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Weekend Reads
The United States may only have two years to prevent World War III.
In the Wall Street Journal, Hudson’s Mike Gallagher identifies steps the next secretary of defense needs to take to overhaul bureaucracy, cut waste, and restore America’s hard power advantage to deter Beijing.
Key Insights
1. Fix the US Navy and America’s maritime industrial base.
America needs a maritime industrial base that can counter China’s. Pentagon requirements for building maritime assets involve too many uncoordinated stakeholders. The Defense Department should return to the board model that served the Navy well until the 1960s. The Navy would have a forum of senior stakeholders with a chairman empowered to decide both requirements and specifications, ensuring that these work in harmony. The Navy should also create an office focused on expediting the development and deployment of certain war-fighting technologies, similar to the Rapid Capabilities Office at the US Air Force and US Space Force. The next secretary should insist on more flexible processes to deliver unmanned surface, aerial, and underwater vehicles with speed and at scale. He should also work with Congress to help shipyards attract and retain talent.
2. Rebuild America’s arsenal of critical munitions, especially air defense missiles.
In a conflict with China, the US could run out of some munitions within a week. The next secretary must rebuild America’s arsenal by moving to maximum production rates of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (Extended Range), Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, Harpoon, Standard Missile 6, and other munitions. Wherever possible, these systems should be equipped with advanced energetic materials to extend their range and destructive power.
3. Make more efficient use of the Defense Department budget and leverage commercial innovation.
The secretary can reduce the civilian workforce, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the general and flag officer corps, and the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy. He can sell non-warfighting assets such as golf courses and resurrect a 2015 Pentagon study that outlined a path to save $125 billion over five years. Congress can help by ensuring the Defense Department complies with the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994. This statute, which the Pentagon violates frequently, aims to prevent the government from wasting money on developing capabilities that can be purchased from the commercial sector. [The National Aeronautics and Space Administration] predicted it would have cost $4 billion to build the Falcon 9 rocket, much more than the $400 million it cost Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build it. It stands to reason, then, that by adhering to the law’s commercial-preference provision, the Defense Department can save tens of billions annually.
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Deeper
To leverage America’s abundant natural resources and reduce dependencies on China, the US needs to rebuild its domestic rare earths and critical minerals industries. Hudson’s Mike Gallagher hosted James Litinsky, founder, chairman, and CEO of MP Materials, America’s only rare earths mining and processing facility, to discuss how Washington can support its crucial strategic industries.
“China, Russia, Iran and North Korea do not want America to be great. They want it to fail,” writes Walter Russell Mead. To overcome this threat, President-elect Donald Trump will need to recognize that the threat environment—and America’s opportunities to respond—have evolved since he was last in office.
On CNBC, Mary Kissel explains how President-elect Trump might approach economic competition against China.
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