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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I would like to begin by reminding our colleagues of a report released before the August State work period. It is a report Congress commissioned in the fiscal year 2022 NDAA, produced by a panel of experts that Congress appointed--the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy.

The Commission was tasked with reviewing the Biden administration's national defense strategy and conducting an independent assessment of the threats and requirements of our common defense.

Any of our colleagues who haven't yet taken a close look at this report should. But I would like to reiterate a few of its conclusions that I discussed just last month as the Appropriations Committee finalized defense spending legislation for the coming year.

This ought to grab our attention, from the report:

[T]he U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.

[T]he U.S. defense industrial base . . . is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners.

[T]he U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare.

The report doesn't flinch in assessing the full scale of the threats posed by major adversaries: Russian victory in Ukraine would make Moscow ``an emboldened and likely stronger power, requiring NATO to build and deploy additional forces, potentially at the expense of other locations where these resources could be applied.

China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment.

And, perhaps most alarmingly, the growing partnership and collaboration between our adversaries ``increases the likelihood that a conflict with one would expand to multiple fronts, causing simultaneous demands on U.S. and ally resources.

It is a sobering assessment with some urgent recommendations to go along with it. The question now is what we are willing to do about it.

Congress has a constitutional duty to provide for the common defense. We have a responsibility to align resources with our requirements and our strategy to provide funding adequate to ensure American military superiority.

Unfortunately, this is work Congress must do without help from this administration. And as one Commissioner, Roger Zakheim, has observed, President Biden's 2022 NDS mentioned neither ``budget,'' ``funding,'' nor ``dollar.''

But after a week back in Washington, Congress is no closer to delivering full-year top-line defense spending than we were back on August 1. The critical increases Vice Chair Collins secured over the President's anemic budget request are no closer to becoming law, neither is the National Defense Authorization Act, which the Democratic leader has yet to schedule for floor time.

So it is one thing to request expert analysis; it would be quite another to do the urgent work that analysis rightly prescribes.

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