President-elect Joe Biden should nominate Michele Flournoy to serve as his secretary of defense. The front-runner for that role, Flournoy is smart, understands the Pentagon bureaucracy, and recognizes the rising threats posed by China and Russia.
These three considerations are critical.
After all, the job of the defense secretary isn’t simply to supervise the armed forces in defense of the nation and our allies. The job also entails providing the president with credible military options across the range of conflict. That means being ready for conventional strikes on North Korea, cyber-strikes on China, and simultaneously winning a nuclear war with Russia. In that sense, a president needs a defense secretary he can trust. Flournoy appears to retain that quality from her time during the Obama administration as a lower-ranking Pentagon official.
That prior Defense Department experience would also enable Flournoy to start her new role at a running pace. This matters because, thanks to the Defense Department’s vast size and heavily inflated general officer ranks, it is easy for a new secretary to quickly become overwhelmed or manipulated by old bureaucratic hands. Considering that the Pentagon’s status quo impulse is to throw money at legacy programs and prevent uncomfortable thinking from taking form in new policies, experience is a must-have. Flournoy’s understanding of Chinese and Russian threats thus suits her well for this role. As progressive Democrats seek to make their voices felt in Biden’s policy, Flournoy will provide centrist Democrats and Republicans with a powerful voice against dangerous defense spending cuts. We might wish to live in a world where our adversaries are deterred by our simply spending more than them on defense. But in the end, it is capability enhancement which most keeps Americans prosperous and safe.
To her credit, Flournoy has written in favor of advancing capabilities that would enable the U.S. military to hold enemy forces at greater risk across the range of conflict.
Flournoy has supported diverting procurement funds toward artificial intelligence and unmanned drones. While this doesn’t sit well with Air Force generals who want big new bombers and Navy admirals who want to keep throwing money at aircraft carriers, it does sit well with our evolving defense. For one example, Chinese and Russian ballistic missile capabilities pose very serious threats to the Navy’s aircraft carriers and surface warfare fleet. This is something too few conservatives admit as they call for an ever expanding Navy. A better approach is to double down on America’s technological cutting edge, investing in strike platforms like autonomous drone swarms, which can overwhelm enemy forces even if they lose communication to U.S. command nodes.
Flournoy also recognizes America’s role in the world as a stabilizing force for human interest. This offers the prospect of a strengthened NATO and the increasing development of new alliance structures in the Indo-Pacific. In regards to NATO, however, Flournoy will have to be willing to challenge our allies to do more in support of that alliance. Absent a resolute message on burden sharing, European allies will double down on their freeloading off U.S. taxpayers. While she made the wrong call supporting the 2011 intervention in Libya, Flournoy rightly recognizes that it’s in America’s interest to be active in the world rather than hesitant. It is understandable that many Americans are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, but these deployments have significant strategic utility in small deployments that avoid regular casualties. Present deployments in Iraq and Syria offer two standout examples.
In the end, it’s up to Biden. But I don’t see a better Democratic Party prospect for this most important of roles.
