MORGAN MURPHY: Trump Reveals What A Sane National Security Policy Would Actually Look Like

In my time as a national security advisor in Washington, I came to believe that convoluted answers are usually the result of muddled thinking too stupid to be clear.

A good example popped up recently. The U.S. Navy has been trying to acquire two attack submarines per year since 1998. The sub program is arguably our most important national security asset.

Until 2022, the Navy met its goal. But very quickly into President Joe Biden’s term, industry foundered and has since has only been able to produce about 1.2 submarines a year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The question is why? You would be forgiven for speculating that the backlog perhaps has something to do with the Biden administration’s industrial policy. In D.C.’s swampland, that is way too straightforward an approach to this problem set. Besides, the brass can’t criticize the president’s policies without losing their jobs in the five-sided building.

So, what did the Pentagon do recently? It threw money at the problem: $2.4 billion to be exact — to a consultant. The contract award announced that your tax dollars will go to “an Enterprise Integration Partner to deliver systemic, holistics solutions to regional and braoder submarine industrial workforce and industrial base challenges.”

Yes, your government cannot spell the problem correctly, much less fix it, so it is spending $2.4 billion of your tax dollars to hire a consultant to identify the problem with our submarine yards. Evidently word salads are the most expensive thing on the menu these days.

When I began my career in journalism in the 1990s, I kept Donald Trump’s number handy in case I needed a good quote. The brash New Yorker always had just the right turn of phrase to explain a complicated business question in a way people could understand. My readers appreciated his common sense.