Wilson Beaver
@WilsonCBeaver
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Defense Policy Advisor @Heritage | Formerly U.S. Senate, @USArmy | @LSU @GeorgetownMSFS | All views my own 🇺🇸
Washington, DC
Joined September 2023
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Pinned Tweet
The Administration’s official defense budget request does not allocate resources appropriately. New spending and reallocated funds must focus on the procurement of ships, planes, and munitions relevant to the Indo-Pacific.
@RC_Greenway
@RealBobPeters
@Alex_agvg
@brentdsadler
NEW REPORT: What the U.S.’s FY 2025 defense budget SHOULD look like👇
@RC_Greenway
@WilsonCBeaver
@RealBobPeters
@Alex_agvg
@brentdsadler
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The Iraq War was a dismal failure and the people who advocated for it were never held to account… they should have been run out of DC on a rail.
I think right now might be one of those times when it’s really worth looking at how people thought about the Iraq War and what they have learned about that decision and its ramifications.
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The biggest contribution Europeans can make to world security is by taking primary responsibility for their own security. The Houthis are still attacking ships, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Italian Navy to be in the Red Sea protecting the sea lanes leading to Europe?
NATO Steps Up Naval Presence in Western Pacific to Counter China
Italian aircraft carrier is the latest to patrol the region.
Goal is to bolster US and allied navies, senior officials say
NATO is bolstering its presence in the Western Pacific by sending warships to more
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@sidhant
Apparently opening America’s borders isn’t enough for the Biden Administration… they want to make India and Japan less safe as well!
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Yes, the U.S. is still far & away the biggest donor of military aid to Ukraine, & some Western European countries are not doing their fair share - especially when the U.S. has multiple priorities to balance & really ought to be focused on the Indo-Pacific.
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I argue in a letter to the editor
@WSJopinion
that “new spending in the near term needs to be focused on buying larger quantities of weapons systems that already exist. The next war might not wait until the next-generation weapons are ready in the 2030s.”
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“We might finally see the pivot to the Indo-Pacific that we’ve been talking about for more than a decade now…Beaver says. “There is now a consensus among American conservatives that China is the primary challenge…”
@Jkoutsoukis
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Germany’s plan to permanently station a brigade in Lithuania is an important milestone that Americans should applaud. w/ coauthor
@OfficialLibLap
@defense_news
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You want a strong and secure Europe? This is how you get it. 3% defense spending by all NATO allies.
3% makes perfect sense as the new standard for NATO (and Japan/South Korea) spending, as
@realDonaldTrump
proposed yesterday.
If you care about our allies, this is what you'd advocate for.
And by the way, it's backed by real analysis and facts. 1/
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Poland and the U.S. are the last countries anyone should be criticizing over Ukraine funding.
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My latest for
@amconmag
. The U.S. is still far and away the biggest donor of military aid to Ukraine, and some Western European countries simply aren’t doing their fair share - especially when the U.S. has multiple priorities to balance and really ought to be focused on the
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People make the mistake of framing increased Japanese defense spending as some sort of favor to the U.S. It isn’t. Increased defense spending is a strategic necessity for Japan if they’re serious about deterring China and maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific.
By failing to mobilize, Japan may be committing a historic blunder by choosing to accept living in China's Asia.
Colby's view is that for Japan, China's Asia would be a cruel place. He may be proven right.
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New piece out with Dr. Peter Robertson for
@RCDefense
on China spending smarter by shifting spending into procurement.
@Heritage
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@NikkiHaley
Given the threat posed by the PRC, they need to be spending a lot more. It’s certainly possible - Poland already spends more than 4%.
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Conservatives across Europe and in the United States need to halt the transfer of national wealth out of the bank accounts of their citizens and into the hands of foreign governments in the name of climate change.
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Americans should encourage Europeans to take the initiative in security issues that are of secondary or tertiary importance to the United States. For
@amconmag
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@Valen10Francois
Saving Private Ryan is an American movie directed by an American. Brits are more than welcome to make a movie highlighting their very substantial contributions - I would be happy to watch it. If you watch American films, you’re likely to see American stories.
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The U.S. military’s deterrent effect on the Chinese attempt to establish hegemony in the South China Sea… serves the national security interests of both the United States and the overwhelming majority of countries in the Indo-Pacific.
