I want to welcome everybody to the events today. How much money for the defense is enough . This began with a call i got from someone i respect who said toyo me simply how do we decide how much money the u. S. Should spend. I have to confess im more i ame comfortable talking about things like Social Security, the opportunity and about the defensee budget. I called my colleague here at brookings and i put the question to him how much should the u. S. Spend on defense and he said funny you asked i just finished an answer to that question so here we are and you can read all 20,000 words on the website but he wont try to read them all today. I want to start with the question i cant answer how much did the u. S. Spend, so can we get the first slide. The short answer is we spend a lot on defense. Theres lots of ways to measure but letsd start with a few basics. This is a pie chart that shows how we spent the federal budget in the last fiscal year about 900 million on defense roughly one out of every eight dollars in Government Spending 12 of federal spending. You can see the biggest slice of the budget is mandatory spending entitlement, benefits like Social Security and medicare and that is a growing part of the federal budget but that defense slice is pretty big when you compare to the nondefense which is funding all the things weet talk about the federal government does, national parks, grants to the state and local government and so forth. Even though its only 12 its pretty big. The department of defense buys more goods, services and software than all other federal government a agencies combined. The department employs about 2. 2 million people, uniform and civilians thats substantially more than all the other executive branch combined into something i learned in prepping for this, one third of all civilian federal employees are employed by the department of defense. Some peoples tallies as we spend more on defense than the next or as much them the next ten countries combined, china, russia, india, saudi arabia, germany and so forth but that calculation may understate how much the chinese spend on defense. They dont exactly have in omb style table to tell us. But another way to look at the Defense Budget is to look at what we spent over history. This shows the historical funding for defense in real terms and what to cbo projects we will spend based on the departments budget. That green line is what the congress and as they say we have so much fo the base budget and then for a war in afghanistan or ukraine they put that on top s that doesnt get built in the base but mostly the point here is you can see the defense is expected to rise in real term over thehe next decade. Travis sharp is one of the speakers who says the trend of the generally rising spending represents one area over washington policymakers both parties keep finding ways to agree and when you listen to the congressional debate it seems should we spend more or less on the nondefense discretionary or how much should we spend in real terms. Another way to measure is to look at the share of gdp and how much effort did we put into the Defense Budget and of course it looks a little different here. This is the share of gdp it was hired during the vietnam war for obvious reasons its gone up and down and its now about 3 of gdp. Thats an interesting number because we keep telling our allies they have to spend at least 2 of gdp so mike is going to talk about this in more detail. Let me explain a little bit more about the order of the program today. Mike is going to give about a 15 minutes minutes presentation. Most relevant title hes the chair of defense and a strategy and director of the Strobe Talbot Center on Security Strategy and technology in our Foreign Policy program. Mike has been at brookings for nearly 30 years with a phd from princeton and public and international affairs. Will be joined i by two other experts on defense spending, mckenzie was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise institute and head of variety of jobs and roles advising the pentagon and members on spending. She has a graduate degree in Foreign Service from georgetown and also travis sharp a senior fellow at the center for strategic and budgetaryp, assessment where hes been for five years. Travis is also a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve and a phd from princeton and Security Studies which he got in 2020. So with that i will turn the podium over and i will be back after the presentation. Thank you, david. Good morning everyone. Its nice to have you here and i will try to spend 15 minutes making the Defense Budget accessible for those who dont think about it fulltime like mckenzie and travis and diana set up a conversation about how much is enough to quote the famous book from the two whiz kids of the 1960s who wrote a book with that title and t of course david already captured the yang yang about how to think about this on the one hand of the military budget a is enormos almost a trillion dollars, almost 900 billion anyway and that doesnt count veteran benefits or homeland security. Its a lot of money and substantially more than the cold war average adjusting for inflation at substantially more than a peek from the cold war if you can believe that. On the other hand as the last chart showed its a little more than 3 of gdp and as we were observing a moment ago when david showed the pie chart, 12 of the federal budget is a lot but its also a lot less than it used to be. In the early years after world war ii even after world war iir we downsized. We were spending about half hour federal budget on the military so its entitlements that jumped out at those i