Trump’s Defense Priorities

As President-elect Trump prepares to start his second presidential term, there’s no shortage of opinions on what the United States should be spending defense dollars on. In the big picture, naval and air warfare are the big-budget, long-lead-time priorities needed for war “west of the International Dateline.” You can add low-Earth orbit to the list: The next great power war will also be fought in space. In a nutshell, the U.S. is emerging from a 30-year counterinsurgency against terrorists and warlords to face potentially hostile rivals that can build submarines, aircraft carriers and satellite killers.

It’s been a long time since America’s armed forces have had to fight submarines and aircraft carriers. It’s never had to fight satellite killers. But now it has to be able to do all these things, while still fighting warlords and terrorists, apparently. Unfortunately, these latter foes increasingly are fielding more sophisticated, long-range missiles that the U.S. has been countering with exactly the same sorts of high-end air-defense systems needed to deter or fight a peer power. Overall, this strategy has been effective but unsustainable, with $2 million missiles being used to shoot down $20,000 drones.

On top of specific existing and emerging threats that may affect the new administration’s priorities, Trump has signaled his desire to pursue a radical path to spend less money through his empowerment of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by business leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The DOGE recommendations are certain to run afoul of Pentagon preferences and probably even of Trump’s own priorities.

The number-one really expensive and potentially high-body-count threat is war over Taiwan. China’s President Xi Jinping used the occasion of the New Year to stress that he really, really wants to take Taiwan. “Nothing can stop” this eventuality, he said—not “we can talk about it.” Trump has to take him at his word, which means building up U.S. naval- and air-defense capacity to stand up to China. As a result, other global conflicts such as the Ukraine war will necessarily take lesser priority.

The Sun Also Sets

The types and quantities of forces you need to fight China over Taiwan are different from those you need to fight a ground war in Europe, which many maintain must remain a U.S. priority. Is thwarting Russian President Vladimir Putin today worth China ruling the Indo-Pacific tomorrow? Certainly, Xi is thinking along these lines as he helps sustain Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Mercatus Center scholars have pointed out that China’s conquest of Taiwan would damage the U.S. economy far, far more than a Russian victory in Ukraine ever could. Ukraine, of course, must figure into Trump’s defense priorities, if only through a diminution of U.S. emphasis there. But for now, China is the bigger threat and likely will be Trump’s top priority.

If the U.S. Navy is necessarily the front-line service tasked with opposing China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, it has not instilled much confidence in its preparations for this possibility. Steve Wills, an expert in surface warfare strategy at the Center for Naval Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia, said recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports have found mismanagement of cruiser modernization programs and amphibious warfare vessel maintenance and readiness efforts. These findings show the scale of the problem facing the incoming Trump administration. These are the very sorts of ships that America will call on in a Pacific war.

“It’s been a rough month or so for the Navy, with new GAO reporting on the poor readiness of the amphibious fleet, a cruiser upgrade program that failed to deliver results and now the potential cancellation of the medium landing ship desired by the Marines,” Wills said. “The Navy may be in for a rhetorical ‘trip to the woodshed’ by the Trump administration and the DOGE effort.”

It’s hard to say which recent failure is worse. Amphibious warfare vessels are vital and in short supply, but they may be sidelined in the early stages of high-intensity combat with China’s navy, now the largest in the world. Perhaps more problematic is the $3.8 billion program to upgrade 11 Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers to keep them in the line of battle on day one of any war. Over time the Navy managed to spend the money while continually cutting the number of ships it committed to refit. Now that number is down to three, and the U.S. may count itself lucky to have those in the fleet.

Critics say the Navy didn’t want the hulls for its own reasons (manpower requirements and flashier new technology programs) and essentially threw the money away.

This is not a good place to be for the service that may be entrusted with more funding relative to the other armed forces, particularly the U.S. Army, which is seeing the end of its golden age with the denouement of the war on terror. Yet, as Wills noted, the candidate Trump tapped to become the next secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a major campaign donor and businessperson with no military—let alone Navy—experience. His ability to get the Navy out of its doldrums in unknown.

But given the Navy’s performance on recent programs, such as the star-crossed Littoral Combat Ship and its plodding Constellation frigate replacement, Wills and other naval pundits seem willing to suspend judgment until they see how the new secretary performs in the role. It is possible Phelan, with his business background, could be a good fit with the DOGE program.

More important from Wills’ perspective is that the Navy write a solid plan for building up to its stated goal of 355 vessels. He said that current Navy Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti has been trying to get such a document written, that her latest Navigation Plan 2024 is closer to a 1980s-era Cold War strategy document than previous efforts, and that a prospective war with China demands nothing less.

“But more detailed work with maps, lines of operations and above all objectives for what the Navy will do to help win U.S. wars is needed,” Wills said. “President Trump may be able to lay down a new Cold War-like strategy—such as Containment was—around which the armed services can better plan and build capability. Previous administrations have just planned to defend the status quo, or have ignored rising Chinese and revisionist Russian capabilities.”

It’s worth noting that in 2020, then-outgoing President Trump bequeathed his successor an ambitious naval expansion program that has essentially gone nowhere since. Critics may describe the effort as electioneering, but some of the underlying rationale is worth noting. Then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Defense News that the U.S. was not building enough ships to deal with the Chinese threat while wasting its money on forever wars: “We’re spending $3 billion a month in Afghanistan or somewhere near that,” he reportedly said. “It’s $3 billion a month when we could be building three frigates a month—that’s 36 frigates in the year. You know who loves the fact that we’re in Afghanistan? China.”

