The principal product of Washington D.C. is words. They come in three different kinds of packages: memoranda, by which government departments and organizations communicate internally; op-ed articles, by which these various groups communicate with each other and the public; and reports, usually compiled under the auspices of people with expertise in the subject being addressed.
All three types are highly perishable. Almost none reaches a broad audience or is read more than a few days after it appears. Even reports, longer and more detailed than memoranda or op-ed essays, generally suffer this fate, likely including the July report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a body authorized by Congress with former Congresswoman Jane Harman as chair and former ambassador and Defense Department under secretary Eric Edelman as vice chair.
That, however, would be unfortunate and even, conceivably, ultimately tragic. For this report has a stark and urgent message:
“The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States last fought a global conflict during World War II, which ended nearly 80 years ago. The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”
In response to the Missouri Compromise of 1819, President Thomas Jefferson said that the question it addressed, the extent of slavery in the United States, was “like a fire-bell in the night” – a warning of the terrible potential consequences that that question would have for the country. The report of the Harman-Edelman Commission has a similar purpose. It warns that brush fires are burning around the world, that a large conflagration may be imminent, and that the global fire brigade – whose mainstay is American military power – is under-equipped and generally ill-prepared for such an event.
Two features of today’s world make this a particularly perilous time for the United States, its allies, and its friends. One is the existence of serious political and military challenges to American interests and values in three crucial regions of the planet. In East Asia, China is building a large military, seeking to dominate large swathes of the western Pacific that it claims, contrary to international law, as part of its territorial waters, and increasing its harassment of and threats to the independent, democratic island of Taiwan. The Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has told his armed forces to be prepared to conquer Taiwan by 2027.
In Europe, Russia has been waging a bloody, destructive war of aggression against Ukraine since February 2022. While incurring large losses of soldiers and equipment, the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has put Russia on a war footing and made it clear that his ambitions for territorial conquest are not limited to Ukraine. The next victims he presumably has in mind include the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — that the United States is pledged to defend by virtue of its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In the Middle East, the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran is sponsoring client groups that have gained footholds and exercise considerable power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Iran is arming and supporting the terrorists making war on Israel and aspires to evict American forces from the region. Moreover, China, Russia, and Iran are increasingly cooperating with one another, magnifying the threat that each poses, and that they pose collectively, to the United States and the free world.
The second source of danger is the rapid, ongoing change in militarily relevant technology, specifically the digital revolution and the remarkable recent progress in artificial intelligence. A country that lags behind in making use of these technologies in battle will lose to a country on the cutting edge. Because the pace of technological transformation is so rapid, even in areas where the United States has a lead over other countries – and the report suggests that in some of them China may already have overtaken America – that advantage is precarious. To make matters even more dangerous, modern technology in the hands of an enemy can have a devastating impact on the American homeland. According to the Commission, a cyberattack on critical infrastructure could affect
“the availability of power, water, wastewater, and the systems that underpin economic, transportation, and financial systems. Access to critical minerals and goods needed to run the U.S. economy and build weapon systems would be completely cut off. Major war would affect the life of every American in ways we can only begin to imagine.”
American foreign policy must have as its overriding purpose deterring the assaults that these three aggressive powers are capable of launching. Successful deterrence involves having the credible capacity to defeat such assaults. The main theme of the Commission’s report is that such a capacity is now lacking.
To acquire it will require changes in the American defense establishment, force posture, and politics, changes that are taking place too slowly or not at all. The pace of advance in military technology means that, to secure American interests, the Department of Defense will have to become more flexible, more agile, and more adept at rapid innovation, for this purpose working more closely with the country’s private sector, which is where most relevant innovation now occurs.
In addition, for the world of today and tomorrow the United States needs more weaponry of all kinds, from artillery shells to naval vessels. The country’s current defense-industrial base cannot supply it because, in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, it has shrunk dramatically. American security will therefore require more firms devoted to defense and more and bigger defense plants. All this, of course, costs money; and as large as the current defense budget is – 823 billion dollars – it is insufficient.
Expanding the national commitment to defense, in turn, requires public advocacy of such a course by the nation’s leaders and a commitment to it on the part of the American public. Neither is currently in evidence. In this election year, the international challenges to the United States, the needs of its armed forces, and the approach of either major party presidential candidate to the duties of commander-in-chief, have thus far gone virtually unmentioned. To the threats that the Commission describes, the country is not paying attention.
This inattention has grim precedents in American history. The United States was not prepared for the Civil War or either of the two World Wars. The Korean War, which began in 1950 and which the country promptly entered, also came as a surprise to the public at large. In each case, the country managed, over time, to muster the military force necessary for success on the battlefield, but only after having paid a price in territory lost and casualties suffered. In the next war, the cost of unpreparedness could be painfully, even tragically high.
One particular kind of Washington report sometimes does, contrary to the general pattern, receive sustained attention: a report investigating a major failure, such as the one issued by the commission that looked into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. If the recommendations of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy are not heeded, and disaster strikes as a result, there will surely be a panel charged with discovering the reasons for what happened, and its findings can just as surely be known in advance. They were expressed decades ago by General Douglas MacArthur: “The history of failure in war,” he said the year before the United States formally entered World War II,
“can almost always be summed up in two words: Too late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy. Too late in realizing the mortal danger. Too late in preparedness. Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.”
The message of the Harman-Edelman Commission to the American public is: it’s later than you think.
