I'm John Batchew with my colleagues Ryan Brobson and Brad Bowman.

They are with the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

We've given you the numbers. It's inadequate to fight a war, even one war at a time.

Right now it looks like we're giving Ukraine enough to lose. What is to be done?

Brad, you want money? How much?

I'm very happy that we've had, you know, there's things in the reconciliation package that

are, that one can, uh, doesn't like, including myself, but there is a whole lot of positive defense spending

in there, I think, to a tune of roughly 150 billion, which is going to help compensate for the

lacklesser base defense budget request that didn't even keep up with inflation that I spoke about.

And so as a general rule of thumb, I believe we need to be increasing our defense spending annually,

about 3 to 5% above inflation, and we have to make sure that we're well above 3% gross domestic

product. I would just highlight in the most recent NATO summit, the Trump administration was beating

up NATO allies to try to get them to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, but the United States itself is going to struggle

to keep above 3%. You know, so in the Army, we have this idea of lead by example. I have an idea.

If we're going to pound our European allies to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, maybe we should too.

Ryan, what is the, what do you recommend about the Pentagon's requirements to include the other partners how so how do we

revise it so currently the Pentagon sets requirements based on the amount of ammunition it's going to need

in a certain conflict and what we're recommending is that the Pentagon also taking to account the needs

of our allies and partners in contingencies.

Now, this is certainly kind of a form of heresy in the Pentagon, and they certainly don't want to have

additional requirements given limited funding, but what this would allow us to do is actually know

how much ammunition we're going to require from industry to be able to prosecute these

...