Perceived Flaws – 2024 National Security Report

Authorities

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy was established by Section 195 of the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 117-81). It is composed by eight members from private civilian life who are recognized experts in matters relating to the national security of the United States.

Background

The national security strategies pursued by all administrations since Bill Clinton show remarkable continuity. The pattern suggests it is expected to continue unabated regardless of which Party controls the White House and/or Congress. Point in fact, the Commission’s 2024 report recommends the U.S. take additional draconian steps to prepare for a plausible all-out war with either China or Russia, or both. That posture aligns with the non-classified 2022 National Military Strategy of the United States and the Summary of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.  

Pertinent Facts and Conclusions

China’s rise can be traced directly to its manufacturing prowess and chronic trade surpluses, not domestic consumer demand. That implies that the day China morphs into an economy powered primarily by consumer spending it will become more self-reliant and largely impervious to U.S. sanctions. If and when that happens the Chinese government will receive higher revenue from a taxpayer population four times larger than the United States. At that point it may choose to spend even more than it does today on national defense, with all its implications. Accordingly, from the perspective of some influencers who believe the U.S. can survive and win a nuclear war, it is better to go for it now, before it loses its perceived superiority.

There is no denying that today the United States faces unprecedented competition. Indeed, unlike the Soviet Union in its heyday, which was a military but not an economic superpower, China is currently America’s only economic peer with a population larger than the entire Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Russia combined. In addition, the competition for natural resources from the Global South is expected to intensify over the next few decades as India, already the world’s most populous nation, overtakes Japan and Germany to become the world’s third largest economy and seeks to satisfy its needs. At that Europe, the U.S., Japan, China and India will have to go to the same watering holes, and they’ll all want priority. Clearly, to guarantee peace – and survival – in a fast-approaching era of ever more efficient and lethal weapons of mass destruction, a new international mechanism, complete with enforcement provisions, will have to be voluntarily created and deployed to allow equitable distribution of resources on a basis other than fiat currencies or sheer military power.

Key Points

The Commission acknowledges – and understates – that the consequences of an all-out war between the U.S. and China or Russia, or both, would be devastating. Indeed, by some estimates that would prevent agriculture, kill plants, upend food chains, trigger nuclear winter, all in just 72 minutes, and eventually wipe out at least 60% of humanity. The Commission does not dwell in depth into the possibility that other powers may also come to blows later (or perhaps sooner) this century, with similar consequences. Witness long-standing chronic tensions between India and Pakistan and India and China, to say nothing of the Middle East.

The Commission does recognize that the ballooning U.S. deficit poses national security risks. While that assessment agrees with the Congressional Budget Office’s Long-Term Budget Outlook, which projects that by 2054 the deficit will reach 8.5 percent of GDP and that the portion held by the public will rise to 166 percent of GDP, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. As of August, 2024 the U.S. accumulated debt exceeds $35 trillion, unprecedented in peacetime.

These sobering facts notwithstanding, the Commission nevertheless recommends a vast multiyear expansion in defense spending to support U.S. allies at war, expand defense-related industrial capacity, increase and accelerate military construction to expand and harden facilities in Asia, secure access to critical minerals, and invest in a digital and industrial workforce on a glide path commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War. To fund it, the Commission called for Congress to revoke or override the caps in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act (H.R.3746), raise taxes, and reform entitlement spending. That has been partially heeded. H.R.3746 has simultaneously suspended and increased the federal debt limit through January 2, 2025 to accommodate the obligations issued during the suspension period.

For all intents and purposes, then, the Commission essentially envisions an environment of unrestrained defense spending that would grow at a rate relative to GDP commensurate with the pivotal years 1982-1991, the height of the Cold War. In addition, the U.S. would indefinitely pay for wars fought by allies; taxes would rise – no word on how they would be apportioned – and Social Security, Medicare, (and presumably) the Affordable Care Act would be curtailed as desired. However, the Commission does not analyze the social and civic consequences that might stem from that course of action. Furthermore, it neither rules out incurring additional massive deficits in order to expand output by the military-industrial complex, nor does it analyze the extent to which the markets might react to the government’s indefinite lack of fiscal discipline and unrestrained spending.

Perceived Flaws

The Commission’s approach is flawed on at least three fundamental points. Firstly, any strategy that incites or seeks a terminal nuclear war is by definition suicidal. It assumes that higher defense spending would deter Russia and China from defending their core interests, namely halting NATO’s eastward expansion and the reunification with Taiwan respectively. At best, all it would do is dramatically expand the existing forest of deployed ICBMs which is already more than capable of destroying life several times over. Worse, the Commission ignores the fact that both adversaries consider these core interests non-negotiable. In Russia’s case, it has already proved that it is willing to fight to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and that President Putin has publicly stated the conditions under which Russia would resort to nuclear weapons. As for China, it has repeatedly declared that while it favors a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, its patience is not infinite and that force cannot be ruled out. In other words, we’re on a runaway train to World War III and there’s no failsafe mechanism to stop it.

