As the National Defense Strategy Commission highlighted, the U.S. Risk translated actually means longer wars, higher casualty rates, loss of major capital assets, and worse. Take as evidence the sustained congressional interest in maintaining a robust U.S. But defense planners cannot assume that politicians will follow their preferred priorities. One popular interpretation of National Defense Strategy priorities is a shift away from capacity and toward advanced capabilities, or to take more risk in the present day to buy the future. Under a flat budget and without a reduction in mission demand, capping the size of the military or shrinking it to pay for qualitative improvements will result in its inability to meet likely requirements and a perpetual readiness problem as units are overused. By not explicitly attempting to measure the stresses of everything else the military must accomplish, this planning construct cannot give decision makers the tools to evaluate the necessary size and shape of U.S. forces largely by their ability to defeat and deter two great powers while fully mobilized, even as the force maintains deterrence in a third theater. The National Defense Strategy’s new force planning construct measures the adequacy of U.S. It also leads to an underemphasis on what “competition” and “conflict” mean, not only against China and Russia, but also in a global context and by service. This inability to characterize trade-offs between force structure, readiness, innovation, and modernization renders force development discussions fruitless. The tendency to fall back on seemingly simple high-tech solutions and fuzzy concepts like “dynamic force employment” is partly the result of a Pentagon lacking the analytical ability to provide clear choices to lawmakers.
“The tendency to fall back on seemingly simple high-tech solutions and fuzzy concepts…is partly the result of a Pentagon lacking the analytical ability to provide clear choices to lawmakers.” Proponents of the strategy frequently argue that the military should cease growing or even shrink to pay for making existing forces “more lethal.” However, because policymakers are unlikely to decrease the demand signal for military forces, trading away capacity-especially before the promised next-generation technology arrives primed and ready-will create a hollow force. military forces should be sized, shaped, modernized, and ultimately resourced. These fundamental shortcomings ripple through thinking about how U.S. Though the National Defense Strategy rightly calls for additional efforts to prepare for high-end conflict against Russia and China, it underestimates the force demands of day-to-day assurance and deterrence on America’s military and skews the Pentagon’s modernization program in favor of riskier transformation. capability,” and debates over technology and equipment beg the question by defining “modernization” of the force mostly as targeted investment in development of future weapons. Complex questions of force development boil down to “capacity vs.
With a few exceptions, the debate over the National Defense Strategy has devolved into discussions about which futuristic technologies are most exciting, with a side of decontextualized budget figures and a sprinkling of buzzwords about “great power competition,” “lethality,” “modernization,” and “gray-zone” competition. This myopic view tends to fall apart under the pressures of politics, time, and bureaucratic friction or inertia. The National Defense Strategy takes a narrower view of America’s strategic requirements, one overly concerned with the growing operational and tactical challenges posed by Russia and China, to the detriment of almost everything else. forces, innovative thinking and planning to turn it into concepts and guidance, and more traditional and cutting-edge investments. Rectifying the bulging strategy-resource mismatch will require fewer demands on U.S. But at the same time, we should accept that the strategy was a codification of the obvious, lacking in hard choices and details, and under-resourced. Pentagon leaders should be applauded for fresh thinking around 21st-century challenges. Like every post-Cold War strategy before it, the document simply piles on newer and harder missions without meaningfully reducing or shedding others deemed less important. While the 2018 National Defense Strategy charts a more honest and realistic priority set of threats and challenges for the U.S.
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