Neg - DIB - CNDI 2024

DIB Case Neg
Notes
Choose to make “squo solves” arguments OR “alt cause” arguments. Not both.
The “turns” can be read on either advantage.
Feel free to impact turn either advantage.
Squo Is Fine
DIB Strong Now
The DIB is strong and profitable now- the US isn’t falling behind
Michael E. O’Hanlon and Rocha in 2024
Michael E. O’Hanlon; Director of Research - Foreign Policy, Director - Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, Co-Director - Africa Security Initiative, Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy
Alejandra Rocha; Senior Research Assistant - Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Strengthening America’s defense industrial base; Brookings; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strengthening-americas-defense-industrial-base/
For perspective, it bears noting that, contrary to popular thinking, there is no general crisis in the American defense industrial base today. New technologies are making their way into warfighters’ hands. America has dramatically ramped up artillery production in response to the war in Ukraine, a case in point of how it might do so in other areas as well. Defense companies do not always make big profits, but major American and allied defense firms are certainly not going out of business. In fact, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business conducted a study on the financial health of the defense industry and found that overall, the industry is financially healthy and has shown improvement over time. The study examined 124 publicly traded U.S. firms, categorized into defense, hybrid, and commercial firms. Defense firms were defined as those that derived 75% or more of their annual revenue from U.S. defense or foreign military sales customers; hybrid firms as those that derived 25% to 75% of their revenue from U.S. defense or foreign military sales customers; and commercial firms as those that derived less than 25% of their revenue from U.S. defense or foreign military sales customers. The graph below compares the defense firms’ performance against that of hybrid and commercial firms and market indexes over five-year periods. All in all, defense corporations outperform hybrid and commercial companies as well as the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and NASDAQ stock indices.
Military production and offshoring to allies is at an all-time high and only increasing. Reject militaristic pessimism---it all comes from defense junkies.
Tirpak 24 [John Tirpak is Editorial Director of Air & Space Forces Magazine. He has written for Aviation Week & Space Technology, Aerospace Daily, and Jane’s. He was written on US defensive posture for over 34 years, 1-29-2024, "Foreign Military Sales Sets New Record, Up 55.9 Percent in 2023," Air & Space Forces Magazine, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/foreign-military-sales-new-record-2023/]
The U.S. transferred a record $80.9 billion worth of military equipment and services to other countries in fiscal 2023, a 55.9 percent increase over the fiscal 2022 level of $50.9 billion, according to the U.S. State Department.
“This is the highest annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners,” a State Department release said.
The total marks progress in State’s goal of accelerating FMS cases after an internal review last year of how the process could be sped up.
Of the overall figure, $62.25 billion was funded by “U.S. ally and partner nations,” while the rest was financed by the U.S. The roughly $18 billion remainder includes about $4 billion through the foreign military financing program and $14.68 billion for State Department programs such as anti-narcotics trafficking enforcement and de-mining operations, as well as the Pentagon Defense Building Capacity programs such as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.
From 2021-23, FMS sales averaged $55.9 billion per year, a 21.9 percent increase over the 2020-22 average of $45.8 billion per year.
The State Department provides this three-year rolling average because of the “multiyear implementation timeframe for many arms transfers and defense trade cases,” it noted in its release.
Poland was the single largest FMS customer in fiscal 2023, with over $30 billion in transfers.
Prominent examples of FMS sales in 2023 included:
Poland: AH-64E Apache attack helicopter, $12 billion
Poland: High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), $10 billion
Germany: CH-47F Chinook Helicopters, $8.5 billion
Australia: C-130J-30 air transports, $6.35 billion
Canada: P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, $5.9 billion
Czech Republic: F-35 fighters and munitions, $5.62 billion
Republic of Korea: F-35 fighters, $5.06 billion
Poland: Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, $4.0 billion
Poland: M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, $3.75 billion
Kuwait: National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) Medium-Range Air Defense System (MRADS), $3.0 billion
Germany: AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM), $2.90 billion
The State Department also provided figures for Direct Commercial Sales, which are not managed by the FMS program but which require congressional approval. The total of licensed Direct Commercial Sales from U.S. companies to foreign customers was $157.5 billion in fiscal 2023, a 2.5 percent increase from the $153.6 billion recorded in fiscal 2022.
The three-year rolling average for DCS was $124.9 billion, a 16.5 percent change from the previous three-year period.
DCS “includes the value of hardware, services, and technical data authorized from exports, temporary imports, re-export, re-transfers and brokering,” according to a State press release.
State also noted that the number of DCS cases adjudicated rose six percent in fiscal 2023 versus 2022, from 22,138 to 23,474. The “Total Licensed Entities” involved also rose 2.9 percent, reflecting a wider defense industrial base doing defense business.
