Reject the President’s Defense Budget

X-51 Hypersonic Missile

Jerry Hendrix, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), advises, “The nation needs to stop standing still with our current legacy force and begin investing in offsetting, leap ahead technologies like cyber, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, directed energy, electro-magnetics and hypersonics.”

Hendrix also writes:

If the nation is to sustain its position of leadership in the world, lawmakers should reject the president’s defense budget. As night follows day, increased defense spending will be accompanied by growth in government spending elsewhere, further eroding the fiscal foundation of the nation, threatening its international credit, and continuing to pass massive amounts of debt to future generations. Admittedly the sequester portion of the BCA should be set aside, it is strategically idiotic, but not the spending caps themselves. Give the services the ability to spend the money they receive more wisely, as opposed to indiscriminate cuts across the board, and drive innovation into the process by holding the service chiefs accountable. Service chiefs must not be allowed to respond to budget cut requests by offering up major weapons that the nation obviously cannot do without in the expectation that Congress will add back funds to keep them. National security today and into the future requires leadership, not gamesmanship.