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Extremely important point. There are way too many barriers to transferring weapons and tech to our closest allies and partners. It simply should not be this convoluted for an ally as close as, say, Japan.
This is very positive.
We should use this model to lower barriers for arms and tech transfers for a much wider set of allies and partners. We're in an era where we need more capable and self-reliant allies. Let's help them do that, not hinder them.
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Some European nations have stepped up since 2022, while others have not. If some countries are contributing and others are not, we should neither praise nor condemn Europe as a whole. The Baltics, Scandinavia, & Poland have stepped up-many others have not.
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@HoyasFan07
Would love to see this same energy from NAFO going after the Western European nations like France who have barely contributed. Instead they only attack the U.S., who has given $46 billion and stations more troops in Europe than many EU nations have in their entire militaries.
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The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO makes the alliance more secure, and both countries are already model member states. Some legacy members of NATO would do well to follow their example.
#NATO
w/ coauthor
@OfficialLibLap
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@ElbridgeColby
Absolutely. The key here is finding where our interests overlap. India and America both care about deterring China, and can put other disagreements to the side to work together on this unifying goal.
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Excellent piece from
@RachelRizzo
on some of the reforms to NATO that would see Europeans providing the bulk of conventional deterrence in Europe. Americans should support these efforts as we by necessity shift focus to the Indo-Pacific.
In our new piece for
@DefenseOne
,
@MichaelBenha
& I argue for a 25-year plan, coinciding with
#NATO
’s 100-year anniversary, that ultimately shifts much of the responsibility of Europe’s continental security to Europeans themselves.
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lol guys. I was 12 in 2003. I feel very comfortable saying that I think the Iraq War was a mistake. “All views my own.”
Yeah? Who not only cheered the invasion of Iraq, but cheered it the whole time? That would be you, Heritage Foundation. And I agree. You should have been run out of DC on a rail.
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While paying lip service to the concept of China as the primary challenge for the United States, the official request fails to align spending with strategy.
@RC_Greenway
@RealBobPeters
@Alex_agvg
What the Conservative Fiscal ’25 Defense Budget Would Prioritize
Via Wilson Beaver:
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Senator
@DanSullivan_AK
's announcement that U.S. government estimates had the true Chinese defense budget at around $700 billion was the impetus for research by
@Heritage
and
@AEI
(among others) to determine what costs were being hidden by the Chinese government, and how PPP
@fravel
has a piece looking at PLA spending. He cites
@MEaglen
,
@WilsonCBeaver
,
@RobertsonPeterE
and I as folks who "overinflate" the budget. A 🧵.
Estimating China's Defense Spending: How to Get It Wrong (and Right) - Texas National Security Review ()
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Clinton stopped funding the military, and then Bush wasted what we built in the 1980s on nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now here we are refusing to admit that prioritization is the only realistic option available after decades of neglect and mismanagement.
If you want a 2.5-war military, build a time machine, go back 30 years, set US defense spending at 5% GDP, then keep it there for 30 years.
And no invasion of Iraq. And no decade-plus "nation-building" mission in Afghanistan.
That's an alternate reality. Had we done all that,
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The United States needs a space infrastructure that is both resilient and redundant enough to survive a Chinese first strike. W/ coauthor
@RealBobPeters
.
@WilsonCBeaver
and Robert Peters wrote on United States space infrastructure for
@amconmag
:
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My first piece for
@TB_Times
w/coauthor
@AndresMartFern
. The fentanyl crisis is one of the worst security issues affecting Americans, and security cooperation w/ Caribbean partners could decrease the amount of drugs entering Florida.
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They’re professional trolls who don’t use their own faces or names and have built an identity off of hateful comments. Most of them are too partisan to even acknowledge when you say something they ought to agree with, like “We need more ships in our Navy.”
Fetish? Why do some in NAFO twist ordinary things into something weird?
It’s perfectly normal to love ships, Jack. No need to pervert everything for likes.
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This echoes a lot of the same arguments from the Cold War. One key difference - back then DoD and CIA were publishing estimates of true Soviet spending (including PPP adjustment and hidden spending) for public consumption, instead of relying on think tanks.