of us to do defee and Foreign Policy quite often and a lot of you when you see that is the big enchilada. So i come at this from the perspective from my paper how to be a cheap hawk in the 1920s. You will remember old Newt Gingrich as he was the speaker whenve republicans took congress in 1994 and gingrich wanted to downsize government so someone ask how does that square away with you being sort of part of a legacy of the reagan revolution and a loyal apostle of president reagan left office only a few years before at that point and he said im a hawk but cheap and not of the same political persuasion of Newt Gingrich in general but philosophically im sort of in the same boat. So what i would like to do is talk about how to be a cheap hawk. In other words, to spend enough to makegh sure that based on my analogies we are in a robust position in a very troubled time and Global Politics with a lot ofof challenges around the worl. And yet, trying to minimize the burden on the taxpayer and also viewing the overall size of the deficit into the debt as longterm National Security challenges onto themselves. The Defense Department cant solve that problem. Im a little concerned about the politics that come back to the discretionary accounts, the socalled discretionary accounts which are only a third of the federal budget together. Defense and domestic. And trying to put pressure on those to reduce the spending while we leave entitlement alone and essentially leave the revenue issue alone. That wonte work. Nonetheless at the time of fiscal distress and the challenge to the countrys longterm economic foundations, i do think for me at least its better to be cheap and to essentially bless each and every pentagon request. So thats the philosophy im coming from. When you think about how to build a Defense Strategy, i think we should begin with this question. Its part of why david wanted to have thisnt event because he wanted the First Principles of you are a generalist thinking about our role in the world and our military posture how do you understand the basic conceptual drivers of a 850 billion a Year NationalDefense Program and a military that isnt huge by historical standards or current internationalds standards, 1. 3 million activeduty, about 2. 1 million total1 menu killed civilians as david said. Even if you added the reserve and guards men and women we are up to about 3 million. Thats small compared to the cold war average. Thats small even compared to china today and not that big compared to india or north korea for thatia matter so its the defense establishment its fairly small in size yet being asked to do a lot. So what is it being asked to do let me briefly speak to that question when you think of building a military strategy and a force posture i think you have to consider who might fight against you, who might fight with you, how many of these kind of fights or wars do you have to at a given moment and what degree of readiness and finally windows the war look like and what is an adequate margin of insurancein or safetyn terms of your confidence level that you could win the war with the ultimate goal of course being we want to convince our adversaries its not worth the fight against us. So, mckenzie coined the phrase when she talks about preparing for war we want to be Strong Enough if we wind up in conflict, our troops live and of the enemymy dies. When she says it sounds better. With about a georgia drawl you mawill hear in a few minutes. But the core point for me as you want to have enough military capability and credibility to fight that we will prevent the war from happening in the first place. We are at a point in the strategy where china and russia have become the top concerns for planning heaven forbid we actually fight them. We have to now go back to the old line with a purpose of military forces in the future to prevent the war from happening. Ideally that would be true but its true when you are dealing with a Nuclear Armed superpower. When you thinken about these for defense planning, who might you fight against, who would fight with you, how many wars at a time and what does that look like and what margin of insurance or advantage or overmatched do you seek so the enemy will hopefully not want to fight you in the first place. What i would say to those that think weo spent too much on the military but i would submit to you is we have a fairly modest and minimal standard for how to define the answers to those questions. Ever since the national Defense Strategy of 2018 and continued now with secretary alston of 202212 we are only planning to fight one at a time for a long time in the cold war and after at least we hypothetically envisioned being able to fight the two at a time to get involved in one war one place no aggressor sees an opportunity or the weakening deterrence so you want to prevent opportunistic aggressors from seizing on the fact that you are already engaged in one place it gives an extra margin in case you are wrong about how many forces would be required. In the Bush Administration it might take five to ten times as much pain, suffering and american casualties as it did so luckily in that case, we exaggerated or overemphasized or over inflated our best prognostications of what the war would look like. The second made exactly the opposited problem. What im trying to convey is not ag political point on agendas. Its more about military planning thatt with the military planning if you get it even within 25 to 50 of the ballpark of what you think you need to win the war and that turns out to be validated by events that is about as accurate as youre going to be so it gives you an extra margin of error and