Prominent examples of DCS sales in 2023 included:
Italy: F-35 wing assemblies and sub-assemblies, $2.8 billion
India: GE F414-INS6 engine hardware, $1.8 billion
Singapore: F100 engines and spare parts, $1.2 billion
South Korea: F100 engines and spare parts, $1.2 billion
Norway/Ukraine: NASAMS, Norway and Ukraine Ministries of Defence, $1.2 billion
Saudi Arabia: Patriot Guided Missiles, $1 billion
US support for Ukraine has strengthened the DIB – ensures financial security for DIB Hoffman et al 24 (Elizabeth Hoffman, currently serves as the director of congressional and government affairs and fellow at the CSIS, was director for government relations at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), spent two years as a senior professional staff member on the House Committee on Homeland Security, and held numerous positions in the House, “How Supporting Ukraine Is Revitalizing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base”, article for CSIS, April 18, 2024, https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-supporting-ukraine-revitalizing-us-defense-industrial-base)
Public skepticism of continued assistance has increased with each vote. Almost half of Americans are concerned that U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to fund Ukraine’s war while domestic issues continue to fester; other analysts have highlighted the impact of weapons transfers on the ability of the United States to deter and defend adversaries should other conflicts occur in the near term—such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. These concerns miss the point. The $113 billion spans agencies and bureaus and provides for much-needed support in areas including military equipment, migration and refugee assistance, energy, and countering disinformation. The majority of the assistance has gone to support the military response to the invasion, with nearly $62 billion allocated to the Department of Defense. Additionally, nearly half of the $9.9 billion allocated to the Department of State has gone to the Foreign Military Financing program, which enables partner countries to purchase military equipment or services from the United States. The two primary mechanisms through which the United States is sending military support to Ukraine include presidential drawdown authority (PDA) and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI). PDA allows for the rapid transfer of weapons and defense services directly from U.S. stocks in the face of unprecedented crises. The value of equipment transferred to Ukraine under PDA is not a part of the $113 billion appropriated by Congress. Since PDA uses existing weapons stockpiles, this equipment has long been paid for, and in some cases has been sitting in U.S. warehouses for decades. As such, the value of the defense articles is assessed using what is called the “net book value,” or the historical cost of the equipment minus depreciation based on use life. As of December 2023, nearly $24 billion worth of equipment had been transferred to Ukraine from stockpiles under PDA. The benefit of PDA transfers to the United States has been the ability to clear out old stock and replace it with newer, more modern equipment. As old equipment leaves the warehouses, substantial sums have been appropriated to replenish U.S. stockpiles that have been drawn down. As of November 2023, $25.9 billion had been appropriated, of which $16.8 billion had been obligated to replace equipment taken directly from U.S. inventories. Typically, and according to statutory authority, these items are not replaced with exactly the same systems; they frequently include older models that may no longer be in production and may no longer represent leading-edge capabilities. However, replacement and replenishment strategies are critical to ensuring that U.S. stockpiles are prepared for future conflict. The second mechanism through which the United States has provided military assistance to Ukraine is through USAI, which allows the Ukrainian government to contract directly with U.S. industry, such as Lockheed Martin or RTX, for weapons procurement. The challenge for Ukraine with this approach is the timeline, as weapons manufacturing takes months or years. Ukraine is expending systems such as 155 mm ammunition at a very high rate, and current production rates and the long time required to ramp up production will mean that they do not have the requisite capabilities for self-defense. USAI will likely be most useful in refreshing Ukraine’s stocks postwar. Congress has obligated $10.5 billion for USAI, bringing total obligations, including PDA, to over $27 billion. Regardless of the funding mechanism—whether replenishment for PDA or for USAI—this money flows into the United States’ DIB. This has direct, and substantial, impacts on what the DOD has identified as “prime vendors and critical suppliers in 37 states.” The map below demonstrates the massive influx of funds into the DIB since January 2022, shortly before the inception of the war, by identifying parts of the DIB relevant to restocking or future manufacturing for transfers to Ukraine. This map includes all contract funding for relevant systems and munitions, not just those destined for Ukraine, and thus shows the extent of the full demand signal bolstering the U.S. DIB. This map shows funding by congressional district, not to draw attention to specific members of Congress, but because this distinction is made in DOD contracting documents and allows for greater specificity than showing investment by state.
