The Economist
America's military strategy
Dealing with reality
THE contours of the new military strategy announced by Barack Obama at the Pentagon on January 5th have been fairly clear for some time. To talk of it as “new strategic guidance” is thus slightly misleading. Short of some cataclysmic event that reshapes the entire landscape, strategy should hardly ever be new, but continually evolving to secure national interests (which remain constant) in a dynamic environment (in which change occurs in unpredictable ways and at varying speeds). As it happens, that pretty much describes Mr Obama’s approach. It is realistic rather than new.
It starts out by acknowledging both explicitly and tacitly some painful truths. The first of these is that America’s slow-burn budgetary crisis requires that defence spending falls back to a more normal level after the fat years presided over by this president’s predecessor. As Mr Obama observed: “We must put our fiscal house in order here at home and renew our long-term economic strength.” Whether that means the $450 billion worth of cuts over the next decade the Pentagon has already been told to find or the $1 trillion that could in theory be imposed if the budgetary stalemate in Congress endures is still anyone’s guess. Which it is matters quite a lot.
The second is that the kind of industrial-scale counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations that America has spent trillions of dollars on over the last decade are simply unaffordable and cannot be repeated. The last American combat soldier has left Iraq and the drawdown from Afghanistan has begun, paving the way for a future in which America’s counter-terrorism campaigns will be more targeted and fought with a mix of special forces, local partners and armed drones. There is also a strong suggestion that America will be more active in trying to prevent local conflicts from getting out of hand in the first place: “Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives.” America, says the document, should be able to fight and win one war while being able to impose unacceptable costs on an adversary elsewhere in the world, not fight two wars at the same time.
The third is the implicit recognition that the long wars against Islamist fanatics distracted America from paying the kind of attention it should have to “the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia”. Consequently, the Pentagon is now promising that “of necessity” it will “rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region”. In particular, there is a firm commitment to maintain America’s ability to project military power in the region despite the rapidly rising military prowess of China and, in particular, its investment in asymmetric “anti-access/area denial” capabilities designed to make it too dangerous for American carriers to venture into its neighbourhood. The next decade will be a test both of that commitment and the way in which the strategic relationship with China–the first potential “near peer” military competitor America has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union–develops.
It looks as if one of the casualties of this rebalancing will be the presence of American forces in Europe. Rightly, the document points out that most European countries these days are “producers” rather than “consumers” of defence and that there is no longer a direct need to station substantial forces in the region. However, that ignores the utility of a significant presence in a part of the world that is a lot closer to many of the potential fights than bases in America. It also underestimates the value that America derives from working closely with the armed forces of other countries and maintaining vital military-to-military relationships with America’s closest allies. While NATO leaves a lot to be desired and the feeble defence effort of too many of its members riles Americans, it remains the only vehicle that (fairly) reliably provides partners when America wants to do something in the world and does not want to do it on its own.
With that exception, most of what Mr Obama announced is both sensible and a belated recognition of realities that have been all too apparent for some time. As ever, the devil will be in implementation. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and in this instance the enemy is likely to be Washington’s hyper-partisan politics and the lobbying power of bruised vested interests.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/01/americas-military-strategy
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