Potential Biden Defense Pick Warns of Trump’s Damage to Military
Potential Biden Defense Pick Warns of Trump’s Damage to Military
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S.-led system of alliances built after World War II may not endure another term with Donald Trump as president, according to Michele Flournoy, a potential candidate for defense secretary if Democrat Joe Biden wins the November election.
“Unless we have a new leadership that our allies believe they can count on, I don’t believe our alliances can survive another four years of what they’ve just experienced,” Flournoy said in an interview on Tuesday. “That will leave the U.S. much more alone in the world and much less able to address shared interests, whether it’s climate change, nonproliferation, the next pandemic.”
Flournoy served as under secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration, making her the most senior female Pentagon official in history at that point. In 2014 she ruled herself out as a candidate to replace Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, citing family needs at the time. Now, she is widely seen as a leading candidate for defense secretary if Biden defeats Trump.
Since taking office in 2017, Trump has challenged historic allies to accelerate defense spending, withdrawn from the Paris climate change agreement and the Iran nuclear deal and announced plans to leave the World Health Organization despite the continuing Covid-19 pandemic.
Key allies have taken note. French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a European defense force, a move that would appear to undermine NATO. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also signaled that Europe can’t rely on the U.S. as it has in the post-World War II era, while Japan and South Korea have bristled at U.S. demands that they pay far more for hosting American troops.
Biden campaign officials didn’t immediately respond when asked whether Flournoy would be considered for the defense secretary job. Regardless of whether she serves in a Biden administration, Flournoy said she would advise him to “make repairing these relationships a central focus right upfront.”
“The alliances are a critical source of strategic strength and advantage,” Flournoy, 59, said. “Certainly at the political level there’s been some real damage done. There are discussions about whether allies can still rely on us, whether our values still align.”
Trump often argues that he’s done more for the military than any recent president, citing budget and salary increases and the purchase of next-generation weapon systems, though many of those have been in the Pentagon’s pipeline for years and tend to outlast any single president.
Flournoy’s comments come as the president is embroiled in a dispute about whether he insulted dead U.S. soldiers in Europe as “losers” and “suckers,” and following his criticism that unnamed military leaders are working in partnership with defense contractors to keep the country at war. Those battles and others also damage civil-military relations, said Flournoy, who co-founded WestExec Advisors, a strategic advisory firm, in 2017.
“Trump has politicized the military justice system. He’s used the military as a prop in photo ops,” she said, a reference to Trump’s June stroll to a church in Washington after the plaza in front of the White House was forcibly cleared of peaceful protesters. “The attempt to politicize the U.S. military is something that needs to be corrected.”
As a result of a surge in defense spending in the Trump administration and ramped-up federal spending to counter the Covid-19 pandemic, the next Pentagon chief is likely to face serious budget constraints regardless of who wins in November.
‘Big Bets’
“Whoever is next needs to make serious investments to shape the military technical edge but likely with fewer resources to do it,” Flournoy said. “If you don’t have a laser focus on how we’re spending our defense dollars, we’re really going to put deterrence at risk.”
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in August, Flournoy called on the U.S. to place “big bets” on future technologies including command-and-control systems powered by artificial intelligence and the use of unmanned systems in combination with manned capabilities. Spending on these bets would likely involve “hard decisions” and less spending on “legacy forces,” Flournoy told the forum.
“The force that we’ve been investing in, 70-80% of that won’t change” Flournoy said in the interview. “The critical question is what are the capabilities you put on those platforms that give you a new edge and how do you fight differently?”
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