How the next president can be a ‘cheap hawk’

When Newt Gingrich was asked about his views on defense spending back in the mid-1990s, at a time when people still cared about the federal deficit, he said, “I’m a hawk — but I’m a cheap hawk.”

It was such a good line that I borrowed it for a book title the following year. And it is time we collectively return to it.

There are voices clamoring for very big increases in defense spending. These views are understandable, given the return of an angry and revanchist Russia, the rise of China, ongoing provocations from a nuclear-minded Iran and a nuclear-capable North Korea, and other security challenges. But neither presidential candidate has gone so far as to specify what kind of defense buildup, small or large, they might favor.

To break the logjam and obtain the kind of increases in defense spending that the global environment now requires, we need to be specific. Sweeping calls for the U.S. defense budget — now at about $850 billion — to return to Cold War levels when measured against GDP are unrealistic and unneeded, especially with federal deficits so big ($1.8 trillion in 2024, CBO has just reported).

One major unmet defense need is in force structure, and specifically our force postures in potential combat zones around the world. We need to beef them up — not across the board, but in concrete and specific ways. The overarching concept behind these modest buildups should be to ensure that, working with local allies, we can help prevent rapid, successful aggression in four places at once. This idea is similar to the recent argument of the independent bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy.

The nation’s last two national defense strategies came out in a remarkably similar place. Both emphasized the importance of great-power competition and the deterrence of Russia and China, after 25 years prioritizing regional conflict against “rogue” states. The Pentagon began this process at the end of the Obama administration; defense secretaries under Presidents Trump and Biden made the changes formal and started to back them up with large resources. This was a big transformation, and a smart and bipartisan one.

But there were two problems with this approach, at least when measured against the demands of the 2020s. First, the size and shape of the American armed forces remained virtually unchanged, even as the Pentagon’s core focus shifted from “two major regional contingencies” to great-power rivalry. Indeed, today’s U.S. military is slightly smaller, in terms of personnel, than the military of the 1990s, featuring roughly the same mix of forces, and the same budgetary allocations across the different branches.

Second, Defense Secretaries James Mattis and Lloyd Austin deemed it adequate for the U.S. to be able to fight one war at a time, with the most demanding scenario probably against China. That was a shift from a more historical post-1950 tradition of building a military with the hypothetical capacity to wage two wars at once (fighting alongside allies in each case). The main motivation of such thinking was less about actually expecting to fight two wars at once (though we did so from 2003 through at least 2009), and more about deterring an opportunistic aggressor from seeing the U.S. as so preoccupied with one big war that it could get away with a quick aggressive move elsewhere.

With Russia, China, North Korea and Iran increasingly in strategic cahoots, this one-war framework no longer suffices.

We need to imagine what U.S. force packages might be needed to maintain deterrence and prevent North Korea, Iran or Russia from successfully attacking American friends and allies in their regions, if, for example, America were already at war with China over the defense of Taiwan. The last two national defense strategies make passing mention of such goals, but allocate no specific forces to the job.

Here is a rough way to think about this goal.

In the Middle East, we need to have the defensive capabilities that were used to help shoot down over 300 Iranian missiles and drones in April, or to help intercept a major Hezbollah attack on Israel of the type that could occur soon. The U.S. has often used two aircraft carriers plus land-based assets in these tasks. Aircraft carrier battle groups are an expensive way to do this job; building a dedicated fleet that could always keep two in the region without being homeported there would literally require building eight more, given ship rotation demands. That would lead to a whopping average annual price tag of around $50 billion. But adding the equivalent capability in dedicated land-based air and missile defense systems, to be kept in the Middle East under all circumstances even in the event of war with China, would have an average annual cost of $5 billion to $10 billion.

With North Korea, the goal of any “hold” strategy should be to help South Korea defend itself from an attack on Seoul, while having enough U.S. airpower to go after North Korean launchers and weapons depots (including any for nuclear weapons that we can identify) early in a war. Those would be the tasks that couldn’t wait for a resolution of the postulated U.S.-China war. Fortunately, we already have nearly 30,000 American troops in South Korea and they have most of these capabilities, but they might be required for the China conflict assumed to be underway.

At a minimum, therefore, we would need the ability to bring additional airpower and air/missile defense systems to the Korean peninsula in time of war over Taiwan, to avoid any perception that the U.S. is incapable of also helping defeat North Korea’s early spasms of attack. That implies roughly doubling our current footprint on the peninsula — say, four more squadrons of combat aircraft, and four more Patriot or THAAD defense batteries. Estimated average annual cost: $10 billion, plus construction costs for additional airfields, fuel depots, aircraft shelters and munitions stocks, which South Korea could help pay for.

With Russia, the simplest long-term solution would involve stationing real American combat power in the Baltic states, NATO’s most exposed eastern flank. The idea would again be to discourage a rapid enemy assault, in this case perhaps against the eastern parts of Estonia and Latvia (where Russian speakers Putin has claimed the right to “protect” are). Adding one Army brigade combat team and a combat aviation brigade (centered on attack helicopters) to the standing Army force structure for this purpose would cost about $5 billion a year after bases were built. These would be modest but serious and self-sufficient elements of American combat power.

Altogether, assuming that we actually added these forces to the standing military, the average annual costs of the new force posture would total around $25 billion a year more than currently projected. Initial costs would be somewhat higher as equipment was purchased, but longer-term costs would average out in this range.

Yes, that is a lot of money on top of the $850 billion-plus a year we already spend on defense. But at about 3 percent of the current Pentagon budget, it still fits under the label of “how to be a cheap hawk.”

Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”