document endorses 381 ships, the Navy's shipbuilding budget is consistently much too low to meet proclaimed goals.
Shipbuilding facilities sufficient to fulfill the aspirations do not exist and cannot be quickly created. China, Wicker says, has more productive capacity in one shipyard than exists in all U.S. shipyards combined. Such is the U.S. maintenance backlog, one attack submarine was idled for five years. Another, after a 2021 accident in the South China Sea, probably will not be operational until 2026.
The U.S. military is experiencing the worst recruiting shortfall in 50 years. Wicker thinks this is related to "the injection of hyperpolitical culture into our fighting forces." Imagine what the Chinese military thinks when a Navy secretary says climate change is as important a challenge as recruiting. (The Navy missed this year's recruiting goal by 7,000 sailors.) The word "climate" appeared 63 times in the Biden administration's 48-page 2022 National Security Strategy. The military's alarming material deficits are perhaps matched by intellectual ones. Hence, Wicker's conclusion: "We are in our most dangerous security moment since World War II."
Winston Churchill wrote that early in 1942, "the foundation of all our hopes and schemes was the immense shipbuilding programme of the United States." "Immense" is no longer applicable. The ubiquity of wars throughout history, and the menacing nature of this moment, strongly suggest that we are living in what historians will describe as yet another span of "interwar years." History will not kindly judge national leaders who, while complacently producing $2 trillion annual budget deficits, were parsimonious regarding the preparations for war that are necessary, if not always sufficient, for preventing war.