Imprimis March/April 2025 | Volume 54, Issue 3/4
Stephen Bryen, Senior
Correspondent, Asia Times
The following is adapted from
a lecture prepared for delivery at a Hillsdale College National Leadership
Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri.
Defending America and
America’s friends and allies is expensive. If you add up the price tag—not even
including secret programs or the cost of U.S. intelligence—our current defense
expenses stand at $875 billion per year.
When you add the cost of
intelligence, which is vast, the total cost of defense rises to about $1
trillion annually.
Despite these expenditures,
the Ukraine War has exposed some dramatic inadequacies. We have learned that
America’s arsenal as it stands today would be quickly depleted in any future
sustained conflict. And we’ve learned that our allies are in far worse shape.
This raises the question of
how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military
that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict. Consider, for
instance, the remarkable fact that, unlike Israel, we have no national air defense
system.
Historically speaking, the
heyday of American defense production was during World War II. Vast civilian
industries were converted to produce guns, artillery, tanks, and jeeps—and new
plants were commissioned to build airplanes and ships.
In World War I, the U.S. sent
4.8 million soldiers directly or indirectly into the war, mainly in Europe. We
also sent 1.325 million horses and mules to the battlefield, depleting
America’s equine stock. The U.S. came into the fight with no tanks, and at
war’s end we had no tanks. We had 45 commissioned transport ships and another
80 former Merchant Marine vessels.
By contrast, in World War II,
we sent 16.8 million soldiers to fight in Europe, North Africa, and Asia—around
four times more than in World War I. And we manufactured 2,751 Liberty ships in
18 shipyards, turning out three ships every two days.
Such a feat of production is
inconceivable today. Building a cargo ship takes years, and most of the
production takes place outside of the U.S. The availability of shipbuilding
slots has been reduced, particularly in the most prolific shipbuilding nations.
China’s delivery time now averages around three years, with tankers at 2.8
years and liquid natural gas vessels even longer. Dry bulk carriers ordered in
2024 are currently expected to be delivered in 3.6 years on average.
In World War II, the U.S.
manufactured around 300,000 aircraft, including 63,715 fighters and
fighter-bombers for the U.S. Army Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Today, the
total number of fighter aircraft in the Air Force, Navy, and Marines is 2,531,
about 25 times fewer.
Of course, we have new
generations of weapons today that never existed before. These can be summarized
under the name “precision guided munitions” or PGMs. Some PGMs are relatively
inexpensive, but most of them require sophisticated electronics and multiple
sensors. Many require support when in flight and guidance from satellites, most
notably the Global Positioning System (GPS), which is run by the U.S. Air Force
and costs over $2 billion per year to operate. All of these PGMs are time
consuming to build, test, operate, and maintain.
A key lesson of the Ukraine
War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or
man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to
manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce
various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories
have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to
start from scratch.
Another weakness of our
defense manufacturing capability is that we depend heavily on global supply
chains. Specialized parts may be produced in the U.S., but sometimes they come
from other countries, including China. When supply chains are disrupted or
certain parts are no longer manufactured, defense production grinds to a halt.
The U.S. must reverse this trend quickly if we are to remain dominant.
Consider the fact that most of
the first person view (FPV) drones—drones controlled by a remote pilot using
video cameras—that are being used on the battlefield in Ukraine and elsewhere
are built with parts made primarily in China. This supply chain dependence is a
direct result of the globalization of industry and the offshoring of America’s
manufacturing—mostly to Asia and especially to China.
While U.S. law requires that
more than 50 percent of each piece of defense hardware consist of American-made
parts, that standard—already inadequate—runs up against the reality of the
outsourcing of goods that are no longer made in America. The defense industry
can only control the supplier network tangentially by trying to ensure that
components meet military specifications (MILSPEC). Even then, there is a
significant number of cheaters who produce substandard parts for expensive
military platforms. In some cases, MILSPEC cannot be applied and only
commercial parts can be purchased.
A further problem is presented
by the fact that our defense industry largely depends on global companies whose
priorities do not necessarily include producing parts for defense
manufacturers. Both for economic and ideological reasons, the relationship between
defense companies and their leading suppliers (usually high-tech companies) is
often fraught. Some of these companies won’t even bid on government contracts,
which they say are burdensome, impose onerous workforce and electronic security
requirements, and are ultimately not profitable. In addition, many workers in
high-tech industries will not participate in defense research for political
reasons. As artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and other
cutting-edge technologies are becoming increasingly important to the ability of
the U.S. to maintain its warfighting edge, this problem grows ever more acute.
Then there is the problem of
time. The lifespan of a fighter jet—from the design stage to retirement—can
last as long as 50 years. Modern high-tech industries are designing, fielding,
and retiring products in a much shorter time frame, and they have no interest
in manufacturing products that they deem obsolete. Forty years ago, I asked Bob
Noyes, a cofounder of Intel, to look at one of our strategic missile systems
where we were encountering supply problems. He recommended that the government
itself needed to produce the older (or “sunset”) technologies, because no one
else would be willing to do it for us. The same problem persists today.