that was nice to have when we could do it when iraq and north korea were our chief concerns. Wound up being harder to defeat taliban isis and al qaeda and the Iraqi Resistance and we didnt have complete success even against the limited capabilities. But today we plan on being able to defeat either russia or china, not both at the same time and we dont assume they will attackko at the same moment. They want limited to deterrence on the peninsula but otherwise not assume an additional conflict and a similarly with iran. So we are only assuming one at a time as a planning framework for our military. We are going to have a a little bit of a debate in a few minutes on how much is enough to sustain the strategy but i think it is worth dwelling a little bit on the fact that that is a fairly modest set of planning criteria for what a superpower with 60 allies around the world really ineeds to have. And also weveup just seen a. Of two decades of conflict which the United States did fight two wars at the same time. And not a very good job when we had to do both simultaneously. Against much less repose than we are talking about today. Taso, thats the framework. Let me know if i could ask my colleague to go through a few slides and i y will give background and try to raise through a couple additional points before the conversation on stage. Im going to pick up with where david left off to remind you in the Historical Perspective of where we are today. We are moved below the peak of the iraq and afghanistan conflict and the size of the u. S. Defense budget once you adjust for inflation but we are well above the cold war peace. But of course this doesnt answer any bottomline question because dollars dont fight it all was on the battlefield, they buy capabilities that are hopefully adequate to win wars or a detour them so that is my first graphic is to remind you about where we are. There was a mini build up, not many but shorter than certainly the buildup we had after 9 11 or thes buildup we had during the vietnam conflict or the reagan peacetime buildup. You can see the cold war numbers typically ranged between about 500 billion a year and 700, 750 million. David mentioned depending on how you count it, we spend more than the next six, eight, ten countries combined. Thats not the ultimate question but it is worth noting who is putting resources into the military and there is good news if you put the Defense Budget in global perspective. I know this is a little harder to read that the United States on this graph a couple of years ago was spending about 38 of the worlds total of all expenditures on the forces. Then our allies come our nato allies added another 17 so all of nato combined is 56 of the World Military spending. Thats good news and bad news, good in this sense we have a lot of rich allies into spend a lot on the military but many if not spending it very well or as much as we think they should and by the way they all represent obligations because now we have to have a big and Strong Enough military to defend that so its not just Defense Budgets add to our own but they aret territorl protections that become our burden as well as if it were an american soil. That is what the article five really means. So i want you to have a sense of resource allocation. We go to the next chart its going to continue. All of our allies around the world add another 12 of total World Military spending so the Usled Coalition if you will nato allies, asian allies, other major Security Partners including in the middle east represent about 68 of all World Military spending. That should give confidence that we are in a pretty strong position. But it shouldntt give us any kind of overconfidence for the reason most of the conflicts we find would be near adversaries own the soil and also began dollars dont fight of dollars. You dont have to have a Defense Budget anywhere near the size of the United States and its allies, just ask the taliban. They won a war against us with a Defense Budget or military budget of their own in the range of 11,000th of ours, so i want you to know and see these inputs but not to think that they are conclusive analyses or predictions of outcomes of any hypothetical conflict. If i could go to the next slide, please. Theres a couple more then i will make some general points. This is just giving a sense. Mckinsey and i were talking on the sidelines 240 billiondollar estimate of the military budget is highly debated and uncertain by probably pluseb or minus 50 . In other words o it could be in the 300 billion range when you convert avi did the study saying it could be higher than that but its between two my best estimates one third and one half of American Military spending. Easily the secondbiggest budget on earth is doubling every seven to ten years and will keep doubling every seven to ten years interestingly less than 2 of chinas gdp but the gdp has become substantial enough its still quite a lot of money and of the war that we worry about fighting iswa near their shore d far from ours. So thats the fundamental reason why even though the numbers are important to look at, i dont think they could come anywhere close to beingng the bottom Line Assessment on whether we spend on the military. To break down the granularity of the Defense Budget and the request ifnd you are curious abt which military services spend the most, at this point its the navy and the air force although bear int mind the air force budget includes a lot of our intelligence budget out off the 850 million in total u. S. National Defense Budgetingto rit now, 100 billion is the intelligence budget. Hidden within the Defense Department. Sort of hidden in plain s