2 basic points re this 🇨🇳 defense spending debate 👇
A) we should fundamentally focus on *capabilities* not real or alleged funding levels
B) despite point A, the funding levels, incl in adjusted dollar amounts, do matter b/c most Americans, incl a lot of influential people in
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@HoyasFan07
Completely agree! They’re confusing us with the neocons. I would be ecstatic if Europeans were able to build this stuff themselves and couldn’t care less if they buy it from us.
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The Army will be able to provide shore-based anti-access capabilities—a relatively new role. The Army can draw lessons in denying access to air and sea littorals with limited and mobile land-based assets from the Ukrainians and the Houthis.
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Really solid article from
@BuchananLiz
“Globalization might have made the world ‘smaller’ and more interconnected, but time has not changed geography. Asia is not Europe.”
"
#NATO
once dealt solely with the defense of
#Europe
—until it didn’t. Instead, the alliance is regurgitating ambitions from a quarter of a century ago. This is not progress, just performance."
@BuchananLiz
in
@TheNatlInterest
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“On the face of it, this proposal is wholly unserious unless its advocates are willing to demand a corresponding sea change in US priorities and behavior at almost every level of the US Government.”
@austinjdahmer
has a good breakdown of this article, but I want to highlight and expand on one point. Tom Mahnken calling for essentially a three war army is genuinely startling.
President Reagan's army was the last time we might have had a two-war army. It consisted of
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The annual defense budget that would be required for what he’s advocating would be something like $1.7 trillion or more. Does he think that’s realistic? Is there any sense at all that Congress or the American people have the appetite for defense spending at this level?
The thrust of the piece is Mahnken advocating the US adopt a 3-war military. But he lists at least 4 potential conflicts DoD must be able to fight simultaneously.
So why stop at a 3-war force? Why not 4? What about counterterrorism & homeland defense? 2/
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@HoyasFan07
Seeing as the majority of Red Sea trade is on its way to Europe, why can’t the relatively large and capable Italian and French navies take the lead in Yemen? The U.S. needs to be husbanding its resources for the Indo-Pacific.
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Biden promised to “repair” America’s alliances, insisting that “diplomacy is back.”
So why is he calling critical allies and partners like Japan and India “xenophobic” and comparing them to China and Russia?
My latest in
@DailySignal
#India
#Japan
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“Exactly as promised???” After a 30 year vacation?
Germany is now meeting the 2% target - - as promised in 2014. Exactly as promised.
And we are, by a wide margin, Europe‘s biggest supplier - militarily and financially - of Ukraine. Update your statistics please.
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A primacist strategy with a budget insufficient to make it feasible is indeed a recipe for disaster.
for the 700th time, we are *NOT* in the 1980s. In fiscal and monetary terms. In fact, we're now in much worse shape than the 80s and the decades that came after.
Anyone claiming that we can just finance a substantial military buildup with deficit spending is (a) very ignorant
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@ElbridgeColby
Hence why it doesn’t make sense to frame replenishment spending tied to drastic increases in PDA authority for Ukraine (and other munitions transfers) as an investment in the US military. US stores get depleted, take years to replace, and Indo-Pacific continues to be ignored.
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@ElbridgeColby
I swear, always with the buzzwords. In Swamp dialect “walk and chew gum” has somehow come to mean “confront China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously while not drastically increasing the defense budget.”
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This is an argument you came up with yourself, of course. My article says the U.S. is the single biggest donor, which is true. Looks like you’re combining all of the EU with Norway and Britain… is Canada in there too? Why should the U.S. spend more than every European state
This is incorrect.
Add up the military aid from each European country in the Kiel Tracker.
U.S. Military Aid: $42.2 bn
Total European states: $65.6bn
Add military spending from "EU Institutions" and the European total is $71.2bn
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Have been for a long time! It’s insane. Imagine if we had allowed Soviet students and professors into programs researching sensitive military tech during the Cold War.
Western Universities are being used to assist China's military tech research.
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Anyone still saying there isn’t overlap in what’s needed in Ukraine and Taiwan is either dishonest or uninformed. And the strongest deterrent to China invading Taiwan is Taiwanese, American, & Japanese military capacity in theater - not messaging on the other side of the planet.
@WilsonCBeaver
good thing patriot missiles don't matter and aren't needed for anything in the Pacific.
cuz that would be bad. If they did matter. And if we did need them in the Pacific.