Secondly, while the Commission categorizes America’s interests and speaks of the need to the defend them, it doesn’t specify what they are. This ambiguity makes it all but impossible to determine the extent to which they benefit America’s various income/social tiers, from half the population that cannot afford to buy a median-priced home anywhere in the country, to the richest 1% that hold more than half of stock and less than 5% of debt . Surely, since the Commission’s recommendations would potentially require new onerous sacrifices, the least it could do is describe in detail how they would be apportioned.  

Thirdly, the Commission warns of the consequences should the U.S. cease to be a superpower. Since the U.S. already has the means to destroy the world as we know it, it’s difficult to imagine how it might be demoted. However, if being a superpower requires the ability to dominate everyone else ad infinitum despite having just 4.17% of the world’s population, then the Commission should explain how the U.S. could possibly subdue the other 95.83%.

That said, the Commission does have a valid point in that the U.S. must do all it can to prevent others, including China, from confining it to the exclusive club of former great powers such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan, which lack domestic oil reserves to meet their needs. But prevention ought to be a peaceful process to ensure that the “cure”, which equates to nuclear war, is taken off the table. Needless to say, that would require time and intense negotiations. What is certain is that never before has the actual survival of homo sapiens been at stake.

Roots

Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam (the sinews of war [are] unlimited money), declared Cicero in his Fifth Philippic. This remains an indisputable truth. Richer countries invariably maintain vast military-industrial complexes and fight more wars, preemptive and aggressive. Today’s nuclear-armed countries include four that were not independent in 1946 – India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, and the probability of a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia or China, or both, is higher than at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. What’s more, since the relationships between individual or groups of nations change over time, there’s no telling how they will evolve. Case in point both Germany and Japan were enemies of the U.S. in World War II, and now they’re allies. And the Soviet Union (Russia) an ally at that time, has become a de facto enemy. On that vein, it’s impossible to say how the relationship between Russia and China might morph, particularly in the context of their relationship with India. As a result, the only real pathway to survival – disarmament – is presently not viable. For example, Russia might feel insecure with respect to not just NATO but China. After all, Russia’s vast, practically empty hinterland east of the Urals, adjacent to China, and Europe’s high density and lack of natural resources are valid reasons for Russia not to disarm. Similarly, the U.S., China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all have their own reasons not to so either.

Consequences

The world cannot rely on treaties, however formal, to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. As we have seen, nations can unilaterally withdraw from them at will. The reason for this is that – short of war itself – there is no mechanism to compel nations not to withdraw. In short, prevention relies on words worth only the paper they’re written on. That’s hardly a reliable mechanism to guarantee mankind’s survival.

Logical Path

Since abundant money is an essential prerequisite to support military industrial complexes capable of producing these dreaded weapons, one way to freeze, reduce, and eventually even destroy them is to introduce a truly neutral mechanism that determines and regulates the exchange rates of all national currencies. That would empower the Global South and dilute the Northern Hemisphere’s undue dominance in a way consistent with the unrelenting need to fight climate change. The specific mechanism is described here.  

National Security of the U.S.

Bill Clinton’s National Security Strategy (NSS), published in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, was a watershed document. Entitled ‘A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement’, it unabashedly stated that “we have… initiated a process that will lead to NATO’s expansion”. Worth noting is that Russia repeatedly and vociferously objected to this expansion even before Putin took office, and that in subsequent years since the policy was adopted, none of the Republican or Democratic administrations reversed it. Based on that, it’s safe to say that both parties seem to agree on what the national security strategy should be.

The unclassified 2024 report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy states that:

