'A TERRIBLE SIGNAL': Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made a final call on Thursday for Biden to boost defense spending as the White House prepares to release the outlines of its fiscal 2022 budget request. The Oklahoma Republican called Biden's forthcoming budget an indication of how seriously the administration is about countering China. A spending plan that keeps the budget flat, as is widely expected, or a cut "would send a terrible signal to Beijing,” Inhofe said. "President Biden's preliminary budget proposes a real cut to military spending — the result of a budget that doesn't even keep up with inflation," he wrote in Newsweek. “That's why we find ourselves in the current situation, with the Chinese military on a modernization sprint and the U.S. military crawling forward. We can't spend our way out of the problem, but we can spend too little to give ourselves a chance." ‘THE LOOMING NAVAL CRISIS’: Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), meanwhile, is appealing to Biden to make a bigger Navy central to the U.S. strategy to confront Russia and China. In a recent letter first reported by USNI News, she argues that “in the thirty years following the Cold War our participation in counter-terrorism campaigns distracted the nation strategically, and we have allowed our naval force to shrink, its readiness to decline, and our supporting industrial infrastructure to rust…” “As we decreased our battleforce from 592 ships in 1989 to 375 in 1997 and [dropped] below the 300-ship barrier in 2003, we also reduced our daily global maritime presence from 150 ships to just over 100 across the same period,” writes the retired Navy commander, who represents a major shipbuilding hub in Virginia. “Meanwhile, China and Russia rushed to fill the vacuum we created.” Luria called on Biden to act swiftly. “I suggest urgency, Mr. President, because the threat to our nation and its interests — on the seas— is proximate and real,” she wrote. “The looming naval crisis in the Pacific will be an all-hands-on deck effort and every available ship will be needed. We must quickly determine what manned and unmanned ships we can build and identify where within our shipbuilding industrial base they can be built — starting tomorrow.” |