Posting #16: The Story of Who Provides the Best US National Security

The story: This story tells Americans that conservatives—the party of “individual freedom,” “limited government,” “the rule of law,” “peace through strength,” “fiscal responsibility,” “free markets,” and “human dignity”—are the most capable of securing the United States.  Conservatives, the story goes, want to aggressively assert the borders of the United States, to fend off adversaries with a nuclear-deterrent “peace through strength,” and to populate the armed forces with Americans whose primary motivation is patriotism.  There is no price too high to provide this security, according to conservatives, including death and destruction.  “Freedom isn’t free,” they declare.

My take on the story:  As I pointed out in Posting #14, “The story of Peace Through Strength,” both liberals and conservatives have willingly—and some say exorbitantly—provided annual funds to the Department of Defense (DoD), funds that now exceed the total amounts granted to all other agencies and all of the top ten countries with armed forces.  If money granted is alone not a good indicator of which ideology supports national security more avidly or even what constitutes “national security,” how can we judge?  What does it mean to practice “national security”?

I suggest examining the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project” and its 2023 “playbook,” “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise” to see how at least one of the two groups plans to manage national security after the next presidential election.  According to the Foundation, this plan is the ninth edition of its “playbook,” a publication that began in 1981 with Ronald Reagan’s administration and continued with the most recent conservative President, Donald Trump.  Reportedly, despite being hamstrung by a Democratic House and Senate, Reagan had implemented 60% of the Foundation’s policy recommendations by the end of 1981, the year of his inauguration, and, with a Republican House and Senate, Trump was able to implement more.  It is said that Trump “liked being compared to a former President he deeply admired, and he touted the comparison frequently” (“Mandate” 885).  This suggests that the Foundation’s plans have been a conservative “consensus view” (xiv) of how to operate the federal government and will be implemented if a Republican is elected in 2024.

All Americans should be familiar with these plans before casting their vote.

The 920-page “Mandate” includes an opening “Note” by Project 2025’s Director, a list and biography of each of the thirty chapters’ Authors, a list of the Contributors who aided the Authors, a Foreword penned by the President of the Heritage Foundation, chapters for each of the federal agencies and more (divided into five sections), and a Conclusion written by the past-President of the Foundation. The thirty-four authors and both editors are deeply invested in the conservative cause: 16 of them are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, and 26 of them—or 77 per cent—served in the Trump administration.  These are the Americans most committed to the conservative cause, or at least to Trumpism.

It would take multiple volumes to scrutinize the entire 920-page document, so in this posting I will only interpret for context the “Note,” the “Foreword,” and the introduction to the second section, “The Common Defense.”  Then I will analyze at greater length the chapter about the Department of Defense.

(My analysis requires some detail, so even if this material is unfamiliar to you, please hang with me.  It’s really important.)

What I can say is that all four of these parts echo what are probably familiar conservative talking points to you: they condemn so-called “Marxism,” use the language of war and monstrosity to characterize what they are facing among the “radical Left” and “woke culture warriors,” and represent their conservative ideas as the only way to “rescue” Americans from such horror.

Note (xiii-xiv):  This 2-page introduction to Project 2025 is written by Paul Dans, the Project’s Director.  He initiates the martial and monstrous language that I see throughout the volume.  “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes.  “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before” (emphasis added).

Foreword (1-16): The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin D. Roberts, has written this 16-page preface.  Like Dans, he uses martial language but combines it with religiosity, portraying the United States as in “moral peril” (1) requiring “rescue” (2) by the Heritage Foundation, the “opening salvo” (2) being this volume.  Roberts also uses war language when he refers to the four “broad fronts” (3) of this conservative “salvo”: families, the “Administrative State,” national sovereignty and the borders, and the “God-given individual rights to live freely” (3).

In the “families” section (4-6), Roberts rails against rampant “fatherlessness” and the decline of marriage, DEI and “gender ideology,” pornography, Critical Race Theory, “Big Tech,” the lack of parental authority in schools, and the plight of “unborn children.”  He celebrates the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe V. Wade, claims it should be applied to all of the United States, and that conservatives should recognize “the heroism of every choice to become a mother” (6).  “Every threat to family stability,” Roberts asserts, “must be confronted” (6).

By “Administrative State,” Roberts means the professional experts who help Congress interpret and enact law.  Roberts insists that this is an abrogation of congressional responsibility that has led to “decades of corruption” (9) and a need to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America” (9).  Playing off the Christian revivalism era, “The Great Awakening,” Roberts calls this Leftist infiltration “The Great Awokening” (8).  (Hence, the current case before the Supreme Court about what’s known as “the Chevron deference.”)

