7 hours ago
4
As I listened to Defense Secretary Hegseth testify about the proposed $1.5 Trillion defense budget, the quote from Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer, kept running through my mind: “The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win.”
The U.S. military has no peer. U.S. military personnel are a stunningly impressive group, the best trained and equipped to ever fight a war. But despite continued tactical excellence, and the highest tech and the (already) most expensive military in the world, the U.S. has had a hard time turning that into durable strategic outcomes.
The War in Afghanistan ended in a collapse of its government and U.S. withdrawal. Getting Iraq to a fragile, deeply sectarian, often-Iranian-dominated, and corrupt democracy, took years, thousands of U.S. lives, many multiples of that of Iraqi lives, and billions of dollars. And the current Iran war seems likely to end in a way that is neither beneficial for U.S. security nor a successful escalation beyond what can be accomplished with coercive diplomacy—as of right now, the war did not remove the Iranian regime, its highly enriched uranium nor Iran’s capacity to shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will. As a bonus, we likely have confirmed the view among nations that the only real way to ensure that no one will attack you is to acquire a nuclear weapon. These three wars are not a track record of strategic wins.
While Congress considers authorizing and appropriating the largest defense budget since World War II, they should undertake a formal, concerted effort to understand why this disconnect exists. In the case of Afghanistan, such an effort is well underway with the Afghanistan War Commission. But a myriad of questions, ranging from the purely tactical to the political and strategic, need to be answered in the case of the Iran War. While the Administration will certainly argue that it’s too soon for a commission like the one for the Afghanistan War to be contemplated, that should not stop Congress from seeking answers on its own as it determines whether, and how, to provide the requested defense spending.
Congress should demand to know why the U.S. military was underprepared for the threat of Iranian drones, which killed U.S. servicemembers, destroyed aircraft, damaged U.S. facilities across the Gulf, and damaged commercial facilities in multiple countries. This seeming under-preparedness is despite the ubiquity of Iranian-supplied drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. Congress should seek to determine if the intelligence on Iran’s drone programs was accurate and, if so, was DOD unprepared? Or, alternately, did DOD determine this level of damage was an acceptable risk—after all, one rarely fights wars without losses. But it’s equally likely, perhaps much more likely, that we overestimated our capacity and that of our allies to suppress drone launches and intercept airborne drone attacks.
Similar questions relate to Iran’s missile capability, which has done damage all over the region. Again, those authorizing and carrying out the war would have strong insight into Iran’s capacity to conduct such strikes. And the U.S. may have understood, assuming media reports are correct, that Iran could rebuild these capabilities reasonably quickly. But Congress should ask about this and the capabilities and decision-making given the costs that have been imposed. Would the systems that would be funded in this year’s budget request fix that problem? Or do we need to do something else?
Iran has been, as noted, able to close the Strait of Hormuz. Did DOD develop workable options for this foreseeable possibility? If not, why not given that such a closure has been contemplated in many, many war games and written about publicly for years? Bad planning? Or did DOD assume they had the capability to deal with the Iranian systems? If so, why was that wrong and what do we need to do to ensure that this can’t happen in the future, for example in the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea?
Congress should also ask hard questions about military planning. The Department of Defense is extremely defensive about sharing details of war plans with Congress, for understandable reasons, but the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have not been shy about broadcasting, for example, the number of targets hit and ships sunk. How did the planners envision striking these targets in those numbers would achieve strategic goals, whatever they were?
The largest problems appear to come from confused and wildly over-optimistic goals and misaligned strategies between allies. And one cannot envision the Administration agreeing to answer questions about how the President made the decision to attack or why he made that decision when he did. But Congress can and should press the Department and the Intelligence Community on what options were presented and how risks and benefits were presented. The Executive Branch will resist this, but also cannot be trusted to grade its own homework. And the country deserves to have some faith in the process by which the President is presented and weighs strategic options and risk even if the President resists explaining how he came to make those decisions.
It would be ideal if Congress would conduct these inquiries publicly. But given the political environment, that seems likely to break down in partisan infighting. Instead, Congress, through the Armed Services Committees and to a lesser extent the Intelligence Committees, could simply explore these questions through a series of closed-door briefings, hearings, and interviews. Responsible members, and the Chairman and Ranking Members on both Armed Services committees are in that category, can agree to lock arms and work together to understand what happened—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation into Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election provides a good example of just this kind of effort (full disclosure—I was the Minority Staff Director on SSCI during this time). Such effort may not fully satisfy anyone, will irritate partisans on both sides of the aisle, and will certainly provoke conflict between the branches. But such checks and balances are essential to war fighting by a democratic state. We need to understand why we’ve failed in the past if we want to win in the future and avoid Heinlein’s curse.
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