[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 181 (Thursday, November 15, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6970-S6973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY COMMISSION REPORT

  Mr. KYLE. Madam President, yesterday the National Defense Strategy 
Commission released its report after about a year of study for the 
defense needs of the United States and our future requirements for 
defense strategy and funding of that strategy. I had the honor of 
serving on that commission during the time that preceded my current 
presence in the U.S. Senate.
  The Commission was appointed by the chairmen and ranking members of 
the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. There were six appointed 
from each of the two bodies, so a total of 12, and it was a division 
equally between Republicans and Democrats. I was privileged to have 
been appointed by my predecessor, Senator John McCain.
  The commission is chaired by Ambassador Eric Edelman and Admiral Gary 
Roughead, Retired, and it included defense experts who had served in 
Congress, who had served in the intelligence community, the diplomatic 
community, and the military. There was one former political person--
myself. As I said, we were tasked with the job of studying our National 
Defense Strategy and providing recommendations to the Secretary of 
Defense and to the Congress about our future courses of action.
  The Commission worked very hard to review all of the pertinent 
information related to the formation of the Trump administration 
National Defense Strategy, which had been issued earlier in the year. 
This effort included examining the assumptions, the missions, the force 
posture, the structure, as well as strategic and military risks 
associated with the execution of that National Defense Strategy.
  The Commission particularly focused on threats to the United States 
and the size and shape of the force required to deter and, if 
necessary, defeat these threats. It focused on the readiness of our 
force, the posture and capabilities of the force, and the allocation of 
resources. It also examined the strategic and military risks that 
informed the development of both the National Defense Strategy and the 
National Security Strategy.
  This Commission has demonstrated that, even in Washington, DC, it is 
possible to get a genuinely bipartisan consensus on something--in this 
case, our

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consensus on United States' national security. We agreed that, for 
example, budget-driven strategies that assume too much risk will cost 
us more in the long run than properly funded strategies based on the 
realistic assessment of the current strategic environment. That is kind 
of a long way of saying that what this bipartisan commission concluded, 
on a consensus basis--no dissenting views at all--was that we risk more 
by proceeding with the rebuilding of our military constrained by budget 
requirements than if we were to increase the budget for defense 
spending and eliminate the impediments to sensible acquisition, such as 
the continuing resolution and the sequestration requirements that 
Congress has been engaged in over the past several years.
  What this Commission said, in stark headlines, is that the United 
States faces a national emergency. It concluded, in very stark terms, 
that we might lose a war with China or Russia, and that the only way to 
avoid this is to adequately fund the strategy that the Secretary of 
Defense has set out. His prioritization, the Commission concluded, is 
exactly right: We have to change from focusing solely or primarily on 
fighting a war in the Middle East or conflicts with terrorists, and 
instead change to focusing on the threats that are posed by potential 
adversaries--Russia and China. If we have the capability of dealing 
with those threats by deterring them or, if necessary, defeating them, 
then we should also have the ability to deal with terrorism, to deal 
with North Korea and deal with Iran, but our first priority needs to be 
to focus on China and on Russia.
  The NDS Commission report argues:

       The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties 
     and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict. It 
     might struggle to win, or perhaps lose a war against China 
     or Russia. The United States is particularly at risk of 
     being overwhelmed should its military forces be required 
     to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.

