The U.S. Defense Department should go back to resourcing and planning to fight wars in multiple parts of the world, according to a formal review of U.S. defense strategy ordered by Congress. That recommendation is a direct contradiction of the Trump-era strategy—echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden—that called for the U.S. military to narrowly focus on the Indo-Pacific.
The U.S. Defense Department should go back to resourcing and planning to fight wars in multiple parts of the world, according to a formal review of U.S. defense strategy ordered by Congress. That recommendation is a direct contradiction of the Trump-era strategy—echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden—that called for the U.S. military to narrowly focus on the Indo-Pacific.
The review was conducted by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally mandated bipartisan panel tasked with analyzing and providing recommendations about “the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts and military risks” of Biden’s 2022 National Defense Strategy. It is headed by former U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, who previously served as a top-ranking official on the House Intelligence Committee. A similar commission reviewed former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy.
Such reports, which typically accompany each new U.S. national defense strategy, are often used by defense hawks in Congress to push for higher Pentagon spending. The latest report, released on Monday, calls for growth in U.S. defense spending—above the rate of inflation—to help stave off threats from China and Russia.
Because the Biden administration’s defense strategy was mostly written ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—and preceded Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza entirely—the commission said that the strategy is “insufficient” to meet growing threats in Europe and the Middle East that have become more acute over the past two years, as well as the growing partnership between Russia and China.
For most of the post-Cold War era, the United States had a two-war strategy in place, calling on the U.S. military to be prepared to fight and win two wars at once. And after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. military spent the better part of the next two decades fighting two wars at once—in Iraq and Afghanistan—though never at the scale of conventional wars of the past such as Korea, Vietnam, or World War II.
But fiscal austerity—especially the budget caps Congress enacted during the Obama administration in an effort to slash the national debt—combined with a strategic pivot toward China under the last three U.S. presidents has made maintaining a two-war military no longer a pillar of Pentagon strategy.
With two wars no longer a requirement and low unemployment making military recruiting much more difficult, the U.S. military’s overall end strength is smaller than it has been in 80 years.
“The Joint Force is at the breaking point of maintaining readiness today,” the commissioners wrote. “Adding more burden without adding resources to rebuild readiness will cause it to break.”
“The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat,” the commission added, indicating that the Pentagon needs to do a better job of fielding higher-tech weapons and munitions at greater scale and replenish ammunition at a rate required to fight a highly capable enemy such as China.
The commission also wants the Pentagon and the White House to review the U.S. military’s operational instructions to deal with China and Russia’s coordination across all areas of the map. U.S. Central Command, the top U.S. military command in the Middle East, showed effective alignment by coordinating air defense assets to stop a massive Iranian drone and missile attack in April, the report said.
The call to fight wars in multiple different areas—or “theaters,” in military jargon—is distinct from the old two-war construct, the report said, as that approach called on the United States to be prepared to defeat rogue states in northeast Asia and the Middle East, such as Iran and North Korea, that might not have first-world military capabilities. Today, the report said, the U.S. military needs to be able to defend the U.S. homeland, lead efforts to deter China in the Western Pacific and Russia in Europe, and defend against Iranian malign activities.
One of the report’s commissioners, Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has personally gone even further, calling for a U.S. defense strategy where the Pentagon prepares to fight in three theaters. But other experts believe that the United States needs to focus its strategy and get used to an era in which resources, including troops and weapons, might be scarcer.
“We don’t have a military that can fight two wars,” Elbridge Colby, who helped develop the Trump administration’s 2018 defense strategy, said at a Foreign Policy event earlier this month. “I think Asia is more important than Europe. That’s a fact of two successive national defense strategies, including the Biden administration’s own.”
The commission acknowledged that U.S. resources aren’t unlimited—especially if multiple wars break out around the world at the same time. Given that reality, the commission said that NATO defense planners should set targets for the military capabilities that U.S. allies in Europe need to have in order “to reduce overreliance on the United States” in supporting those capabilities. But even if the United States were to focus only on China, the report said, the U.S. military would still have to be based around the world in order to deal with China’s global interests.
The commissioners are set to testify before Congress on the report’s findings on Tuesday.
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