In regard to “national sovereignty and the borders,” Roberts asserts that it is “human nature” to know how to live well (10) and that therefore any treaties or regulations that impinge on that natural knowledge are “dictatorial” (11).  This is what to Roberts has led “the woke Left” to open borders, to the “pseudo-religion” and “anti-human” (11) environmental activism, and unfettered trade with China that has decimated American manufacturing.  Consequently, he recommends the next conservative President institute a series of musts: American borders must be sealed entirely; all membership in international organizations must be abandoned; illegal immigration must be ended; economic engagement with China must be terminated; and implements of Chinese propaganda, like TikTok and Confucius Institutes, must be outlawed (12).

Finally, Roberts discusses the “God-given individual right to enjoy ‘the blessings of liberty’.”  This “radical equality” (14), Roberts says, is found primarily in family, work, and religion (13), an equality that “elites” despise.  Because serving oneself is “human nature” (14), economies should enable that while calling it “equality.”  “In countries with a high degree of economic freedom,” Roberts argues, “elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge.  People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens” (15; emphasis added).

Introduction to “The Common Defense” (87-90)

The two editors of this “playbook,” Paul Dans and Steven Groves, are both Heritage Foundation employees, former members of the Trump administration, and have written the introduction to the second section of “Mandate for Leadership”—“The Common Defense.”  Dans and Groves claim that the Department of Defense (DoD) and the State Department are “first among equals,” neither of which is “currently living up to its standards” (87).  This opening assertion already is an odd claim, given how unequal their budgets are: DoD receives at least ten times what State is given.  (See Posting #14.)  More odd claims follow: the generals currently in the US military are “Barack Obama’s” and so should be more heavily scrutinized (88); for 75 years Congress has reneged on its responsibility for declaring war (88); the Department of Homeland Security should be disbanded (89); and DoD has “Leftist” policies imposed from above while the State Department is wholly made up of “Leftists” (89).  The editors firmly agree with Roberts’ “Foreword,” though, that China is the greatest threat.

These three sections—the Note, the Foreword, and the Introduction—contextualize what follows, the 40-page chapter on the Department of Defense.  Their binary characterization of liberals as monstrous, radical, anti-human, and elite establishes conservatives as the opposite: virtuous, moderate, pro-human, and egalitarian.  This sets the stage for what the author and his contributors recommend for DoD.

“The Department of Defense” (91-131)

This chapter’s author, Christopher Miller, began serving in the Trump Administration in 2017, and, after President Trump fired his second Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper (who was Trump’s second nominee after James Mattis resigned), Trump appointed Miller to be his third Acting US Secretary of Defense for what was the last few months of the Trump Administration.

(It’s confusing, I know: in only 4 Trump years, two different Senate-approved Secretaries of Defense (Mattis and Esper) and four Trump-appointed Acting Secretaries (Shanahan, Esper, Spencer, and Miller). Acting Secretaries don’t have to be approved by the Senate. For comparison, Obama had four Secretaries in 8 years (his first, Gates, was a holdover from the Bush administration) and in his three years in office, Biden has had one Secretary. Neither had any Acting Secretaries of Defense.   

In Miller’s short tenure, he created controversy for his role in first, postponing DoD meetings with the incoming Biden administration and second, delaying the deployment of the National Guard during the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Miller had had a long career (1983-2014) in the US Army, starting as an enlisted man, and, once becoming a commissioned officer, joining the problematic Special Forces. Between his 2014 retirement from the Army as a Colonel and his joining the Trump administration in 2017, he is said by Wikipedia to have been a “defense contractor.”  Since leaving the Trump administration, he joined another defense contractor, DZYNE Technologies, “a leading developer of autonomous defense solutions.” Coincidentally, the Pentagon during the Trump administration had been asking for “sharp spending increases to its autonomous weapons programs.” I tell you these details not only to provide evidence of Miller’s credentials but also to emphasize his point of view: a career Army Special Forces officer, employment in the most recent conservative government, and a defense contractor.

Both of Miller’s contributors, Sergio de la Pena and Chuck DeVore, also worked in the US Army.  De la Pena retired from active-duty as a Colonel by at least 2008, worked for a private military contractor (L-3), and then worked in the Trump administration’s Department of Defense.  Afterwards, in 2021 he ran a failed campaign to be governor of Virginia and, since then, appears from LinkedIn to be a self-employed consultant on defense matters.  De Vore served in the Army National Guard and Reserves and retired in 2007, worked for a defense contractor in the aerospace industry, served in the California state Assembly, and currently works for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.  Miller, de la Pena, and de Vore not only have Trumpist conservatism and the Army in common, all three have parlayed their military experience into jobs with defense or private military contractors. (See Posting #10).