  Some might oppose such strong wording, but the Commission believed we 
had to be able to talk honestly about the state of our military 
preparedness and our national security.
  As Ambassador Edelman, Chairman of the Commission, stated, ``It is 
probably more dangerous to tell ourselves and other people that we're 
going to be able to do these things when, in fact, we aren't able to do 
them because we're not paying for them.''
  The object of a strong military is to deter conflict from ever 
occurring. You do that by demonstrating you are able to prevail in a 
conflict if necessary. You have to have the capability of defeating any 
adversary you might face. If you have that capability, those 
adversaries are less likely to miscalculate, to assume they might be 
able to advance their parochial interests without a pushback from the 
United States, NATO, or our other allies, and they come to this belief 
if they examine their capabilities against ours and determine we are 
lacking in the ability to stop them.
  What this report says is that we have to get serious about rebuilding 
our military, or we run the risk of bad actors in the world deciding 
they can take a chance that we will not respond.
  Let me summarize what this report says. Again, I can't emphasize this 
too much. I know it is Washington, DC. I know we are talking about 
difficult issues here, but these 12 Democrats and Republicans, equally 
divided, reached a conclusion, a consensus, about what we need to do, 
and we are willing to speak very strongly about it. It is possible for 
Democrats and Republicans to get together on something in this city, 
and I am hoping my colleagues in the House and in the Senate will 
approach the issues in the same bipartisan spirit that characterized 
the deliberations of the Commission.
  Here is the summary:
  First, we are in a state of national emergency. For the first time 
since the end of the Cold War, the United States is at risk of losing a 
war against these peer competitors--that is a euphemism for China and 
Russia.
  Second, there is a bipartisan consensus that Congress must provide 
predictable and sufficient funding for the Department of Defense to 
execute the strategy it has developed--the National Defense Strategy. 
This means Congress must undo sequestration, which is the provision in 
law that says that if we don't meet certain budget requirements, all 
Departments of the government, including the Department of Defense, 
have to cut right off the top an equal percentage of funding in order 
to get back to those budget levels. For the Defense Department, it is 
impossible to both provide for our national security and comply with 
that requirement, so sequestration has to end.
  We have to return to the regular order of appropriating funding for 
the Department of Defense on an annual basis at the beginning of each 
fiscal year so the Pentagon can do the planning necessary and the 
people who provide the weaponry and other products to the Defense 
Department can plan adequately for the development and production of 
these items on a sensible basis, on a basis that enables them to 
calculate in the future how much money they will have over the period 
of time they need. We can't do that if, instead, we continue to operate 
on what are called continuing resolutions, where Congress throws up its 
hands sometime in the late summer and says: We are never going to agree 
on how much to fund the various Departments of government, including 
the Department of Defense. Let's just agree to continue to do the same 
amount of spending we did last year on the same things.
  Think about that in your family budget. Each year, instead of trying 
to figure out what you are going to need this year--and it is going to 
be a little different from last year--you say: We will just spend the 
same amount we spent last year on the same things. It is a very 
illogical way and it is a very detrimental way for us to provide for 
our national defense.
  The third thing the Commission recommended is that we have to 
increase the top line or the total amount of money spent on defense 
over the next several years if we are going to truly rebuild our 
military. Last year, a deal was struck in which we agreed to a 2-year 
funding for the Department of Defense that staunched the flow of blood 
from the inadequate funding of years previous. All it did was to 
temporarily provide funds, primarily to increase our readiness. It did 
not provide enough to rebuild our military. It provided enough to start 
the journey, which may take us 15 or 20 years, but that is how long, 
with increased funding, it will take to do the job.
  We concluded that we ignore the issues at our peril, that today our 
adversaries undermine U.S. goals on a daily basis and that continued 
neglect of our defense capabilities puts our Nation at risk.
  What are the specific conclusions? This report reports that America's 
military superiority has ``eroded to a dangerous degree'' and that the 
United States is in a ``crisis of national security.'' It says that 
``the United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should 
its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.''
  In other words, we are in a state of national emergency, and this 
country is at risk of actually being defeated by Russia or China should 
we find ourselves in conflict with them. Nobody is predicting a war 
today or even tomorrow, but we have seen the nationalistic designs that 
China has in its region of the world, and we have seen repeated efforts 
by Vladimir Putin's Russia to advance its sphere of influence, 
particularly in Eastern Europe--the taking of Crimea, the invasion of 
Ukraine, the shooting down of a civilian airliner, the use of chemical 
agents--prohibited by treaties, by the way--on foreign soil to deal 
with people with whom it disagrees. Somebody has likened Vladimir Putin 
to the burglar in a hotel who walks down the hallway pushing on each 
door until he finds one that is not locked so he can go in and 
burglarize. He is an opportunist who takes advantage of weakness. The 
last thing we want to do is to suggest to him that we would not or 
could not respond to actions he takes. In other words, to prevent him 
from miscalculating, we have to deter conduct that could lead to 
conflict.

  The way the Russian military doctrine works these days is, it starts 
with a hybrid war. It is not a fighting war to begin with. It is done 
through cyber attacks, through propaganda, through actions that perhaps 
utilize contractors rather than the Russian military

