The Proposed 2023 Defense Budget Doesn’t Meet U.S. Security Goals

Will the president’s proposed 2023 federal budget allow the Department of Defense to satisfy the demands of the National Defense Strategy? The short answer is no—it is too small to pay for the necessary capabilities and capacity to deter and if necessary, defeat, challenges from major-power rivals China and Russia, as well as deal with those posed by Iran, North Korea, and global terrorism. Since the 2018 congressionally appointed bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission, they and numerous other American defense leaders have repeatedly stated that meeting those goals will require between 3-5 percent real growth per year throughout much of the 2020s. The president’s proposed 2023 budget does not meet that target. In fact, when inflation is considered, proposed 2023 defense funding is down between 3-5 percent real growth compared to last year’s—not up.

The National Defense Strategy Commission explained today’s circumstances well when it concluded: “America is very near the point of strategic insolvency, where its ‘means’ are badly out of alignment with its ‘ends.’” Given the alarming threats posed by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, this danger is very real.

We have four plausible alternatives for resolving this discrepancy: one, significantly increase the defense budget (not likely); two, lower the expectations of the defense strategy (also not likely); three, accept the growing strategy-resource mismatch (potentially disastrous); or four, start evaluating defense capabilities and investing in terms of the desired effects they contribute to meeting the needs of our defense strategy. Options one and two are pragmatically and politically unrealistic. Option three is what we have been doing for the past two decades and is becoming untenable in the face of growing threat military capabilities–particularly those of China. Option four will be difficult, but it is entirely feasible.

Any discussion regarding defense budgets must begin with investment priorities. In the 2023 proposal, the actual DOD budget percentages are allocated among the armed services as follows: Navy 23.3; Army 23.0; DOD Agencies 22.1; Air Force 21.9; Marine Corps 6.5; Space Force 3.2. In DOD budget documents the cited Air Force number is a higher figure because of what is called “pass-through funding”—money that actually goes to other DOD agencies as a budget conveyance tool. In FY23, the pass-through in the Air Force budget amounts to over $40 billion.

To allow transparency for decision makers to better understand the fiscal predicament facing all the services, the pass-through must be removed from the Air Force budget and placed with the other DOD agencies where it belongs. The pass-through leads to inaccurate assumptions that have resulted in the Air Force being chronically underfunded for decades. In fact, the Air Force has been funded last relative to the Army and Navy for 28 years in a row (FY94 through FY21), and that last place position is repeated in the FY23 proposed budget. That neglect has resulted in the smallest, oldest, and least ready Air Force in its entire history. As a reference point, the youngest B-52—the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force—is over 60 years old.

The Air Force has many more mission demands than resources to accomplish them. Without a defense-wide approach to evaluate defense capabilities relative to meeting the needs of our strategy, the Air Force, and to a degree the other services, are obliged to do the only thing that they can do: accept significant risk in the near term by retiring current force structure to free up funds to invest in necessary future force capabilities.

For example, in the current 2023 future years defense plan (FYDP) the Air Force is planning to divest 1,463 aircraft, but only buy 467. The move will decrease its force by 996. That is about a 25 percent force structure reduction to a service that was already evaluated as ‘weak’ in a recent annual military assessment of the U.S. armed forces. The Navy will shed 24 ships over the same period. The Pentagon writ large is reducing personnel on the order of 25,000 just in 2023 alone. The end of the FYDP is 2027. This is the same year analysts anticipate that China will be fully capable of successfully assaulting Taiwan. With the path the President’s FY23 defense budget puts the nation on, will the Pentagon be better off or worse off in offering the President in 2027 options to defend Taiwan, or accomplish any other defense contingency?

With a growing defense strategy-resource mismatch, along with little current administration or Congressional support to resolve that mismatch by increasing the defense budget share, the time is past due for an open and honest roles and missions review of the armed forces. The last serious attempt was conducted in 1994-95. Such a review could be used to evaluate our current and projected defense capabilities in terms of the practical effects they contribute to meeting the needs of our strategy. It could then recommend shifts inside of the DOD to optimize defense capabilities given that current defense budget allocations are disconnected from the defense strategy.

Not all defense programs offer equal combat value. Too often a service is forced to reduce a highly effective existing capability in order to free up funding to achieve a needed future capability in that service, only to see less effective programs with similar missions survive in another service. Considering the dangers posed by growing threats the DOD can no longer afford to continue disjointed investment prioritization and force management. The best way to ensure defense strategy priorities are optimally addressed is to look beyond budget allocation from a service-centric perspective and instead consider how the American defense posture as a whole can best achieve desired national defense strategy objectives using a cost-per-effect perspective.

The DOD must seek to make far more informed decisions that will result in our warfighters having access to optimal capabilities, regardless of the service from which they might originate. Growing threats and insufficient defense resources to accomplish current assigned missions will require new budget apportioning aligned to meet those mission demands in the most effective and efficient way fashion possible.