Readiness crisis has been manufactured for decades.

It’s worth thinking about why defense spending is about to explode. It’s not because of some revolutionary change in the global security environment — aside from those pesky North Koreans and their nukes, America has never been so secure. It’s not because the U.S. military’s effectiveness has declined; it remains the most powerful force in the world, highly capable and very ready. The reason the Pentagon’s budget is now on a long-term upswing is because the military has spent years loudly lobbying for such an increase while complaining about an alleged “readiness crisis.” Complaining works, at least when the military does it, because politicians in both parties fear the military’s wrath. Partisan gridlock can still impede efforts to bump up the military’s resources, but now that Republicans are in control of Congress and the White House, there are no more hurdles standing in the way. None of this is to suggest, however, that the congressional generosity will buy Americans more security or a better force than the one they have today. Every military leader in history has wanted more resources at his or her disposal. U.S. secretaries of defense have been especially adamant since 2011, when the Budget Control Act first set limits on both defense and domestic spending. The tears shed by the Pentagon went beyond complaining about those pesky budget caps. They also touched on declining military readiness, units that weren’t combat ready, Chinese military expansion, and just about anything else that defense officials thought might put the spending train back on the tracks. All the Pentagon’s complaints ignored the reality that since 2001 the military has been receiving tens, and sometimes even hundreds, of billions of dollars in additional funding — above and beyond the budget caps — thanks to a special slush fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations account. That money is supposed to be designated for emergencies, but both the Pentagon and the Congress have routinely used this budget for nonemergency purposes, such as paying, training, and supporting existing troops (all normally in the Pentagon’s base budget) and buying equipment already in the long-term defense plan. Nevertheless, the military has complained that its readiness is in tatters. And after all those years of deployments, military officials testifying to Congress could always come up with a sad anecdote about planes being cross-decked to an outgoing carrier, fighters not ready to fly, or missing pilots. U.S. policymakers have seen this movie many times before. I experienced it myself in the 1990s, when the brass was displeased with the budget levels set by the Bill Clinton administration and whined about readiness problems to the Office of Management and Budget, where I worked. My follow-up with the Pentagon’s civil servants made it clear that the measures they were using were rigged to show low levels of readiness; they set standards that called units “ready” only if they had every capability imaginable to fight a major ground war, and they counted as “unready” units that were back from deployments and had missed a training slot for that big war, one they would soon be scheduled to receive. We knew the Pentagon was using manipulated numbers to bludgeon us with demands for more funding. Nevertheless, we caved: In 1994, we added more than $20 billion to the defense budget, not really to fix readiness but to try to make the issue go away before the midterm elections that year. (It didn’t work, by the way.) Four years later, we did it again, busting previous budget commitments to add billions of dollars more. (For an excellent analysis of that fight, read This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars by the late George C. Wilson, once the premier Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post.) Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — the more things change, the more they stay the same — as military parade leaders in France might say. Today, once again, the U.S. military stands on the brink of an alleged readiness crisis, and more money is needed, pronto. The trail of tears became so deep that it caught up Republicans and Democrats (always eager to portray themselves as “tough on national security”). It caught up in the lachrymose flow virtually all of the think tank preachers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for a New American Security, and large panels of bipartisan heavyweights reviewing the Pentagon’s four-year defense studies. Everyone in Washington seems to have been swept up in the tide; even some of the most careful, independent analysts are on board. As Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted, “We are stretched too thin.… We are trying to do too much with the size force that we have all around the world.” All this hand-wringing is happening about a ground force that, after nearly two decades of war, is highly experienced and primed — and largely back at home; a Navy that is larger than any other navy in the world and the only one with global reach; an Air Force that is larger and more technologically advanced than any other, flying, bombing, tanking, airlifting globally. America’s is the only military that has global basing, logistics, communications, transportation, and intelligence; nobody else, not the Chinese and certainly not the Russians, comes even close. But this is Washington, where the policy and analytical sheep gather under one tree to be safe from the storm of political criticism. The British novelist Lawrence Durrell comes to mind: “How nugatory and how glum / The endomorphs of scholarship / Like hippos on a sinking ship / Stand bum to silly bum.” (Just replace scholarship with politics and the comparison is apt.)