While Washington talks a big game about great power competition primarily vis-à-vis China, recent defense budget requests are overly focused on great power war. Equipment and platforms that could easily be repurposed for other uses and missions are scrapped or capped early on the premise they cannot survive the Chinese missile threat ring and are therefore of scant utility (among other reasons).

By not fully accounting for winning the competition and stopping a war in the first place, inadequate budgets logically follow. Maintaining a military large and modern enough to compete and prevent conflict requires a costly premium . But an ounce of deterrence is worth much more than a pound of war.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy was heralded as a key turning point in the United States’ strategic planning. As we predicted a few years ago , while defense planners are eager to heap more work on the Pentagon’s plate, few additional resources , people or time have been given the US military over that same period.

So while the force shrinks in size and ages its inventories and fleets , peer competitors are seeing a force more generally in decline . Bolstering credible conventional military deterrence against China and Russia’s leaders is an additive demand for resources which requires additional investment above planned levels.

This ongoing and indeed growing strategy-resource mismatch in the “Terrible 20’s” has resulted in strategic insolvency where policymakers demand more from the troops without matching funds or reduction in workload.

Even after release of the most recent National Defense Strategy , the troops are little better off. On the whole, the Defense Department is still waiting on steady and sustained real budget growth . As the 2022 defense strategy emphasizes the “acute threat” from Russia and that China is the “most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades,” the Air Force and Navy are dwindling, our stockpiles are dropping , and the defense budget is stagnant.

The 2020 defense budget totaled $725 billion , while the 2024 budget request totaled $842 billion . On paper, this looks like a 14 percent increase over four years. However, when accounting for the buying power lost to the past years of rampant inflation, the story changes. Using the Consumer Price Index as a record of inflation, a budget of $725 billion in 2020 would have roughly $847 billion in buying power today.

Worse, the effects of the military’s strategic insolvency have dragged on over the years. A new report , Inflection Point, from RAND highlights a (sadly) similar conclusion. The new threats and capabilities of America’s adversaries today far outclass post-Cold War threats that Pentagon planners are used to confronting.

RAND notes with a stern warning that “Neither today’s force nor forces currently programmed by the US Department of Defense appear to have the capabilities needed to execute this new approach.”

The report suggests key ways the Pentagon can work towards effectively meeting the strategy—including a need to define the force of the future, rework overly-optimistic munitions requirements, and create a resilient forward posture to bolster allies and deter our rivals.

All of these ideas are sound; just not new or easy. Choices to alter the force structure to deter rivals are not easy. Pentagon leaders continue to prioritize short-term temporary solutions rather than structural improvements that position the bureaucracy for the longer-term competition and to avoid altogether the conflict.

Fixing the yawning say-do gap for the U.S. military is a monumental task. The troops have strained over the past half-decade to meet the challenges continuously piled on , and the cracks are starting to show . In order to meet the needs of our strategy today and restore solvency, combat forces need more investment and fewer demands.

This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.