President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress are reminding us that they do not take China’s military threat seriously. Instead of making hard choices to bolster the U.S. military’s means of deterring and defeating the People’s Liberation Army, Congress is prioritizing corporate cronyism and wokeness.
The problem starts with Biden. The president insists that he is determined to meet China’s challenge, but his defense budget is utterly incompatible with that rhetoric. Woefully insufficient in funding, it wouldn’t even address inflationary concerns, let alone the urgent need to improve readiness to fight China. And Biden is worsening the critical shortage of military assets available in the Pacific Ocean by redeploying them to Europe.
Also, under pressure from the Democratic Left, the Biden administration has forced the military to embrace more and more stupidly woke initiatives at the expense of training within specializations, operations, and professional development. When sailors, airmen, Marines, and soldiers are not told to learn about critical race theory, they’re forced to undergo mindless PowerPoint presentations and video training sessions that have nothing to do with military service.
Yet, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley proved when he told Congress he “wanted to understand white rage,” too many senior military officers are willing to dance to Biden’s woke waltz in order to get promoted. So even as the military is firing useful personnel who refuse vaccines, it is rewarding useless and sycophantic officers responsible for leadership failures of a toxic nature.
Republicans recognize at least some of these problems. Writing last December, Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Jody Hice (R-GA), Michael Cloud (R-TX), and Warren Davidson (R-OH) warned of a military that is more focused on bolstering its woke credentials than deterring China.
But as Congress sets perimeters for the National Defense Authorization Act, it’s clear that Republicans are also part of the problem.
For example, Biggs and Norman last week joined a House majority in voting down efforts to scrap the Navy’s littoral combat ships. Those ships are a waste of money, utterly incapable of contesting Chinese forces in the East and South China Seas. The Navy rightly wants to scrap these ships and spend the money elsewhere. Democratic House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith rightly tried to get rid of all the littoral combat ships. Unfortunately, congressional cronyism is forcing the Navy to keep at least five of them. Other Republicans, such as Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL), want to save all nine of the ships when the House and the Senate reconcile their budgets later this year.
This evinces a pathetic and unpatriotic cronyism.
A similar tale applies to the House’s approval of a Democratic amendment that spends an additional and pointless $660 million on F-18 fighter jets that the Navy does not want and an additional $250 million on heavy-lift helicopters that are incompatible with the Marine Corps’s new China strategy.
Why the waste? Because Boeing, which makes the F-18s, and Lockheed Martin, which makes the CH-53s, lobbied Congress for more money. They find ready allies in Republicans such as Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO), whose district benefits from such military pork, even if the nation does not.
The hard truth is that China’s challenge to America’s security and prosperity demands a more serious approach. The stakes are too high to let parochial concerns triumph over exigent national security needs. It is well and good that Republicans make tough statements about wokeness, but they also need to start making tough choices on procurement.
The People’s Liberation Army is certainly taking the situation seriously, surging the construction and deployment of highly capable air defense destroyers, submarines, aircraft, and long-range missiles.
Congress remains as clueless as ever. The Senate Armed Services Committee this week recommended a $45 billion increase on Biden’s woefully inadequate defense budget request. But only $2.6 billion of the additional funds would go to bolstering munition stocks. It should be at least 10 times that much.
Biden and Congress need to wake up. If not, thousands of young people are going to die because they were ill-equipped for a threat that everyone should have seen coming.