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@HoyasFan07
Alliances are a give and take, a partnership. There’s no obligation for America to keep giving to allies that only take. Scaling back cooperation with allies who refuse to do their part is absolutely a legitimate option.
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Heritage’s
@Alex_agvg
and
@RealBobPeters
outline here what a truly conservative national security strategy would look like in a world full of increasingly difficult choices and competing interests.
🚨NEW:
@Heritage
unveils comprehensive defense strategy for incoming presidential administration.
The United States must resist the temptation to be EVERYWHERE at once, argue
@Heritage
's
@Alex_agvg
and
@RealBobPeters
.
MORE 👇
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Oh wow, no kidding. If
@davidfrum
doesn’t like her this actually might be great news for Mexico.
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In what possible world do you expand the submarine industrial base without increasing ship orders? Sending a demand signal will drive industry investment in labor and infrastructure. This argument that you must decrease procurement now in order to to increase it later is absurd.
Just the facts:
"“I’m in favor of building three submarines a year,” Calvert said. “The problem is the industrial base, the primes, the subs, are not capable of building more than one submarine a year. It’s just a fact we have to deal with.”
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This is actually incredible. The intervention in Libya was an unmitigated disaster that caused chaos across West Africa, and created numerous ISIS safe havens and continuing unchecked migration across the Mediterranean.
Imagine being the guy who still defends the intervention into Libya.
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@HoyasFan07
Didn’t take them long to get back to saying America is unreliable and awful did it? I thought they’d wait at least a week or two after the $61 billion in aid passed.
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One can only assume that in the year 2040 we’ll be cutting procurement to focus on RDT&E projects due in 2060. Can’t eat your seed corn, you see.
China is the greatest threat to US interests for the foreseeable future.
So we shouldn't resource current ops at the expense of deterring China in the 2030s.
Nor should we focus on the 2030s at the expense of our ability to deter China now. 1/
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The Biden Administration finds such creative ways to insult countries we get along with otherwise.
'They wouldn't just eat any white men that fell from the sky': Outraged Papua New Guinea academics lash out at Biden's 'unacceptable' suggestion that cannibals ate his WW2 pilot uncle
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“The other argument that you often hear is we’re going to spend a bunch of money on Ukraine and that’s going to help our defense industrial base. But that also doesn’t make sense.”
#Ukraine
#Supplemental
@Heritage
In the
@DailySignal
I try to lay out a common sense approach that puts Americans practical interests first in a concrete way, but a way that enables us to collaborate with others.
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I dunno. I feel like European navies striking Houthis would go a long way toward fewer ships blowing up in the Red Sea. Just a hunch.
The existence of strikes by EUR militaries is irrelevant and distracting within the context of trying to determine the efficacy of strikes?
This logic doesn't seem entirely coherent.
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@IllyChakrabarty
@ElbridgeColby
@KevinRobertsTX
@GarrisonMoratto
@Cold_Peace_
@Alex_agvg
Very interesting! Definitely a positive step.
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“The navy should also move one of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the Pentagon should consider deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific... U.S. bases in the Pacific often lack adequate missile defenses and fighter jet protection—a scandalous
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Imagine how discouraging it must have been to the Japanese in WW2 to learn we had an ice cream barge.
B U I L D M O R E N A V Y S H I P S
(And ice cream barges too please!)
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Mediterranean countries like Italy, France, and Greece could use their navies to police the Red Sea and Mediterranean, both preventing attacks on shipping and targeting the Houthis currently disrupting commerce.
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Of course we want Taiwan to succeed and maintain sovereignty, but it’s only possible if Taiwan invests in its military at a sufficient level to meet the challenge posed by China’s dramatic annual increases in defense spending. Taiwan must be as serious about defense as Poland is.
I am profoundly, deeply, and consistently committed to putting Americans' interests first.
A free Taiwan is better for America.
*But only if it can be done at a reasonable level of cost and risk.* If it cannot, we cannot destroy our military in a losing, highly costly war. 1/
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“Initially, the US version of the FREMM required replacing or improving about 15 per cent of the original design, predominantly to satisfy the USN’s more stringent survivability criteria… this has crept up to a total of 511 alterations, changing fully 85 per cent of the original
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@SameeraKhan
Absolutely horrible take from someone claiming to be conservative - especially insulting her accent.
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@thinkdefence
@johnkonrad
Luckily they have plenty of self-hating advocates in DC to insult us too.