While an America that can build three frigates a month (or even a frigate for a billion dollars) is invisible in time’s rearview mirror, it’s a modern reality or an easy reach for China. Reality dictates that an expanded U.S. Navy and shipbuilding infrastructure will be Trump priorities. In an interview with radio show host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said he remains committed to a naval approach to confronting China, which involves adding more hulls (including from foreign builders), reforming program management to prevent a constant drip of new and revised requirements from sidetracking a design, and increasing maintenance capacity.

What’s That Up in the Sky?

An inevitable component of that Trump 45 naval plan was provisions for various unmanned air, surface and submarine systems, both as platforms (substitutes for manned vehicles) and munitions (expendable drones). In the interval between Trump 45 and Trump 47, the drive toward unmanned systems has only accelerated, with use of what are near-universally collectively called drones chronicled in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The problem is that drones have become bees in the bonnets of certain advocates who see unmanned warfare as the future of war. Planners envision swarms of drone-like vehicles and munitions closing the Taiwan Strait to a Chinese invasion under a concept called Hellscape. The idea is that large numbers of autonomous systems can be used in the Taiwan Strait in place of risking human lives or using expensive high-end missiles. Of course, Hellscape still has to be defined, awarded, developed, tested, produced, integrated and fielded. The services have a habit of favoring new technology “silver bullet” programs over procurement of actual weapons. Meanwhile, China is drilling off the coast of Taipei with actual ships, planes and missiles.

At the same time, the Russia-Ukraine war and the threat posed by large flights of missiles and low-level attacks from drones have evolved to a spectrum of what Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), calls “weapons of choice.” As with Hellscape, many countries perceive that it is preferable to stand off and lob weapons at enemies from a distance rather than come to grips with troops.

“The threat has so metastasized and the weapons have become so numerous and so diverse that it strains the very taxonomy of what we are trying to describe,” Karako said, adding that defending against such threats is fragmenting the services and specialties tasked with dealing with them.

A recent CSIS report Karako co-authored described one class of threat as “small uncrewed aerial systems” that are proliferating widely due to their usefulness and reliance on inexpensive commercial technology. Rather than trying to get people to remember yet another acronym to describe some sector of the drone universe, he said the report’s purpose was to call attention to what is happening before our eyes.

Karako said the recent case of the New Jersey drone scare—whether caused by some hobbyists or a government exercise or a mischievous foreign actor—demonstrated that the U.S. has no real response to a class of threat that is extant in other parts of the world. There did not seem to be any sort of effective, organized effort to monitoring airspace, identifying contacts and, if necessary, knocking them down.

“It doesn’t matter what it is because the threat exists and the vulnerability is right there for all to see,” Karako said. “If this is not the Chinese, next week it could be.”

On the campaign trail, Trump said one of his priorities would be to put an Iron Dome over the United States, referring to the Israeli missile-defense system. As with many Trump statements, this pledge packs in hyperbole and generalities along with the kernel of what he hopes to accomplish. In this case, “Iron Dome” is like a brand describing an integrated air-defense system, rather than a specific technology Israel uses to counter a particular class of missiles applied to the United States.

Karako said such imprecise language is part and parcel of the same taxonomy challenges even experts are facing with the new generation of threat systems. The trick is not to get distracted by terms like “Iron Dome” or “drone” and to focus on what exactly the threats are and what can be done about them.

“If you want an Iron Dome, you should want one that’s going to protect against the full spectrum of threats, not just the rogue state ballistic missiles,” Karako said. “However, the missile- and air-defense spectrum has been strained and distorted by new technologies. Yet these are weapons of choice, and there are so many of them that we dang well better care about defending against them.”

Ukraine Fades as a Priority

Combatants such as Ukraine and Israel suffering under aerial attack make air defense a priority. That Trump has incorporated air defense into his platform, however imprecisely, indicates it will be one of his defense priorities also. But DOGE tolls for all, and there is little prospect of a radical expansion of the U.S. defense budget. Instead, look for money to be reallocated from existing priorities.

Which brings us to Ukraine. There is little point in rehashing Trump’s boasts about stopping the war, or his enemies’ categorizing him as a tool of Putin. The fact is, responsibility for supporting Ukraine will increasingly fall on Europe. If the Europeans will not pick up the slack, then the war must come to an end.

The slowly improving output of the anemic U.S. defense industrial complex has been allocated in part to Ukraine to maintain an untenable stalemate rather than stockpiled to confront China, a country that says it’s getting ready to fight. Many of the advanced weapons, and all the basic ones, the U.S provides to Ukraine have European analogues. Some of those are in service. There is no reason why Europe, which probably won’t fight China, can’t be tasked with Ukraine duties.

So, the first Trump defense priority for Europe will be to make the NATO allies pay their share for defense of their continent against Putin. Despite having a smaller, poorer and less productive population than Europe, Putin’s Russia seems willing to fight and die and fight some more in order to win in Ukraine. It’s up to Europeans to come to terms with that.

In the meantime, the United States has many defense issues it needs to get serious about. The losing naval race with China and evolving missile and air threats are just two areas Trump must prioritize. The emerging fronts in low-Earth orbit, the Arctic (hence the “Greenland” kerfuffle) and possibly elsewhere in our hemisphere will also command his attention. Hopefully, Trump 47 has the attention span to achieve his defense priorities.