Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley has predicted a coming defense budget cliff under a Biden administration, the product of the dual impact of a struggling economy and continued coronavirus pandemic.
The defense budget challenges, he said, come at a time when investment in defense modernization must be America’s key security priority to prevent a great power war with China.
“We’ve got to do a quick reality check on the national budget and what is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future,” Milley said at a Brookings Institution discussion with security scholar Michael O’Hanlon Wednesday.
“There’s a reasonable prospect that they could actually decline significantly,” Milley added after saying that, at the very least, budgets are expected to be flat instead of the 3% to 5% annual increases that would be required to maintain current defense needs.
Milley said the nation’s high unemployment, battered economy, and the continued fight against the coronavirus pandemic were factors that influenced his stark assessment just seven weeks before Biden takes office.
“The most important priority that you need to do is to take care of the COVID piece, get that behind us, and breathe new life into the economy,” he said. “Once you do that, then you can put additional monies into military.”
The Heritage Foundation was surprised that the military leader would delve into politics and guess at future budgetary decisions rather than stick to military analysis and the nation’s national security needs.
“I kind of thought that was unfortunate,” retired Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr, director of the Heritage’s Center for National Defense, told the Washington Examiner.
“He’s making political predictions, and he is the expert on military things,” he added. “So, I’d love for him to talk about what the need is for the defense strategy, for the armed forces, and then let the politicians, if you will, argue about what’s actually within the realm of doable.”
Milley repeated the gloomy predictions in a virtual discussion with the U.S. Naval Institute’s 2020 Defense Forum Thursday while also making the case for urgency to keep pace with great power competitor China.
“We are going to have to ruthlessly prioritize what it is we’re putting money against,” he said.
“I am biased towards future modernization,” he said. “The greater challenge for the United States, the longer term, almost existential challenge is going to be China. It just is.”
The Defense Department is currently spending tens of billions of dollars in modernization efforts, including hypersonics, artificial intelligence, and robotics. But so is China.
Milley took pains to stress that following China’s rapid modernization under Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s and a fast-growing economy, the communist country was positioned to strengthen its military.
Echoing an argument often made by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Milley laid out the case that preventing war with China requires investing in the capabilities to deter China.
“They would like to at least not only match us but exceed us, to dominate us, to be able to beat us in armed conflict by mid-century,” Milley said.
Spoehr said the pending National Defense Authorization Act includes an amendment by Utah Sen. Mitt Romney calling on the Pentagon to create a comparative report of defense spending between the U.S. and peer rivals China and Russia.
That authorization bill passed out of committee Wednesday and is expected to receive a floor vote this week despite veto threats from President Trump, who wants language about renaming Confederate bases stripped out and new, unrelated language added that would remove protections that allow social media companies to censor content.
Still, Spoehr was dismayed that the principal military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense appeared to declare Pentagon budget cuts a foregone conclusion.
“It almost seems like we’re declaring defeat before we’ve even had the battle,” he said.
