A Modest Defense Awakening in Congress

Congress passed an outline of $858 billion for national defense in 2023, up from the $813 billion Mr. Biden requested. This is a nearly 8% increase over last year. Alas, that is only about the rate of inflation, which has swallowed Pentagon purchasing power on everything from gas to new equipment. The U.S. is still nowhere near Cold War defense spending, about 6% of the economy, versus roughly 3% now.

Still, the bill authorizes up to $10 billion in security assistance for Taiwan over several years, a show of U.S. seriousness to mitigate the military threat from China. It includes guidance to put Taipei at the head of the line for weapons, and it allows for more joint training and munitions stockpiling. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative snagged $11 billion.

The Biden Pentagon has been pushing a strategy that hollows out the American military now to fund new technology for the 2030s, and Congress is right to reject it. Congress authorizes 11 new ships for the U.S. Navy and blocks the retirement of about a dozen, at least putting the Navy on a stable trajectory, unlike the Biden plan to retire about three ships for every one requested. The sea service still needs to buy three attack submarines per year, one more from the current two a year, to counter China’s rapid naval build up.

Congress was also smart to retain the more than two dozen F-22s the Air Force asked to retire, as these U.S. air superiority assets are already too scarce in a fleet of about 180. Another welcome development is funding to speed up the E-7 Wedgetail to replace the Air Force’s exhausted AWACS fleet, which serve as a flying pair of battlefield binoculars.

Among the best provisions for U.S. military preparedness is one that allows multi-year contracting for munitions. The Ukrainians have been burning through everything from 155mm howitzer ammunition to antitank Javelins as they try to evict

Vladimir Putin’s

military, and U.S. production and stocks aren’t sufficient to feed a long war. Multi-year contracts can cut costs and offer companies the certainty to make capital investments.

The bill authorizes up to 106,000 Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems; 28,300 Javelins; 5,600 Stinger anti-aircraft weapons. Especially welcome are 950 long-range anti-ship missiles (LRASM) and 3,100 joint air-to-surface standoff missiles (JASSM). These precision weapons can be fired from afar, but by most analyses the U.S. would currently run out in about a week of war with China.

The GOP extracted a repeal of the military’s vaccine mandate. The vaccine has devolved into a proxy for a larger political debate, and an Army that missed its recruiting goals for 2022 by 15,000 soldiers can’t afford to alienate a large part of the country that doesn’t trust the shot.

One negative: provisions pushed by Sen.

Kirsten Gillibrand

that would further crimp a commanding officer’s authority, sold under the falsehood that these officers don’t want to prosecute sexual assault offenders. Congress did manage to push back on a number of progressive fantasies about the world, such as preserving funding for a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile to deter Mr. Putin’s threat of using a tactical nuclear weapon.

The asterisk larger than a tank in this authorization bill is that Congress still must fund these priorities in an appropriations bill, and a long stopgap funding measure could slow down everything from the recently unveiled B-21 bomber to submarine maintenance.

A year ago there wasn’t a land war in Europe, a testament to how quickly global affairs can change. Lawmakers deserve credit for at least beginning to acknowledge that the U.S. needs a more capable military to prevail in this volatile new world. All the more so when Mr. Biden is still proposing budgets as if this is 1993.