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to go into another country so that they have plausible deniability 
until they have achieved their initial goals and then have the Russian 
military move into the area and even potentially, according to Russian 
doctrine, use nuclear weapons. They would do this on a tactical basis 
to do what they call escalate to deescalate--in other words, to suggest 
to NATO, the United States, and other allies that our responding to 
that attack could lead to a nuclear conflagration.
  The Russians have the tactical weapons. They have 10 times more than 
we do, so they can use them on a battlefield and then say: Look, we 
have taken the territory we want to take. We are done for now, and you 
just need to leave us alone rather than getting involved in this 
conflict.
  That is the kind of way we could be drawn into a conflict even though 
there is not a big army attack or air attack to begin such a conflict. 
It is the escalation ladder where tactical nuclear weapons might be 
used, and then it is up to the United States to decide what to do next.
  This is the kind of thing in which miscalculation can occur. The 
United States has to persuade countries like Russia and China that they 
shouldn't begin the process of calculating whether they could defeat us 
with the assumption that we wouldn't or couldn't respond. That is what 
deterrence is all about. Nobody wants war, but you prevent war by 
demonstrating to the aggressor that it is not worth it for that 
aggressor to start the conflict, that he is going to lose more than he 
can potentially gain.
  We don't get to define whether we have adequate deterrence; that is 
defined by our potential adversary. What do they think we can do? In 
the past several years, both the Chinese and Russians have gone to 
school on the United States and the way we conduct our military 
activities, for example, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan. They 
understand our strengths and weaknesses. They have been spending a lot 
of money on research and development and readiness and weapon 
acquisition and doctrine to take advantage of our weaknesses in an 
asymmetrical way in order to defeat us if there should ever be a 
conflict between us.
  The Chinese have put a lot, for example, into their space-based 
capabilities, trying to knock the United States out of space so that 
our satellites can't tell our weapons where to fire or tell our troops 
how to get where they need to go.
  The Russians are very good in cyber activity. They would like to be 
able to deny us the ability to communicate with each other and to do 
the other things we rely upon through cyber space. They have developed 
very capable modern technology and weaponry that in some cases is much 
better than ours. They have the ability to deny us access to 
battlefields through their long-range air defenses, for example. The 
United States no longer has superiority in all military fields. We can 
expect not to have air superiority, for example, in a conflict with 
Russia.
  These are problems that have to be remedied, and they can't be 
remedied overnight. What our Commission concluded is that we have to 
recognize the potential threat. The reason our adversaries have 
developed the kinds of weapons and doctrine they have is because they 
want to be prepared in the event of conflict between us. We are not 
going to start a conflict, but we want to make sure they don't 
miscalculate and start one, and that starts with having a military that 
they understand is sufficient to defeat them. That is what real 
deterrence is all about.
  This report should not be understood as a criticism of the Secretary 
of Defense or of the Defense Department. It is true that we say there 
are areas that need improvement, but Secretary Mattis knows as well as 
anyone what the nature of this threat is. He is able to say ``I will 
make do with what the Congress gives us,'' but I don't think he is able 
to say ``I know in my heart that will be sufficient.'' In fact, earlier 
this year, he warned us that ``our competitive edge has eroded in every 
domain of warfare--air, land, sea, space, and cyber. The combination of 
rapidly changing technology, the negative impact on military readiness 
resulting from the longest continuous period of combat in our Nation's 
history, and a prolonged period of unpredictable and insufficient 
funding, created an overstretched and under-resourced military.'' He 
has recognized the problem.
  I think it is up to the Congress to respond to his recognition of the 
problem and to the report of this bipartisan Commission. We have all 
heard plenty about the results of this underfunding. We have seen 
aircraft that aren't able to fly or they crash. We have seen Navy ships 
that collide with each other and other kinds of catastrophes that have 
befallen our military. Today, our military is the smallest it has been 
since 1940, since before World War II. We face munition shortages. We 
obviously need to refresh our wornout troops and equipment. There are 
urgent requirements to modernize our nuclear deterrent--the deterrent 
that says to the Russians or the Chinese, for example, and in the 
future North Korea and perhaps Iran: Don't even think about a nuclear 
conflict with us. We have the ability to destroy you. We are in the 
process of modernizing that, and it is going to take a long time and a 
lot of money to do that.

