President Donald Trump (R) says he’ll propose a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, a 50% increase over this year’s proposed (because it’s only passed the House, with no guarantee that an obstructionist Progressive-Democratic Party will allow it to be passed in the Senate) $1 trillion budget. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the larger budget proposal will ever be passed, either, which adds to the premium on Republicans and Conservatives winning the 2026 mid-terms for the reasons below.
The subheadline set the framework.
A $1.5 trillion military will cost much less than a war with China.
This is a war that, presently, we would lose and lose in the most humiliating fashion.
But, but—
[H]asn’t the US military shown, in Iran and Venezuela, that it is unmatched? Yes, and brilliantly so, against small powers when we can dominate space and the skies, and use our experience in combined arms operations. Going up against China, or a multiple front conflict, is far less certain.
Actually, in a fight with the PRC or a multi-front war, the outcome is pretty certain, just not favorably so. The Ukrainian military’s last attempted offensive against our near-peer Russia was an abject failure. That offensive was conducted in accordance with NATO—which is to say American—combined arms doctrine (which worked so brilliantly in Venezuela), but without a Critical Item component of that doctrine: air power and support. Absent that, even with the technologically superior ground weapons Ukraine employed against the Russian forces, Ukraine’s offensive was stopped in its tracks with very heavy loss of those superior armored vehicles.
When the People’s Republic of China invades the Republic of China, American air power will be stripped away from any putative support we might have in mind for the RoC as our Pacific aircraft carriers are sunk and our surviving naval forces are driven all the way back to Hawaii.
Nor would the PRC would have no incentive to stop there, because
new technologies are proliferating in ways that threaten the US homeland. These include hypersonic missiles, space and cyber weapons, drones, and as ever nuclear weapons. All of this is before AI is weaponized in multiple ways.
Unlike 1940s Japan, the PRC has both the stated goal of dominating us in every important way and the wherewithal to follow up its naval victory in the Western Pacific.
The US remains helpless against cyber attacks as demonstrated by the repeated hacks against a variety of data storage sites and infrastructure distribution nodes. The PRC has a first strike capability with its hypersonic, nuclear-capable missiles, which have intercontinental reach. As part of its invasion of the RoC, the PRC has strong incentive to isolate us from the island and wage its cyberwar against us and then to exercise its first strike capability. With the latter, there will be no possibility of a nuclear threat, much less response, from the United States.
We would be left with the PRC dominating our foreign policy and, especially with its control of the Pacific sea lanes of communication and of commerce, dominating our domestic economy. With those controls, the PRC will control us.
That budget must be passed without delay, and DoD’s reform of contract-letting, of weapons development, and of procurement and production must proceed ruthlessly and with similar pace.
