By James Carden, The American Conservative, 9/26/24

On September 12, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the upper chamber’s floor to praise the work of the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally appointed panel run out of the RAND Corporation. McConnell, summarizing the report’s findings, said,

Any of our colleagues who haven’t yet taken a close look at this report should. But I’d like to reiterate a few of its conclusions that I discussed last month as the Appropriations Committee finalized defense spending legislation for the coming year. This ought to grab our attention: 

From the report, quote, “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.” 

A further quote, “the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners.”

And, quote, “the U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare.”

Writing during the early months of the First World War, the journalist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann observed, “While it takes as much skill to make a sword as a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.”  And, if anything, “human values” are conspicuous by their absence in the recommendations of the RAND Commission on the National Defense Strategy report, which, if implemented, would put the US on a permanent war footing likely to provoke—perhaps concurrently—wars in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East.

Necessarily, then, the report relies heavily on euphemism and the misleadingly anodyne terminology of defense experts. In response to the threat posed by the new “no-limits” partnership between Russia and China, the report recommends what it calls a “Multiple Theater Force Construct” since, in the view of the report’s authors, neither the previous “bipolar Cold War constructs and the two-war construct designed afterward for separate wars against less capable rogue states… meets the dimensions of today’s threat or the wide variety of ways in which and places where conflict could erupt, grow and evolve.”

A combined defense and intelligence budget of roughly $1.4 trillion a year? Not enough! The “Multiple Theater Force Construct” is in reality a bid to create what far less euphemistically and more accurately might be called a “Global War Zone” where, as the report goes on to recommend, the U.S. “must engage globally with a presence—military, diplomatic and economic—to maintain stability and preserve influence worldwide.” 

Presence, not empire. Influence, not imperium.

The report also evinces a deep-seated confusion between the level of defense expenditures and, well, results. The report claims that current defense expenditure of 3 percent of GDP is dangerously low—noting,

During the Cold War, including the Korean War and Vietnam War, DoD spending ranged from 4.9 percent to 16.9 percent of GDP. The comparison to that period is apt in terms of the magnitude of the threat, risks of strategic instability and escalation and need for US global presence.

Yet given the examples (U.S. and allied forces lost roughly 170,000 men in Korea and 280,000 in Vietnam) there is surely a case to be made that might be an inverse relationship between expenditure and security.

The RAND commission speaks of the imperative to further “integrate” with our allies. At multiple points the report insists on the “indispensability” of our allies with whom we must deepen our cooperation. The U.S. “must continue to invest in strengthening its allies and integrating its military (and economic, diplomatic, and industrial) efforts with theirs.” Yet, as we have seen in the case with the now decade-long effort to wrangle Ukraine into NATO’s orbit, the search for endless allies is also a search for endless trouble.

The report is very much a product of the former Democratic Representative Jane Harman, who served as the RAND Commission’s chair.

Readers may recall that in 2006 Harman was picked up on a wiretap promising an Israeli spy she would lobby federal prosecutors to go easy on two officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. In return for that assistance, the Israeli agent offered to lobby then-Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi to name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

In a normal country, Harman’s offer to undermine a federal case to benefit a foreign power, as a sitting member of Congress no less, would have landed her in prison. At the very least, she’d be treated as persona non grata among the great and good of Washington. But instead Harman, wife of a California billionaire who later became the owner of Newsweek, was appointed to the CIA’s External Advisory Board only a couple of years after her quid pro quo was caught on tape. Still more, the commission was rife with conflicts of interest, as a report by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft pointed out last year.

That said, if the authors of the RAND report are cognizant of any risks in creating a Global War Zone, they keep it to themselves. Might a conventional military build up in the Indo-Pacific prompt China to achieve nuclear parity with the US? Is the establishment’s nonchalance with regard to the risks of provoking Russia a reasonable position in light of the recent admission by CIA Director William Burns that “there was a moment in the fall of 2022” when he thought “there was a genuine risk” of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia? RAND is likewise silent as to whether there exist alternative grand strategies that might better suit the moment, such as retrenchment.

In the end, the RAND report leads one to a conclusion that can’t be avoided: The U.S. establishment is itself a threat to U.S. national security.