FILE – Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., meets with reporters during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 11, 2024. The top Republican on a Senate committee that oversees the U.S. military is making an argument for aggressively increasing defense spending over negotiated spending caps. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, is releasing a plan for a “generational investment” that seeks to deter coordinated threats from U.S.
Wicker acknowledged it would be “a hill to climb” to convince Congress to break from the spending caps at a time of deep political upheaval. Washington is still grappling with divisions over support for Ukraine, the aftershocks of two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a presidential election between two presumptive candidates—Biden and Republican Donald Trump—who espouse vastly different visions of America’s role abroad.
Defense spending when measured as a portion of GDP is currently about 3 percent and has been declining since the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has not reached above 5 percent since the early 1990s. China has given diplomatic support to Moscow after its invasion of Ukraine and emerged as a top export market for Russian oil and gas, helping fill the Kremlin’s war coffers for the ongoing offensive.He said in his proposal that the US faces “the most dangerous threat environment since World War II” and urges a national war footing appropriate for a long, drawn-out conflict with a major world power.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is set to craft the annual military authorization bill next month, but the chairman, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, has not publicly released the spending amount that he will propose. Wicker said that he had been in contact with Reed, as well as top Democratic appropriators, about the plan, but their level of support was not clear.