Biden Budget Expected to Stiff the Indo-Pacific

From Foreign Policy (Mar 9, 2023): Biden Budget Expected to Stiff the Indo-Pacific (By Jack Detsch)

The Pentagon’s top military command charged with countering China believes it’s getting shortchanged—again.



The Nimitz-class aircraft carriers USS John C. Stennis, left, and USS Ronald Reagan conduct dual aircraft carrier strike group operations in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific on June 18, 2016. U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 3RD CLASS JAKE GREENBERG

The tip of the spear when it comes to U.S. military competition with China, the Indo-Pacific Command, is asking Congress for more than $15 billion this year to stand up to the rapid military buildup of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to an assessment of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s priorities obtained by Foreign Policy. The Hawaii-based command is looking to build defenses to protect Guam, procure sea-based standoff weapons and anti-ship missiles, and snag billions of dollars to pour concrete for bases or installations in Australia, Oceania, and the Mariana Islands.

The request, which comes as part of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s independent assessment of the military situation in the region, aims to get more money into its coffers over the next four years as China moves toward a 2027 target date to prepare for a potential invasion of Taiwan, a deadline that coincides with the centennial of the founding of the PLA.

“The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis. The [People’s Republic of China] has accelerated their whole-of-government assault against the rules-based international order and the strategic competition with the U.S. now encompasses all domains to include efforts to coerce our strongest allies in an attempt to dominate the region,” the command wrote in the assessment that is set to be released publicly later on Thursday. “The U.S. must focus our efforts to present a persistent, lethal, and integrated Joint Force west of the [international date line],” to impose costs on China or another U.S. adversary, the assessment continued.

“The PLA’s rapid modernization efforts embolden the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] to defy long-standing international legal norms and engage in more provocative behavior,” the Indo-Pacific Command summary added. Politico first reported on the request.

Underscoring the urgency, in a speech on Wednesday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for more rapidly moving China’s military to “world-class standards,” including making the world’s most populous country less reliant on foreign computer chips. In step with China’s buildup, the Indo-Pacific Command’s needs are set to balloon to $21.7 billion in 2025, from the $15.3 billion request this year and up from Congress’s $11.5 billion authorization last year, a surge driven by long-range naval weapons, construction of new bases and periodic waypoints for U.S. troops, and new air and missile defense sensors.

The report comes as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, known by the acronym INDOPACOM in Pentagon parlance, is expected to request more than $3 billion in additional money on top of President Joe Biden’s budget request set to drop on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the talks. Biden is expected to request nearly $840 billion for the U.S. Department of Defense—the largest sum in history—but a lot of that is for down-the-road modernization rather than meeting current requests from combatant commands. Money for planning and design of new military installations in the region and restocking munitions, for example, are not expected to make the final budget.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is also asking for billions in munitions and weapons procurement, including stepped-up air and cyber defenses, after recent public wargaming revealed that the United States could run out of long-range precision-guided munitions within a week if China launched a war over Taiwan. The command wants $1.6 billion to continue missile defense efforts on Guam after China developed a medium-range missile capable of striking the island, including fielding the Aegis Ashore system and the U.S. Army Integrated Air and Missile Defense program. It is also asking for $5.3 billion to track missiles, including overhead persistent infrared radar that can provide coverage into the Arctic, missile warning tracking in low-earth orbit, and more than $1 billion to build a space-based sensor layer.

Congress did not appropriate money last year to build more long-range anti-ship missiles, a potentially key capability to deter a cross-Taiwan Strait invasion, despite a handshake deal between Raytheon and the U.S. government to build more. So INDOPACOM is asking for nearly $3 billion in big naval guns, including $266 million to develop and procure more Tomahawk land-attack missiles and $395 million to develop a longer-range version of the system, more missiles for the U.S. Air Force variant of F-35 fighter jets, and more than $350 million for anti-submarine torpedoes. The command also wants nearly $315 million for new sea mines.

