Heritage 2025: Defense

Much has been written about the Heritage Foundation Blueprint, Project 2025. Most attention has been given to two particularly dangerous ideas: the replacement of thousands of civil servants by political loyalists and the politicization of Justice.

These are far from the only dangerous ideas in this profoundly loony document. Over the next few months, Gettysburg DFA will analyze this plan. The first part discusses national defense.

 Heritage 2025 Plan: Defense

 I remember at the start of the one season when former Redskins owner Dan Snyder appointed his sycophant/clipboard carrier Vinny Cerrato general manager. Vinny appeared on a sports talk show and insisted he really truly understood how to build a football team and basically just listed everything. Well, you need an offensive line that can run-block and protect the QB and you need receivers that can win possession in a crowd and ones that can get past the defense and a defensive line that can pressure the passer and stuff the run and went on and listed every football function. Demonstrating, of course, that he understood nothing, since in an NFL with 53 man rosters and a salary cap, it’s all a matter of setting priorities and choosing the areas where you’ll just be so-so.

 Well, Vinny Cerrato could have written the 2025 report’s chapter on DoD. It can be summarized in 3 words.

 More.

 Of everything.

Resources

Here's a sampling of the resource discussions in the 2025 plan.

1.    The US should “replenish and maintain ammunition stockpiles depleted by the war in Ukraine

2.    The Army should “accelerate the development and procurement” of all six “current modernization priorities;” improve training and readiness; and increase force structure by 50,000. [In other words, spend more on everything.]

3.    But the fantasy completely takes over with the Air Force; Increase F-35A procurement; build the capacity for a B-21 production rate of 15–18 aircraft per year; increase Air Force airlift and aerial refueling capacity to support agile combat employment operations that generate combat sorties from a highly dispersed posture in both Europe and the Pacific; develop and buy larger quantities of advanced mid-range weapons (50 nm to 200 nm) that are sized to maximize targets per sortie for stealth aircraft flying in contested environments against target sets that could exceed 100,000 aimpoints.

4.    Increase Navy force structure to 355+

5.    Despite all the big-ticket items, conventional forces apparently are still relatively unimportant because the report says DoD must Prioritize nuclear modernization. All components of the nuclear triad are far beyond their intended lifetimes and will need to be replaced over the next decade. This effort is required for the U.S. to maintain its nuclear triad—and will be the bare minimum needed to maintain U.S. strategic nuclear deterrence.

a.    Accelerate the timelines of critical modernization programs including the Sentinel missile, Long Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO), Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, B-21 bomber, and F-35 Dual Capable Aircraft.

b.    Develop the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N). In 2018, the Trump Administration proposed restoring the SLCM-N to help fill a growing gap in U.S. nonstrategic

6.  And then there’s the right’s eternal dream, missile defense. To them, it’s not an expensive boondoggle; “is a critical component of the U.S. national security architecture.”

a.    Champion the benefits of missile defense.

b.    Reject claims made by the Left that missile defense is destabilizing while acknowledging that Russia and China are developing their own advanced missile defense systems.

c.     Commit to keeping homeland missile defense off the table in any arms control negotiations with Russia and China.

d.    Strengthen homeland ballistic missile defense. Buy at least 64 of the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), which is more advanced than the GBI, for an eventual uniform fleet of interceptors. The Biden Administration currently plans to buy only 20.

e.    Consider additional steps to strengthen the GMD system such as a layered missile defense or a third interceptor site on the East Coast.

f.      Increase the development of regional missile defense.

g.    Change U.S. missile defense policy. Historically, the U.S. has chosen to rely solely on deterrence to address the Russian and Chinese ballistic missile threat to the homeland and to use homeland missile defense only against rogue nations.

h.    Invest in future advanced missile defense technologies like directed energy or space-based missile defense that could defend against more numerous missile threats.

i.      Invest in new track-and-intercept capabilities. The advent of hypersonic missiles and increased numbers of cruise missile arsenals by threat actors poses new challenges to our missile defense capabilities.

j.      Invest in cruise missile defense of the homeland.

k.     Accelerate the program to deploy space-based sensors that can detect and track missiles flying on non-ballistic trajectories.

l.      Accelerate the Glide Phase Interceptor, which is intended to counter hypersonic weapons.

 Policy

After the military triumph of Iraq got bogged down in low intensity conflict, the Army made a painful transition to focus on low intensity conflict, special operations, and asymmetrical warfare. Project 2025 seems to be planning for a new era of superpower military confrontations. Given the facts of military spending, this means for all practical purposes military confrontation with China. There is nobody else with a military comparable in any way to the U.S. The report contains policies such as:

       Re-stablish the experiential base for the planning, execution, and leadership of Army formations in large scale operations. Currently, there are no general or field grade officers who served as planners or commanders against a near-peer adversary in combat. (In other words, nobody on active duty served in the Korean War)

·       Revamp army school curricula to concentrate on preparation for large scale land operations that focus on defeating a peer threat.

·       But then they also call for making “irregular warfare a cornerstone of security strategy.”

 Culture War

 The authors can’t resist creating a cartoon image of a “woke” military so caught up in DEI initiatives that it has lost its ability to fight wars. Even in a “throw-back to Reagan” policy statement, the authors can’t resist the culture war.

 ·       “The DOD is also a deeply troubled institution. Historically, the military has been one of America’s most trusted institutions, but years of …, and (most recently) the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll.

·       The Army can no longer serve as the nation’s social testing ground. A rebuilt Army that is focused again on its core warfighting mission and empowered it with the tools, resources, and authorities it needs to accomplish that mission must be the next Administration’s highest defense priority.

·       Stop using the Army as a test bed for social evolution. Misusing the Army in this way detracts from its core purpose while doing little to reshape the American social structure. The United States military is an extraordinary institution, staffed by exceptional people who have defended our nation and changed the course of history, but the Biden Administration, through word and deed, has treated the armed forces as just another place to work.

·       We must restore our military to a place of honor and respect and recruit and retain the individuals who will meet the rigorous standards of excellence that are required for membership in the world’s greatest fighting force.

·       Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda. This direction should be reinforced during the Senate confirmation process. Orders and direction motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness.

Then there’s the loony stuff. And the scary stuff.

1.    Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding.

2.    Young civilians who would thrive in a military environment are disenfranchised when educators and influencers discourage them from learning about military service and preparing for the honor of wearing America’s uniform.

3.    Strengthen protections for chaplains to carry out their ministry according to the  tenets of their faith.

4.    Reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine, restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay.

5.    Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.

6.    Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.

7.    Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

In reality, the current level of defense spending is unjustified and ought to be unsustainable. It is shocking that the “fund everything” period of defense budgeting is now 23 years old and there haven’t yet been serious calls to reconsider our spending.

Every budget is a statement of priorities. “More of everything” isn’t a serious plan. Yet that’s the quality of thinking that went into this profoundly misguided document.