Aderholt: Our defense budget gap threatens America’s security

On May 4, I spoke at the Huntsville Madison County Chamber of Commerce on the challenges our nation is facing on multiple fronts from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. I’ve coined them the Four Horsemen of Darkness.

I spoke in Huntsville for the simple reason that since the end of World War II, almost every time our nation has faced a challenge to our national security, our national prestige or our important place in the world, America has turned to Huntsville to find the answers. Every time, whether it was winning the space race, winning the Cold War, or meeting the security challenges of the 21st century, Huntsville has answered our nation’s call and America has ultimately won.

Today, once again, America finds itself at a crossroads. We find ourselves at a point where the rest of the world is looking to us and asking if America has the courage, the strength, and the will to stand up and project its values to the rest of the world as it has for 80 years now? Or is it going to take a backseat and allow Russia, China, North Korea and Iran to cast their seeds to the wind and allow their autocratic, dictatorial, and downright evil philosophies to spread and grow across the globe?

Since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the United States, and other nations, have been helping the Ukrainians resist by sending them billions of dollars of military equipment.

While we as a country have stood up and led on this issue, I feel in many respects, since the end of the Cold War, we’ve gone adrift. This current crisis in Europe has shed an even bigger light on our own military shortcomings.

We are woefully unprepared to take on China and Russia head-to-head. Both have been heavily investing in new technologies and capabilities to achieve their particular goals. While Russia is struggling in Ukraine, they still have a massive stockpile of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems. Meanwhile, here in America, we have just been pushing the status quo and trying to play catch up, i.e. hypersonic weapons.

While I certainly hope we never have to become involved in a war with either, military war games show us performing badly, and in some scenarios, downright losing.

It doesn’t help that America showed weakness with Obama’s “red line” in Syria, offered no significant push-back to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and President Biden hastily evacuated Afghanistan in a humiliating fashion. Putin and Xi were watching closely.

We have time to correct these shortcomings, but it’s later than we think.

As a member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, I am calling for a dramatic increase in our defense budget. It’s time. Our current spending is just over 3% of our Gross Domestic Product. Our current spending of almost eight hundred billion a year on defense is not even close to meet the challenges we have coming at us from China and Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have averaged around 4.4% of our GDP on defense spending. During the Cold War, it was closer to 8%.

I believe we are facing even greater challenges now than during the Cold War. This difference between our current 3% of GDP and our average of 4.4% of GDP is what I call our “Security Gap.”

This “Security Gap” is keeping us from maintaining our leadership role. This “Security Gap” is keeping us from staying at least a generation ahead of our foes in technology, let alone keep up with them.

This “Security Gap” is keeping us from paying our men and women in uniform wages that compete better with the private sector.

This “Security Gap” is keeping us from modernizing our nuclear forces. It is keeping us from building the naval resources we need to stay ahead of China. It is keeping us from accelerating our missile defense technologies, and from accelerating our offensive and defensive capacities in cyberwarfare.

Peace through strength should once again be our focus. More than 100 years ago Theodore Roosevelt understood this when he said speak softly but carry a big stick. We must ensure that our military is the most powerful and most capable on the planet by leveraging our technological capabilities.

We must not only fund and accelerate development of new technologies such as hypersonics, advanced lasers, advanced missile defenses, smarter drones, etc., we must also increase our production of conventional weapons. At the end of the Cold War, we had $21 billion worth of weapons in our inventory. Today, that amount is down below one billion. We already have shortfalls in key conventional systems needed for Ukraine, and we are at least a year behind in fulfilling weapons deliveries to Taiwan.

The United States must work towards the domination of warfighting domains such as space, cyber and artificial intelligence. This includes fully funding Space Command and making sure we dominate in space. Space Command and Space Force are some of the greatest ways for us to achieve new levels of superiority over the Chinese and Russians.

We also have not spent nearly enough money on U.S. Cyber Command. Their main mission has been to counter cyber threats to the homeland. But their capabilities to launch offensive operations have been woefully underfunded. Our cyber capabilities must remain the most robust in the world with a myriad of options for our cyber commanders to deal with any threat, anywhere.

We must also begin to strengthen our old alliances like NATO and to continue to make new ones in Southeast Asia. China is working relentlessly to build new alliances around the world, in particular, the continent of Africa. The Chinese have invested billions of dollars in infrastructure in African nations.

If America creates leadership vacuums, the Chinese will be more than happy to fill them.

And finally, I want to talk about the type of culture we are creating inside our military. For the past few years, the woke culture from the outside world had also been seeping into our military structure.

There is a video you can see on YouTube where it compares our Army recruiting videos with those of the Russian Army. The difference is night and day. The Russian video was more along the lines of what you would expect from a recruiting video. It reminded me of the Army’s Be All You Can Be ads from the 1980s.

On the other hand, our recruiting video looked like it had been produced by some leftist, Hollywood woke organization. Democrats today are seeking to tarnish military service by proposing bills designed to label members of the military as white supremacists and neo-Nazis. With the Democrats’ rebranding efforts, it’s no wonder the services are struggling to meet end-strength. Our military needs to be based on a culture of warriors, not wokeness.

As long as I’m in Congress, I will be fighting to ensure America has the military might to thwart any and all attempts to weaken this great nation.

We are talking about a significant, but necessary amount of money. I envision by 2026 our defense budget should be closer to $1.1 trillion, instead of the current presidential request for $773 billion.

Yes, it’s a lot of money and we will have to find other areas to cut. But if we are not willing to spend the amount of money necessary to defend our nation from those who wish us harm, does anything else really matter?

U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (AL-04) is a Republican from Haleyville.