On September 12, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the upper chamber’s floor to praise the work of the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally appointed panel run out of the RAND Corporation. McConnell, summarizing the report’s findings, said,
Any of our colleagues who haven’t yet taken a close look at this report should. But I’d like to reiterate a few of its conclusions that I discussed last month as the Appropriations Committee finalized defense spending legislation for the coming year. This ought to grab our attention:
From the report, quote, “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.”
A further quote, “the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners.”
And, quote, “the U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare.”
Writing during the early months of the First World War, the journalist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann observed, “While it takes as much skill to make a sword as a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.” And, if anything, “human values” are conspicuous by their absence in the recommendations of the RAND Commission on the National Defense Strategy report, which, if implemented, would put the US on a permanent war footing likely to provoke—perhaps concurrently—wars in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East.