“For almost twenty years we had all of the time and almost none of the money; today we have all of the money and no time.” That was then–Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall’s warning on July 22, 1940, a little more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s entry into World War II.
Today, Americans find themselves in a similarly precarious geostrategic position and at risk of making the same mistake again — waiting until the last moments before a war to invest the necessary resources in defense. That undermines deterrence, invites aggression, and increases the chances that American war-fighters will not have what they need in the early months of a preventable war.
Each year, the Obama and Biden administrations failed to request from Congress sufficient resources for defense. Trump should not make the same mistake.
The bipartisan, congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy assessed in its July 2024 report that the “threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
Read the whole article at National Review.