The Hawaii-based command wants nearly $2 billion this year to reinforce U.S. military installations, including more parking for bombers and fighter jets at Tindal and Darwin air force bases in Australia, developing an airfield at Tinian in the Marianas, and a submarine pier and satellite communications in Guam, as well as more parking for aircraft at Andersen Air Force Base on the island. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is also asking for more boat ramps and storage on Tinian, the Micronesian island of Yap, and on nearby Palau, where the Trump administration had previously sought to expand airfields.

It was not immediately clear why the money for planning new bases and munitions did not make Biden’s final budget request. It is typical for U.S. military services and combatant commands to gripe over the initial budget ask: Last year, they together asked for nearly $22 billion on top of the president’s budget. But the possible request from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is particularly eye-popping: It would be more than double last year’s request to add $1.5 billion to the budget.

The Biden administration and Congress have been locked in a heated battle over how to build up enough munitions for a possible war in the Indo-Pacific. Though the U.S. Army spent $2 billion to expand capacity for munitions production last year, including plans to quintuple production of NATO-standard artillery to hit 80,000 rounds a month in coming years, the debate has not yet extended to the Indo-Pacific.

“The Ukraine war has brought to our attention the fact that we only have a very limited number of production lines for certain kinds of missiles, precision missiles, conventional missiles, that we would need for a Taiwan contest,” Jacqueline Deal, the president of the Long Term Strategy Group, a nonpartisan defense consultancy based in Washington, D.C., said at a media event hosted by the conservative Vandenberg Coalition think tank last week. “It would show how serious we are, the more we can address that kind of insufficiency in our supply chain and defense industrial base.”

Yet defense hawks are worried that China is increasingly outstripping U.S. spending. Over the last 20 years, the PLA’s procurement budget has grown by almost 700 percent, while U.S. defense spending for weapons procurement has not quite doubled, Deal said. China has also increased defense spending by 2,200 percent over the same two decades to buy weapons that will help it project power further into the region, such as amphibious warships, aircraft carriers, bomber aircraft, and nuclear-powered submarines. Still, the Chinese defense budget is a fraction of the United States’, at an estimated $293 billion in 2021, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank.

The Pentagon has long talked a big game about improving military posture in the Indo-Pacific region, which some military officials have complained is better positioned for a pre-Korean War world than to compete with a resurgent China that has made major maritime grabs in the South China Sea and held renewed muscle-flexing exercises over Taiwan last year.

In December, Ely Ratner, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said that 2023 would be the “most transformative year” in a generation for putting U.S. troops in the region, including in the Philippines and Northern Australia. The announcement of the end of phase one of the so-called AUKUS submarine initiative, expected to take place in a joint ceremony with Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in San Diego on Monday, could also give the U.S. administration a window to announce more military deployments to Australia.

But officials and experts are still frustrated with the lagging pace. For instance, the Pentagon has not made upgrades to facilities on Tinian, an island north of Guam in the Marianas, in several decades, despite possible plans for a diversionary airfield based at a civilian airport there. And even as the Pentagon appears to have taken a major step forward in the Philippines—after the prior Duterte administration repeatedly threatened to boot U.S. forces from the archipelago—experts still believe the devil is in the details, especially when the administration can’t sell the idea of pouring concrete at home in U.S. congressional districts.

“We’re really bad about pouring concrete in the Indo-Pacific,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow and lead of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. She said that the Pentagon would need to build more infrastructure in the Philippines, including runways to land heavier transportation aircraft, send more prepositioned stocks forward, and reinforce munitions and fuel depots to protect against aerial attacks.

Adding to the frustration, the Pentagon doesn’t have a separate spending account for the Indo-Pacific. The so-called Pacific Deterrence Initiative, named after the European counterpart set up after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, is not structured like its predecessor, which was drawn out of a now-defunct post-9/11 Pentagon war fund that was not subject to congressional budget caps. Instead, the Pentagon flags things it is already doing as activities under the rubric of the deterrence initiative.

“Concrete has no constituency in Congress,” Wasser added. “[Military construction] doesn’t get attention.”

[Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @JackDetsch]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/09/us-military-china-taiwan-pentagon/