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“No boots will be on the ground” in Gaza… I guess they’ll just be on the pier?
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Australia’s new naval plans are sound, but will only work if Australia avoids the defense spending mistakes others have made.
@Diplomat_APAC
w/
@victoriaalmevaz
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@HoyasFan07
@pjhroberts
@LukeDCoffey
Also why does the EU get to include the UK? I propose we add the UK’s total to our total.
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Add this to the long list of creative ways Biden insults our friends and allies. Here he is calling Japan and India “xenophobic” for not wanting open borders.
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Europeans can also take over the mission in Kosovo (KFOR) by providing either the overwhelming majority or the entirety of the force stationed at Camp Bondsteel.
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European countries could send a real message that they are taking primary responsibility for their security by establishing permanent bases in Estonia and Latvia the same way Germany is in Lithuania.
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@Valen10Francois
It’s a direct response to “I can’t even remember if you see any in Saving Private Ryan.”
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@EHunterChristie
@amconmag
In the article I praise Germany, Poland, and the Baltics for having contributed substantially. I criticize France, Spain, and Italy for having barely contributed. Also $60B of EU non-military aid is in loans - all US aid is grants. And lol at “propaganda script.”
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A bipartisan letter signed by over 100 congressmen argued in favor of two submarines, saying the planned growth in submarine production is “dependent on the persistent two-per-year demand signal to the nationwide submarine industrial base that Congress has defended since 2011.
We’re All Living… With One Less Submarine - Cutting funding for a second submarine is especially egregious
@RCPolitics
by
@WilsonCBeaver
#USNavy
#Submarines
#FutureFleet
#DefenseIndustrialBase
#Shipbuilding
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“‘This is about competition. And this is about us being a lot smarter about the choices we make,’ Santoro said.”
We will help that process
@PacificForum
#OIIP
@HawaiiNewsNow
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Why is the U.S. government still requiring COVID contact tracing on flights back to the U.S.? How is this still a thing?
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2.5% isn’t inspiring. It’s meeting the bare minimum. A country facing an existential crisis like Taiwan ought to be spending a lot more for its own sake - like Poland!
Taiwan’s commitment to shared security is inspiring. They spend 2.5% of GDP on defense, and have increased defense spending for 7 years.
Other free nations should learn from them, especially many U.S. allies. Taiwan is ahead of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and many other
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This money would be better spent on the infrastructure and defense needs of Europe and the United States or simply left in the hands of individual citizens through tax cuts.
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@MaryMargOlohan
Like a lot of the defense world these days, winning wars and protecting Americans always seems to be an afterthought and leftist politics the priority.
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💯👇
You seem to be agreeing that the 2014-2023 spending levels were insufficient based on your disapproval of those defense budgets. And this obviously also applies to Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain & Portugal. But we're discussing Germany now since
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@Dogstoyesky
@RC_Greenway
@BasedMikeLee
@NATO
@Heritage
Our graph compares military aid allocations as documented by the Kiel Institute. The one you’ve posted here is based on commitments, which includes money that has been promised but not yet sent, and also non-military aid.
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@fravel
@TXNatSecReview
@RobertsonPeterE
@QuincyInst
The whole article must be seen in the context of its claim that "unbalanced assessment of China's defense spending" could "undermine the ability of planners" to focus on the war in Ukraine, which the authors call the foremost security challenge facing the U.S. - not China.
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@james_rogers
Actually, according to the Kiel Institute’s numbers, France is providing less military assistance than Estonia in absolute terms too.
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@RealBobPeters
Deeply unserious. Also, they keep going on about the DIB… what exactly is the point of increasing SIOP funding if we only order one Virginia-class per year?
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Official estimates published for the public (and enabled by the type of data collection and analysis only the Feds can do), would make this a far more informed debate.
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Nothing controversial about wanting to expand the Merchant Marine and Navy!
@WilsonCBeaver
💯
It always surprises me how often they latch onto what I thought were the least controversial takes.
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@ElbridgeColby
Decreasing sub orders is certainly not going to incentivize industry to hire more workers. If we don’t increase orders now we’ll be in the same situation 10 years from now.
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@RhubbaComedy
@Valen10Francois
I don’t know what the budget was, but “1917” was one of the best historical war movies in the last couple years.
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