Trump’s Military Budget Minus a Plan
Trump’s Military Budget Minus a Plan by Caitlin Talmadge, New York Times
Last week President Trump again called to revitalize the United States military, most notably with a 10 percent increase in the defense budget. Such proposals make for a snappy sound bite and enable the president to bask in the reflected glow of the armed forces, which happen to be more popular than he is. Yet in the absence of a coherent national strategy, arbitrary increases in the defense budget will do little to make America safer, and could make the world more dangerous.
There is no doubt that the United States faces serious security threats. The Defense Department is dealing with genuine readiness and modernization challenges, and reasonable people can disagree about whether targeted budget increases are a necessary remedy. Some experts see rising threats from North Korea and Russia and have called for augmenting the United States’ ground warfare capabilities after long campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others call for increasing funding for the Navy, which is slated to shoulder the cost of a new ballistic missile submarine — the backbone of the nation’s future nuclear force — even though this effort may squeeze out the service’s traditional shipbuilding.
Ideally, a coherent defense budget process would reflect these types of debates, prioritizing some threats over others and determining how best to combat them. In the real world, the defense budget is complex, politicized and hard to wrangle even when incoming administrations attempt to link their budgets to a vision. But they usually try…
McMaster Twofer Monday
National Security Adviser to Make Rare Appearance Before Senate Armed Services Committee by Joe Gould, Defense News
President Trump’s national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, will do something people in his job rarely do: appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
SASC Chairman John McCain confirmed McMaster will testify before the panel on Tuesday in a closed session. If McMaster was a civilian, he would not need Senate confirmation to become national security adviser. But because he opted to remain on active duty and retain his rank, he requires a Senate vote to be approved.
Asked about the hearing on Thursday, McCain told reporters there will be a question-and-answer session, but a low-key one, saying it’s “more of a meeting than a hearing.” Yet it comes at a loaded time for the National Security Council, with Capitol Hill charged with questions about Russian contacts with the administration, questions that led to the resignation of McMaster’s predecessor…
McMaster Supports Trump's Goal to Defeat ISIS
When Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President’s Trump’s national security adviser, appeared at a Washington think tank last year, he asserted that the Islamic State terrorist group “can’t be contained.”
It was an assessment that on its face appeared to contradict the message from the commander in chief. Mr. Trump has made it clear that his top foreign policy objective is not to contain the Islamic State but to destroy it. Defense Secretary James Mattis has presented the plan in outline form.
If there is any field general best able to size up the terrorist threat, it is Mr. McMaster. He doggedly led soldiers on the ground in Iraq against the vicious al Qaeda in Iraq insurgency led by Abu Musab Zarqawi.
In tough street fighting, his soldiers secured the crossroads town of Tal Afar near the Syria border — the same critical juncture that U.S.-supported Iraqi forces are fighting over today.
“They are some of the worst human beings on the face of the Earth,” he told the Pentagon press conference back then. “There is no really greater pleasure for us than to kill or capture these particular individuals.”…