  • The United States faces the most serious and challenging threats since 1945, including the potential for a near-term major war.
  • China and Russia are major powers that seek to undermine U.S. influence.
  • In many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific.
  • Russia will devote 29 percent of its federal budget this year on national defense.
  • China and Russia’s “no-limits” partnership, formed in February 2022 has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, a new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests that creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.
  • China (and, to a lesser extent, Russia) is fusing military, diplomatic, and industrial strength to expand worldwide and coerce its neighbors.
  • The NDS names China as the “pacing challenge” and invokes the National Security Strategy finding that China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”
  • China poses the preeminent challenge to U.S. interests and the most formidable military threat.
  • China boasts the largest navy in the world (over 370 ships and submarines), the largest aviation force in the region (which is rapidly catching up to Western air forces), and the largest army in the world.
  • China announced in March 2024 that its defense budget would increase by 7.2 percent for the coming year.
  • If trends continue, China’s People Liberation Army will be a peer, if not superior, military competitor of the United States across domains.
  • Even short of all-out war, the global economic damage from a Chinese blockade of Taiwan has been estimated to cost $5 trillion, or 5 percent of global gross domestic product.
  • The cost of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is estimated at $10 trillion, or 10.2 percent of global GDP.
  • Although war against China, over Taiwan or otherwise, is not inevitable, the United States should take seriously Xi Jinping’s call for the PLA to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027.
  • The U.S. military is the largest, but not the only, component of U.S. deterrence and power.
  • The United States cannot compete with China, Russia, and their partners alone –and certainly cannot win a war that way.
  • The threat Russia poses is chronic – ongoing and persistent.
  • Russia has brokered agreements for missiles and drones from North Korea and Iran and is receiving massive economic and dual-use support from China.
  • Russia maintains the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, additional strategic assets, and world-class space and cyber capabilities.
  • Russia is, directly and through affiliates such as the Wagner Group, engaged diplomatically and through defense support in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.
  • If Russia gains control over Ukraine, its border (including Belarus) with NATO member states would stretch from the Arctic to the Black Sea, presenting significantly more demands for deployed NATO forces.
  • The White House is right to make clear that any Russian use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction if Russia is losing conventionally would be met with “catastrophic consequences.”
  • The Commission finds that the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners.
  • Congress, the Department of Defense, and other agencies will need to rewrite laws and regulations.
  • The consequences of an all-out war with a peer or near peer would be devastating. Such a war would not only yield massive personnel and military costs but would also likely feature cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure and a global economic recession from disruptions to supply chains, manufacturing, and trade.
  • The U.S. public have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower.
  • The Commission proposes a Multiple Theater Force Construct, the military backbone of a comprehensive approach.
  • The Commission believes that the partnership encompassing Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea increases the likelihood that a conflict with one would expand to multiple fronts, causing simultaneous demands on U.S. and allied resources.
  • The United States must engage globally with a presence –military, diplomatic, and economic – to maintain stability and preserve influence worldwide, including across the Global South, where China and Russia are extending their reach.
  • The Commission finds that the Joint Force must leverage technology, expertise, and allies across domains to maintain existing and develop new asymmetric advantages against U.S. adversaries rather than seeking to match them platform-to-platform.
  • The Commission recommends that the Joint Force be sized and structured to lead the effort, with meaningful allied contribution, to deter China from territorial aggression in the Western Pacific – and fight and win if needed.
  • Lead NATO planning and force structure to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russian aggression.
  • Sustain capabilities, along with U.S. partners in the Middle East, to defend against Iranian malign activities.
  • The Nation must also consider the possibility that future conflict could overwhelm the capacity of the active-duty force and should plan now to better prepare the reserve components and, potentially, a broader mobilization.
  • Congress should pass a supplemental appropriation immediately to begin a multiyear investment in the national security innovation and industrial base. Funding should support U.S. allies at war; expand industrial capacity, including infrastructure for shipbuilding and the ability to surge munitions production; increase and accelerate military construction to expand and harden facilities in Asia; secure access to critical minerals; and invest in a digital and industrial workforce.
  • Congress should revoke or override the caps in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that serve as the basis for the FY 2025 budget request.
  • Given the severity of the threats, the FY 2027 and later budgets for all elements of national power will require spending that puts defense and other components of national security on a glide path to support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.

The ballooning U.S. deficit also poses national security risks. Therefore, increased security spending should be accompanied by additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending.

The latter implies that the U.S. economy must be able to afford the proposed arms build-up without bankrupting itself.

National Interests

The National Security Strategies (NSS) of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations pledged to defend the nation’s security and interests. However, none of these documents itemize the latter. As for president Biden, he has reportedly recently approved a highly classified nuclear strategy that deals squarely with China’s rising economic and military prowess.

In 1996, the year after Bill Clinton’s NSS was published, the Commission on America’s National Interests (part of the Office of Justice Programs, itself under the U.S. Department of Justice) determined that four levels of US national interests exist: vital, extremely important, just important, and less important. In addition, it concluded that there are only five vital national interests:

  1. To prevent the threat of an attack of weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil or its military abroad;
  2. To ensure U.S. allies’ survival and cooperation to shape an international system in which we can thrive;
  3. To prevent the emergence of hostile powers on U.S. borders;
  4. To ensure the viability of major global systems;
  5. And to establish productive relations with nations that could become adversaries.