Miller emphasizes several points in this chapter: warfighting needs to be restored as DoD’s purpose; border protection is part of that warfighting purpose; the industrial base of that warfighting purpose needs to be rebuilt; and how DoD spends money needs to be transparent (92).  I take away four main points from Miller’s 40-page chapter, though: China is the greatest threat, most of the military consequently needs to be rebuilt (requiring more money), the Army in particular is suffering from being a “social testing ground” (108), and a “move fast and break things” attitude should prevail. 

China is the greatest threat

Like the “Foreword,” and the Introduction to “The Common Defense,” Miller declares that China is the greatest threat to the United States.  Miller claims that the decades of US warring in the Middle East were “ill-advised” and were part of what has led to “a high toll on America’s military” (93).  Israel, however, must be supported without qualification while NATO should be “transformed” so that allies should only expect nuclear weapons coverage from the United States (94).  Meanwhile, China is conducting a “historic military buildup” (93), including nuclear weapons, and menaces Taiwan; the United States, Miller avers, should “prioritize a denial defense…of Taiwan” (93).  Russia also poses “real threats” (93) to the United States and so DoD should be prepared for an “era of great-power competition” (92).  But the threat from the People’s Republic of China must be prioritized above all (93).

Therefore, the military budget needs to be increased

I’ve shown in Posting #9 how Congress continues to allocate more than half of the annual discretionary funds to the Department of Defense.  Miller argues, though, that the billions upon billions of unaccounted-for dollars are not enough, that “decades of ill-advised military operations in the Greater Middle East, the atrophy of our defense industrial base, the impact of the [2013-2021] sequestration, and effective disarmament by many US allies have exacted a huge toll on America’s military” (93). His solution is to provide more “rebuilding” funds to the Defense Intelligence Enterprise (106), the US Army (108), the US Navy (111), the US Air Force (113), nuclear deterrence (124), and missile defense (126).  The only entities not requiring more money are the smallest of the armed forces: the Marine Corps, US Space Force, US Cyber Command, and Special Operations Forces.

That China’s military build-up necessitates a comparable American build-up is a curious claim, since researchers outside of the Department of Defense do not agree with the first premise, that China is conducting a meaningful military build-up, nor the second, that the United States must consequently increase its military budget.  For instance, in a December 2023 report, “Reality Check: Chinese Military Spending in Context,” William D. Hartung, a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discounts the premise of “Mandate for Leadership” and its conclusion.  “This report,” Hartung contends, “reveals that the U.S. continues to outspend China on defense by a substantial margin… Accounting for the full range of military spending and purchasing power parity, Chinese spending ($476 billion) was 59% of U.S. spending ($806 billion) in 2022.”  Hartung cautions that “more military spending to counter China will not lead to greater security. A war between China and the United States over the status of Taiwan would come at a high cost for all concerned and might even escalate into a nuclear confrontation” (emphasis added).  Hartung concludes that:

China currently represents little or no direct threat to the United States. The Chinese military is not presently configured, aside from nuclear forces, to strike the U.S. in a serious way, with its extremely limited capabilities to project power outside of its immediate region: few aircraft carriers, few attack submarines, few amphibious attack ships, few transports/refueling aircraft, and little combat experience. Beijing has not fought a major war in more than 40 years (emphasis added).

The Army is a “social testing ground”

Miller contends that the US Army—and no other branch—has been used as a “social testing ground” to the detriment of its primary mission, “warfighting.”  Miller enumerates a number of distracting “progressive social policies,” like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) matters and climate change (108).  (Even though it’s the Navy that has a “greater range of climate exposure,” Miller says nothing about that.)  To move away from the “testing ground” and toward the “warfighting,” Miller makes several points.  My thoughts are in italics:

1.     “The Army no longer reflects the national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated” (109).  Is this a good or bad thing?  Should the all-volunteer Army reflect national demographics?  Should it not?  And if it doesn’t but should, as Miller implies, how does it not and why should it?  It’s hard not to think that this comment implies a time before the 1973 All-Volunteer Force, when women were barred from the Regular Army and men of color were not usually officers.  It’s also hard not to think that this comment reflects a January 2024 report that fewer white people are enlisting in the Army.  

This comment appears at the end of Miller’s “social testing ground” assertion.  As the country’s largest employer, when has the US military NOT been a so-called “testing ground”?  During the American Revolution, despite fears of a standing army? During the  War of 1812, when the federal government could not deter men from serving in their state militias and not the standing Army?  During the World Wars, when American servicemen of color were segregated from white servicemen (except for their commanders) and women were only permitted to serve in a separate service, the Women’s Army Corps?  During the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when recruiting numbers of men plummeted but women still were not permitted to serve in combat?  During those same wars, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ended and LGBTQ people were permitted to serve openly?  Again, during those same wars, when transgender servicepeople were permitted during the Obama administration, then not permitted during the Trump administration, then permitted again during the Biden administration?  Just when was this golden age of the US military not being a “social testing ground”?

