On Monday, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain called for a massive boost in the Defense Department’s 2018 spending budget. The Republican Senator from Arizona released a “white paper” titled “Restoring American Power” that pushes for $54 billion more than the base budget called for by President Obama for the fiscal year 2018, and another $430 billion over the next five years. The 28-page document details Senator McCain’s plans to “repair, rebuild, and reimagine” the future of America’s military against threats facing the nation.
“The President-elect has said he wants to ‘fully eliminate the defense sequester’ and ‘rebuild the military.’ I could not agree more. My new report lays out a plan to repair, rebuild, and reimagine the military for a wide range of threats facing our nation,” McCain posted on Facebook.
McCain stated in the document that for the past 70 years the U.S. has “led a global effort to maintain an international order and a balance of power that have expanded security, prosperity, and freedom.” He added that this has required “diplomacy, alliances, trade, values, and most importantly, a strong U.S. military that can project power globally to deter war and, when necessary, defeat America’s adversaries.”
“We are now at a tipping point,” McCain said. “Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has often swung from retrenchment to overextension with a dearth of strategy, depleting our margin of global influence. We now face, at once, a persistent war against terrorist enemies and a new era of great power competition. The wide margin for error that America once enjoyed is gone.”
He added that the paper offers a blueprint that would rebuild and reshape our military.
“This paper offers a general blueprint to begin rebuilding and reshaping our military,” McCain continues. “It is not cheap—roughly $430 billion of new money above the Obama administration’s defense budget for the next five years, which is already more than $100 billion above the budget caps in law. The cost of further inaction, however, is worse: We will irreparably damage our military’s ability to deter aggression and conflict.”
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