  Defense spending is near historic lows. We think that because last 
year we made a deal to slightly increase it for a 2-year period of time 
that we solved the problem. That is not true. As a share of the Federal 
budget and the national economy, we are spending at near historic lows 
on defense. We now have enough evidence to know that mindless spending 
cuts, as would be required by sequestration, for example, don't make 
the Department of Defense more efficient. There are always savings to 
be had in the Department of Defense, but that is not the way to achieve 
them. In fact, informing the larger drivers of the Pentagon's budget 
would actually require legislative changes that the Congress has been 
unwilling to make. So let's put the burden where it lies, and that is 
on Congress, to fix a lot of these problems.
  Between the fiscal years 2012 and 2019, the Department of Defense 
will have sustained $539 billion in cuts over the budget plan proposed 
by Secretary Gates in the year 2010. So Secretary Gates said: Here is 
our 20-year plan, and we are almost half way through that plan, and we 
have already suffered almost half a trillion dollars in cuts over what 
he said we would need. If defense spending continues at the planned 
rate through 2021, it will take another 19 years to reverse all of the 
Budget Act cuts that occurred as a result of sequestration. Obviously, 
we have work to do.
  I have talked about the threat. Let me just mention a couple of other 
points that we made in the report. We commented on the Defense 
Department's national security report--the National Defense Strategy, 
which was published in 2017--and it actually helped to make this case 
for us. It argued that we face ``an extraordinarily dangerous world,'' 
and that threats ``have intensified in recent years.'' We face a world 
where ``China and Russia challenge American power,'' where ``the 
Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran 
are determined to destabilize regions,'' and where transnational threat 
groups ``are actively trying to harm Americans.''
  So when I speak to China and Russia, I don't mean to demean the 
threats posed by other actors like North Korea and Iran or the 
terrorists who continue to threaten us. I am simply noting the most 
serious threat should conflict arise. This focus on China and Russia, I 
think, is prudent because both countries, as I said, have extensively 
modernized their forces, including their nuclear weapons arsenals, and 
they have routinely taken actions that threaten, coerce, and intimidate 
others in the region.
  For the last 17 years most of our forces have been organized, manned, 
trained, and equipped to fight smaller scale wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. I think in the meantime some of our planners have 
forgotten how to plan and operationalize large-scale military 
conflicts. This we have to relearn while we still have time.
  Our adversaries are not waiting, as I said. They don't face similar 
fiscal constraints as we do. I was asked the other evening: Well, isn't 
it true that we spend a lot more in our military than Russia and China 
do? The answer is that this isn't even an apples-and-oranges 
comparison. We are honest about

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our budget and transparent. We put out in the public what our 
intelligence community topline budget is. The Russians and Chinese 
don't do that. They hide as much as they can. They don't pay their 
forces the way we do, and 70 percent of our defense budget is for our 
forces--our manpower--in the pay and benefits and healthcare they need. 
We don't have the combined industrial base with the military that the 
Chinese do, for example, and that the Russians do. What we spend is all 
out there. They can hide a lot of their spending in the activities of 
their industrial companies that are doing the work of the Chinese army, 
for example. So that is not a valid comparison.
  I will just conclude this way. I was in the Congress for 26 years. I 
served on the House Armed Services Committee. I came to the Senate and 
served on numerous commissions and task forces--in the Intelligence 
Committee, for example, for 8 years, which looked into the threats that 
we face and what we need to do about those threats. I led efforts 
dealing with our strategic deterrent, our nuclear modernization effort, 
and I was sobered by the evidence that we received as a member of the 
National Defense Strategy Commission. I was taken aback. I had not been 
in the Senate for 5 years. I hadn't had the advantage of classified 
briefings on the status of our adversaries' efforts and our own, and I 
was shocked at the degree to which we have lost the advantage that we 
used to have. I shared the concerns with my colleagues that this could 
lead potential adversaries to miscalculate, to think that they could 
make moves that wouldn't be resisted by the United States because we 
don't have the capability any more to do that. That has to change if we 
are to avoid war.
  Therefore, I urge my colleagues in the days and weeks to come to 
review this Commission report, to think about it in terms of a 
consensus document between Republicans and Democrats, who unanimously 
agreed that it was critical to tell the American people the truth--that 
we have a severe crisis in this country--and to recognize that we, the 
Congress--the House and the Senate--have the first obligation to do 
something about this by setting the policy through our National Defense 
Authorization Acts and then funding those policies adequately through a 
series of eliminating sequestration, funding through the regular order 
appropriation process, rather than continuing resolutions, and 
increasing the topline budget for the military enough to make up the 
gap that we discuss in this report here.
  That effort will begin with an administration in the development of 
its budget, which is underway right now and will be submitted to the 
Congress in the early spring. I urge the administration, as well, to 
recognize that its leadership in this effort will have a lot to do with 
the success of Congress stepping up to do its job to fund that budget 
adequately.
  So to my colleagues who are concerned about our national security--
and who isn't--and to those who said during the last campaign that we 
want to work across the aisle to solve problems that confront the 
American people, well, I can't think of a more serious problem than 
this. This is a great opportunity to roll up our sleeves and work 
together. I pledge to work with my colleagues to do exactly that and 
commend to them this report of the National Defense Strategy Commission 
to review during the Thanksgiving break we are going to have here and 
to come back ready to do work.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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