Job One

Summary. The integrity of a country begins outside that country. The standing and quality of life of its citizens depend on the vision that the world has for that country’s values. Congress in 2024 needs to, desperately needs to, address US ability to protect its interests worldwide. Play to your strengths; start with the Military.
Military. There is the military, and there is more to the military than the military. President Dwight Eisenhower, the top military man, arguably, since the Civil War and one of the top five of all times in the US, famously said, “When they tell you something is essential, there is no way to say no to them.” He was speaking about the top military procurement personnel plus the top defense contractor executives of his time. As the joint group advised Eisenhower that this or that was needed to defend the country, even he could not discriminate between the essential and the nonessential hardware, capabilities, processes, deployment, training, inventory, supplies, logistics, and governance that makes up the modern military. That’s a lot; that’s a lot of $ too.
Eisenhower’s point was there was nothing he could do to deny the cadre of requestors of military expenditures whatever they requested. He couldn’t discriminate between the bare bones minimum, the ideal provisioned and efficient military, and a bloated, overabundant military. He felt that he had to give the high-level group whatever they asked for or risk having the nation be underprotected in the face of world confrontation.
That was the post-WWII society, when every adult in the land had lived through the war years and been profoundly affected by them. We now live in a US three generations separated from pervasive war, and in a society where war was peripheral to daily life. So far peripheral, in fact, that we needn’t think about Vietnam more than daily, Iraq more than weekly Afghanistan more than monthly, and Ukraine hardly at all.
A rude awakening is waiting for US. And not in the distant future. The dread is walking toward you at this moment, but in the sunshine of our bright society you cannot see it. Our day of supremacy and safety could very well soon be over. Not that it will definitely be, but we will be forced to mobilize and fight for it against those who are already mobilizing. There is a race that has already begun to change the world balance of power, and we are sitting on the bench far from the starting line while a relay squad of others are already pumping strong leg muscles to gain momentum.
Complacency. That’s the first problem. Do we even realize the efforts to make the contest unequal, weighted to the adversary have begun? Here are some of the preliminaries:
– Theft of intellectual property. There are patents and trade secrets in hardware, manufacturing, software, and electronic communications that give our military great advantages. But there are many, even many more, nonmilitary technologies that support direct and indirect military functionality. Even something as simple as a Teflon fry pan coating can benefit a surface that needs to be kept clean out in the field.
– Development and strengthening manufacturing. The interconnected, local, interconnected transfer of parts and processes in fabricating and assembling
– Deposition, resist, lithography, etch, ionization, packaging