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🧵I have been back in DC for 1.5 months now, and I'm struck by the apparent lack of urgency in our national security policy debates when it comes to addressing the threats the US and its allies face, as they continue to multiply at speed. 1. #UkraineWar is in its 2nd year. 1/9
2. We're looking at potentially another major regional war triggered by Hamas's attack on #Israel. It has expanded the front and put additional strains on America's military resources. 3. As pressure build on Kosovo, I'm concerned that the Balkans may become another theater. 2/9
America's adversaries are preparing for war. #China is investing heavily across the spectrum of its military capabilities, and #Russia is busy at work expanding its armor production. The "axis of dictatorships" includes also two smaller players: Iran and North Korea. 3/9
Our analysts continue to push various and sundry estimates of CHN and RUS capabilities estimates, but IMO miss the fundamentals. The baseline should be that both the Chinese and Russian militaries are being built not to deter us but to attack. This should drive our planning. 4/9
We also continue to underestimate our adversaries. A case in point: Moscow has shown it understands mass; after 1.5 yrs the Russian army is capable of fighting and mobilizing at the same time. We need to re-learn that maneuver and attrition on the battlefield are linked. 5/9
The PLA and PLAN are untested, but they've shown they understand mass, redundancies and the imperative of stockpiling. But we keep talking precision, investing in ever-more expensive platforms of which we can buy fewer and fewer. Plus, our defense industrial base is too small.6/9
The massive expenditure of weapons, munitions, and human life in Ukraine ought to be a wake-up call for our political leaders and military planners. We need to ask whether our all-volunteer force model is up to the task of generating the capabilities and reserves we'll need. 7/9
The solution is not to “pivot to Asia,” but to rebuild the force, with the requisite redundancies in the reserves. Simply put, it is imperative that the United States and Europe increase their defense spending and rethink what we spend money on and how we generate our forces. 8/9
The US needs to move beyond the normative/reactive pronouncements about “defending the rules-based order." Let's stop talking about “great power competition” and ask instead what a geo-strategic map that favors America’s and other democracies’ interests should look like? 9/End
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