ONE AND TWO. But given the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines, and strategic bombers presently deployed by the U.S. and its adversaries, mirror launch on warning policies, the fact that launched ballistic missiles cannot be recalled, redirected or shot down (Russia and the U.S. have in excess of 1600 warheads, the U.S. has 44 interceptors with a 50% kill ratio), the threat of a surprise attack with weapons of mass destruction is ensconced in daily life and cannot be prevented. Instead, the U.S. and Russia, who collectively have the lion’s share of these weapons, rely on deterrence to do so. Should that fail, the subsequent all-out nuclear exchange would annihilate upwards of 600 million people in as little as ninety-two (92) minutes, unleash nuclear winter, and starve to death a further 5 billion around the world in a matter of weeks.

THREE. The emergence of hostile powers on U.S. borders is, for the foreseeable future, not a factor. Indeed, neither Canada, Mexico, nor Latin America as a whole have the means to threaten the U.S.

FOUR. The viability of major global systems presumes that the U.S. will continue to retain its economic and military hegemony. However, the “no limits cooperation” between China and Russia, the refusal of the Global South to sanction Russia on account of the Ukrainian war, and the concerted effort by BRICS countries to collectively avoid the dollar in international transactions suggest that America’s influence and authority is eroding.

FIVE. While it is possible to establish productive relations with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others, that would require dialogue and cooperation without preconditions, not confrontation. However, given that as of this writing (August 23, 2024) it’s been over two years since the presidents of the U.S. and Russia have talked to each other, that does not presently appear to be on the table. As for the specific “national interests” that the U.S. is committed to defend, survival should be at the very top. Based on that simple criterion, everything else must necessarily be negotiable, including the status of Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan, NATO, the dollar, and control of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves. If we’re unable to reach an agreement, we may not make it to the next century.

Historical U.S. Debt as Percentage of GDP

On August 7, 2024 the national debt reached $35,094,756,345,920.31 ($35 trillion). As the graph shows, it is now on a level not seen since the end of World War II. However, in 1940, just before the U.S. entered the war, the debt stood at about 45% of GDP. In contrast, should the U.S. enter into a war with another major power, it would be doing so already burdened by a debt of 120% of GDP.

Historical Defense Budgets

Note: On March 11, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration submitted to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget request of $849.8 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD), consistent with the caps approved by Congress under the Financial Responsibility Act (FRA) of 2023. On August 1, 2024 the Senate Appropriations Committee approved its fiscal 2025 defense spending bill, funding the Defense Department at $852.2 billion. Though approved unanimously, the bill still has to be reconciled with the House’s version of the Pentagon funding legislation, which authorized $833 billion in total funding. The proposed 3.3% increase in defense spending suggests that the bipartisan agreement on spending caps might be falling apart.

Hydrogen as a Peacemaker

The idea of using solar (or geothermal) energy and seawater to mass-produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, burn it and add gravity to generate a surplus of electricity and freshwater, even far from shore (which desalination cannot do), is feasible, practical and necessary. Indeed, it is a seismic proposal, in more ways than one. For starters, the pertinent raw materials –solar energy, seawater and gravity- are in the public domain, easily accessible and, except for landlocked nations, which have no direct access to the ocean, universally available. As a result, it would be extraordinarily difficult for anyone to organize a global cartel with the power to allocate production quotas of hydrogen and to set its price. Gradually the scheme would make nuclear fission and fossil fuels obsolete, dramatically increase the supply of hydrogen needed to build a widespread, reliable network of hydrogen automobile pumping stations, modernize the electric power industry, stop the wholesale dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, end the real estate crisis for the working class, and create millions of non-temporary, well-paying construction and energy jobs that cannot be outsourced.

Since oil is the main support pillar of the value of the dollar and the demand for oil will at some point collapse, it follows that the dollar needs to replace the oil mainstay. Accordingly, today’s essay looks at the dollar in light of the enormous burden of chronic current account and trade deficits and the necrotic inability of our elected leaders to come to its rescue.

BRICS countries don’t have to promote one of their national currencies to global reserve status. All they have to do, when they’re good and ready, is to stop accepting dollars as payment for their goods and services. If China did this by itself in the 19th Century, collectively they might do it too.

To say that this would usher in wholesale chaos would be a gross understatement. For the U.S., it would be an ominous event. And the European Union, which is closely linked to the American market and the dollar, would be dragged into the vortex. In other words, countermeasures must be taken to preclude the global economy from falling into the abyss.

It makes no sense to peg any currency to gold; the supply is finite, there are 8 billion people (and counting) in the world, and it just doesn’t work. Green hydrogen, which is renewable, fits the bill. it’s high time to let it determine the value of all currencies.

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