BRANDON TSENG
September 1939: President Roosevelt assails the Neutrality Act. Earlier in the year, he appealed to Congress to massively increase funding for aircraft production. AP Photo
Putin invaded Ukraine. The Ayatollah of Iran is funding and equipping terror groups such as Hamas and the Houthis with sophisticated weapons, not only funding the awful attacks against Israel, but also missile, rocket, and drone attacks against UAE, Saudi Arabia, and international merchant ships. And Chairman Xi has declared hell or high water, he will reunify Taiwan.
The world has become less stable and more violent in the past ten years, and we should not wait for a catastrophic event in the U.S. to declare an emergency. Instead, we should recognize there is an emergency today, but - thankfully - it hasn’t hit home yet.
Why recognize the national security emergency? The U.S. government can move insanely fast when there is an emergency. For whatever reason, emergencies seem to be the only time where we get lots of bang for our taxpayer buck.
There are many modern examples of emergencies driving speed of government, but we’ll use World War II as the starting analogy. In 1939, President FDR realized the U.S. industrial base was ill-prepared for war with Nazi Germany and Japan. He recognized the emergency and brought industry leaders together to solve this problem. That year, the U.S. made about 2,000 airplanes. By 1944, we were producing 100,000 fighters and bombers per year. By the end of the war, the U.S. had made over 300,000 planes while Germany and Japan combined had built a little over 200,000.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has shown every military in the world that the force structure for the next conflict is far different than how current U.S. forces are structured. A mass of drones and munitions matter. Further, drones and munitions must have autonomy and AI onboard to navigate the hellish electronic warfare environment where GPS and communications are jammed. Software battle management systems will drive targeting of High Value Individuals (HVI) and High Value Targets (HVT). And if you have an expensive asset (e.g., helicopter, fighter jet, aircraft carrier), it’s getting a missile in the first week of conflict.
Our military has recognized the need for change. Same with Congress and the Executive branch. There are small wins here and there. Thousands of drones and munitions have made their way to Ukraine. But hundreds of thousands of drones and munitions coupled with sophisticated AI and autonomy tied into software-driven, battle-management systems are required to deter and, if necessary, win future conflicts. We know this, but we are slow to move. Slow to change our buying processes. Slow to acknowledge the massive challenge. And even slower to execute.
This is why the DoD, Congress, and the Executive branch must recognize the emergency we are in and properly allocate resources to mobilize against it. In closed doors, everybody knows it’s an emergency. We’ve all stacked our hands in agreement that we must move quickly. However, until there is public acknowledgement of the emergency, whether in the form of an Executive Order or a Congressional Act, we will be unable to mobilize with the right resources.
“Accelerate change or lose” is a phrase our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CQ Brown, ingrained into our Air Force when he was Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Senior DoD, Congressional, Executive branch, and industry leaders all agree with that mantra. Our warfighters are counting on the leadership of these groups to make it happen. Just like President FDR declared and mobilized against the emergency in 1939, increasing aircraft production by 13x before Pearl Harbor, we must come together, declare the emergency, and reboot America’s forces. This is how we win.
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