American defense companies
essentially consist of three types: (1) the big four—Lockheed Martin, RTX
(formerly Raytheon), Boeing, and General Dynamics—who dominate in terms of
contract awards; (2) second-tier companies, some of which are innovative while
others are just looking for a contract; and (3) the suppliers. The big four
often buy up innovative companies, which sometimes leads to good results, at
least for a while.
A complicating factor is that
the competition to acquire new technology, such as artificial intelligence, is
dominated by non-defense companies with deep pockets. While defense companies
are sometimes chasing the same innovations, there are no assurances they will
succeed when outbid by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, or even offshore
corporations. While the U.S. government helps defense companies by underwriting
critical research and development, the Defense Department does not assist them
with acquisitions of high-tech companies.
Almost all modern defense
systems need complex software. For example, the F-35 stealth jet runs on more
than eight million lines of code. As artificial intelligence capabilities
increase in aerospace and defense, the amount of code will expand and new types
of processors will be added to the F-35 and many other platforms, such as
missiles, tracking systems, fire control systems, and intelligence gathering
devices. New AI systems will make the kinds of decisions that are currently
made by soldiers, pilots, and command centers and will have the ability to
process information at astonishing speeds. This is an excellent opportunity to
make the old equipment much better and more effective. One important question
is whether our major defense companies will be able to recruit enough high-tech
talent to do the job.
We are living in a time when
autonomous systems are taking over parts of the battlefield, including in the
Ukraine War. But we are not alone in fielding these autonomous AI-driven
systems. China and Russia are making tremendous progress in this area. Consequently,
our challenge is to upgrade our AI fighting systems rapidly.
American defense companies are
lagging behind their foreign competitors, and the help they need is unlikely to
materialize internally. It is urgent that they team up with commercial AI
developers, who should be encouraged to assist with national security
priorities.
I worked in a multinational
defense company, then the eighth largest in the world, with annual revenues of
over $20 billion. But like almost all such companies in the U.S. and Europe, it
was built through the acquisition of smaller firms that were combined to make
one big corporation. The same is true of today’s big defense companies.
Typically, if a defense
company is contracted by the government to produce a PGM, such as the Stinger
missile, it will build a facility to do that. When the contract runs out, or
there are no more significant exports, the special facility is shut down. This
poses a serious problem if the U.S. urgently needs to surge production of that
PGM.
One solution to this problem
would be the construction of a single flexible facility that could produce a
range of PGM products using the same labor force. In that case, restarting a
production line could be done much more quickly and easily. This would require
suppliers to agree to a consolidation plan to build their products in a common
facility. In other words, we need a national security version of Elon Musk’s
Gigafactory.
One of the key vulnerabilities
of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it
relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China. In effect,
we have two defense budgets: one for us and the other for our enemies. Despite
various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge
business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until
very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The
thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies
bleed us dry.
But cyber is only one area
where our adversaries are actively working to damage us. They are using all the
tools of espionage at their disposal in an effort to replicate our most
advanced defense and commercial technologies. This relieves them of huge costs
and speeds up their development schedule for new weapons such as ICBMs,
submarines, advanced radars, and satellites.
We must take the steps
necessary to protect our defense investments. If we don’t, we may one day find
ourselves engaged in a conflict with an enemy who is much better prepared for
the fight than we are.
An important thing we learned
very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we
gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. A
thoughtful national defense establishment would have drawn the conclusion from
this that we should launch a crash project to develop an effective and
inexpensive answer to drones. But no such project was launched. So when the
Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was
the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two
$2 million missiles. A grade-schooler could do the math. That is not a
sustainable defense policy.
Recently, by the way, forces
on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun
technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried
methods.
We need new thinking—something
that doesn’t come naturally to large bureaucracies like the one in the
Pentagon—about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must
be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible. We should remain hopeful that
the new leadership in the Pentagon will shake things up.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/new-thinking-needed-on-national-defense/
Comments
The US is in several
technology races including AI, System Upgrading and National Defense. All of
these take time, but should be completed by 2028. Ending War is the goal. This
can be accomplished by growing the US economy, replacing War with Total Economic
Isolation of “bad acting countries” and continuing DOGE to divert revenue to
support priorities. We should be able to eliminate the National Debt by 2032.
Expanding the US Private
Sector Economy is the first priority and is expected to be improving by 2026.
The Tax Rate reduction bill should be complete in May 2025. Energy costs are declining in May 2025 and
will continue to decline as US production increases. Deportation of Unvetted
Criminal Illegal Aliens is underway in May 2025. Cuts in grant funding in
Universities who support anti-American protests is underway in May 2025.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea
Party Leader