AT: US Falling Behind
US defense tech isn’t falling behind- still the largest resource investor in the world and far ahead of other countries
Eugene Gholz and Harvey M. Sapolsky in 2021
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge; ND International Security Center; https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-defense-innovation-machine-why-the-u-s-will-remain-on-the-cutting-edge/
The United States is the most powerful nation in the world.Footnote1 It has the most powerful military, the biggest economy, and the most dominating culture. It is the world’s leader in science, engineering, and medicine. Its universities are the most admired. Its corporations are the richest and most successful. People eat Big Macs, drink Coca Cola, fly on Boeings, use their iPhones, and watch Hollywood movies around the globe. Everyone knows the name of the American president, what the CIA does, and who you should call if there is trouble on your border. The United States is also a very secure country. It is surrounded by two big oceans and two unthreatening neighbors. Its surveillance systems scour the globe looking for dangers. It has nuclear weapons, a Navy and Coast Guard on constant patrol, an Air Force on high alert and with a global reach, and an Army and Marine Corps second to none in capability and recent combat experience. But many Americans believe that this is all slipping away, that America is becoming vulnerable and losing its power and dominance. They cite internal and external sources of the vulnerability. American power, they claim, is being frittered away by a dysfunctional Congress, an incompetent president, and a bloated, slow moving, gold-plating acquisition bureaucracy that cannot keep up. Indecision and gridlock have seemingly become the American Way of government. Meanwhile, some fear that agile rival nations, specifically including China, can tap fast moving commercial technology to build modern weapons that will defeat the United States.Footnote2 Here we examine these concerns that the American military advantage in the Post-Cold War era has dissipated in large part because the Defense Department lags behind in developing advanced technologies. Our judgment is that the American defense research and development system, as honed during the Cold War and expanded since, is fully capable of handling any military challenge. It is a gigantic technology-generating, innovation-producing, war-fighting machine. U.S. ‘hard’ innovation capabilities – ‘input and infrastructure factors’ like R&D facilities, human capital, access to foreign technology, and availability of funding – far outstrip those of its potential rivals, even though those factors are the ones often thought of as easier for catch-up countries to obtain.Footnote3 Despite warnings that the United States no longer spends enough on R&D and that Chinese R&D spending is surging, the reality is that the United States dramatically leads in military innovation investment. In functional terms, the United States dominates all other countries, including China, in ‘input factors,’ starting with resource allocations to defense research and development.
“Soft” factors like history and culture give the US distinct advantages in military tech- not falling behind
Eugene Gholz and Harvey M. Sapolsky in 2021
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge; ND International Security Center; https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-defense-innovation-machine-why-the-u-s-will-remain-on-the-cutting-edge/
More important, we believe that the American defense technology system is pushed toward innovation by specific contextual factors, the ‘soft’ categories of attributes and capabilities, that cannot readily transfer to likely rivals.Footnote4 First, the political culture of the United States values technology strongly: technology is assumed to be the solution to most problems, including military ones. American culture also has a strong casualty aversion driven by an economy traditionally burdened by labor scarcity and by responsive political institutions that encourage the substitution of capital for labor to keep its own people out of harm’s way.Footnote5 The All-Volunteer Force reflects this by making military service voluntary and thus making military service expensive for government and service personnel lives ever-more-valuable and in need of husbanding. Second, competition is deeply engrained in defense, as it is in most of American society, stimulating new ideas and providing a diversity of approaches to any problem, in case one technology trajectory does not work out as hoped. Competition extends among the various military services and agencies, which each seek to propose solutions to the nation’s strategic problems, and among firms with different design-team philosophies. Third, the United States also welcomes foreign ideas much more readily than other countries, given U.S. openness to immigration, especially among the highly skilled and technically expert. Finally, a Cold-War organizational innovation in the United States created special public-private hybrid organizations, Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that offer unbiased technical advice and a mechanism for the accumulation of knowledge – a unique social, relational system for institutional memory and systems integration capability that generally works very well. Other nations, with different divisions between the public and the private and dramatically different governance institutions, cannot easily copy these capabilities. These soft innovation factors particularly emphasize American advantages in the functional category of institutional factors – norms of seeing technology as a solution, trying hard to minimise casualties, using innovation as a means of competition among organizations, and welcoming foreign ideas. The institutional factors draw from the particular American mix of organizations, notably independent military services with strong identities, competitive firms in the defense industry that readily form networks or teams of suppliers even as each maintains its own core competencies and technical habits, and FFRDCs that help keep systems integration efforts honest and less parochial and that help preserve knowledge of false-start technology trajectories and craft skills that enable high-tech systems to function well.Footnote6 Because of the robustness of America’s input factors and the difficulty of copying its unique institutional factors, we conclude that the American defense innovation system will remain at the cutting edge and will not be surpassed by a potential international rival. In the final section, we explain why American leaders are so nervous anyway.
US still outspending the world in defense R and D- no risk of other countries catching up
Eugene Gholz and Harvey M. Sapolsky in 2021
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge; ND International Security Center; https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-defense-innovation-machine-why-the-u-s-will-remain-on-the-cutting-edge/
The United States invests heavily in defense-related research and development (R&D) activities. Figure 1 shows the past 40 years of history of U.S. inputs to defense research and development. Currently the United States invests more than 75 billion USD each year in defense R&D plus billions more in Department of Energy R&D investment for nuclear weapons. That is about two-thirds of what all other countries in the world, American friend or foe, spend on defense R&D.Footnote9 China is the only great power that spends more on its entire defense effort than the United States spends on just defense R&D. Seventy-five billion dollars is more than Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Japan spends on defense.Footnote10
Moreover, the United States has invested at very high levels for more than 70 years. The United States substantially ramped up its defense R&D investment in the 1950s to levels comparable to today’s spending. While it is true that in inflation-adjusted term

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