2.     Senior Army leaders need to be held responsible for the decline in public support for military service (109). How would these senior leaders be held accountable?  It’s easy to proclaim this but much harder to apply.  And wouldn’t this responsibility politicize the Army leaders, something Miller rails against repeatedly?

3.     People in positions of senior leadership must have had combat experience (109). This presumes that combat is the be-all and end-all of the US military.  a.) Not all combatants are effective as senior leaders; b.) Combat doesn’t necessarily prepare one for other essential military activities, like intelligence-gathering, auditing, and acquisition; c.) This presumes that the United States always will be at war, providing the combat necessary for promotion to senior leadership.

4.     Units should be deployed for longer terms (110). In Posting # 15, I discussed the frequent deployment of military people in the last twenty years.  This appears to have had a toxic effect, not only on families but also on the mental health of US servicemembers.  But the frequent deployments also were found to benefit servicemembers in terms of pay and promotion.  Will these longer-term deployments be seen as similarly beneficial? And won’t longer-term deployments make command positions fewer and thereby lessen the opportunity for the combat experience Miller requires for senior leadership?    

5.     The National Guard should be used more sparingly in non-declared wars “in order to stabilize and preserve military voluntarism in our communities” (110). This is a revealing comment—when recruiting numbers are down, armed forces are fewer and fewer, and private military contractors are mostly fighting our wars (Posting # 10), the voluntarism is what needs to be propped up, not fighting forces per se.  

6.     “Address the underlying causal issues driving increasing Army suicide rates” (110). Miller’s recommendation is peculiar and perhaps reveals his (and his contributors’) deep familiarity with the US Army and not other branches.  Suicide in the entire US armed forces is a problem.  But it is the Marines who suffer the highest rates.  Yet Miller says nothing about suicide in his section about the Marine Corps (115-117), as though he wants to accuse only the Army of being a “social testing ground.”

“Move fast and break things”

Miller warns readers to resist the “siren song” that says money, efficiency, and the big bugaboo, technology, will protect us.  “The most powerful weapon systems,” he sings, “will remain the six inches between the ears of our citi­zens and the strength of their hearts and content of their souls” (92). 

But this invocation of citizens’ brains, hearts, and souls is mawkishly protesting too much, since Miller then, in the harder-to-keep-track-of details, recklessly promotes accelerated decision-making, expenditure of money, and fielding of technologies in terms of:

 DoD Acquisition:

·      For emerging technologies, permit allocated funds to be shifted at will and outside of the traditional processes (96)

·      Incentivize defense industries with money and speed (97)

·      Decentralize decision-making (98)

DoD Research: Accelerate getting technologies onto the battlefield (99)

DoD Foreign Military Sales: regain the WWII title, “Arsenal of Democracy,” by accelerating the sale of weapons systems to other countries (100)

DoD Intelligence: Use machine-learning and Artificial Intelligence to exploit publicly-available information (106)

US Navy: “tolerate risk so that ‘good enough’ [technology]systems can be fielded rapidly” (111)

US Space Force: reduce classification so commercial industry can participate (118)

Finally, Miller shows his true conservative and ex-Special Forces colors when he recommends that a.) the US military be used in “border protection operations” (92) and b.) Special Operations Forces “be used proactively to prevent state and non-state actors from negatively affecting US policies and objectives” (i.e state-sanctioned thuggery 121), but c.) insists that US Cyber Command—part of whose mission is to “Defend and Advance National Interests”—must not participate “in federal efforts to ‘fortify’ U.S. elections” (120).

If elections in the United States aren’t secure, what nation is there left to defend?

So what?

Surely Miller and the Heritage Foundation make some recommendations that would contribute to American national security.  But we voters have to ask ourselves about the plan that will likely be implemented if a Republican is elected president in 2024. 

It seems to me that even when a good half of the Defense budget already is committed to private defense and military contractors (Posting #10), by design it will never be enough.  Miller’s recommendation for even deeper neoliberal privatization of state-sanctioned violence discloses that, as long as private industry has influence over DoD, national security will be the publicly-stated objective… but it will also be one that should never be achieved.  “Peace,” they say, is through violent, escalating, and dominating “strength,” not through cooperation, diplomacy, mutual prosperity, compromise, equitability, unity, harmony, understanding, dialogue, respect, the Golden Rule, et cetera.   

This influence of the military-industrial complex is the very thing (conservative) President Eisenhower warned Americans about as he left office in 1961:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together (emphasis added).