America’s Military Risks Losing Its Edge
In 2016, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter highlighted a “return to great-power of competition.” And in 2018, the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy crystallized this shift: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” it declared, with a particular focus on China as the pacing threat.
Yet despite such a widespread and bipartisan acknowledgment of the challenge, the U.S. military has changed far too little to meet it. Although strategy has shifted at a high level, much about the way the Pentagon operates continues to reflect business as usual, which is inadequate to meet the growing threats posed by a rising China and a revisionist Russia. That disconnect is evident in everything from the military’s ongoing struggle to reorient its concepts of operations (that is, how it would actually fight in the future) to its training, technology acquisition, talent management, and overseas posture. Some important steps have been taken to foster defense innovation, but bureaucratic inertia has prevented new capabilities and practices from being adopted with speed and at scale.
THE WARS OF THE FUTURE
In the months and years after 9/11, the U.S. armed forces prioritized counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, counterinsurgency operations consumed even more U.S. forces and more of the attention of the Defense Department’s leadership. For a decade, the wars being fought in the present left little capacity to prepare for the wars of the future.
By 2012, a small but growing chorus of defense experts began sounding the alarm that greater challenges were looming on the horizon and that the United States needed a new strategy to meet them. The shift was driven in large part by China’s more assertive behavior and new capabilities. Since the Gulf War, the Chinese military has gone to school on the American way of war. It developed an expanding set of asymmetric approaches to undermine U.S. military strengths and exploit U.S. vulnerabilities, including robust “anti-access/area-denial” (A2/AD) capabilities.
These new capabilities—cyber and electronic weapons, air defenses, arsenals of precision missiles such as antiship weapons—are designed to disrupt and destroy U.S. command-and-control networks and thwart U.S. power projection into the Indo-Pacific. As a result, the U.S. military can no longer assume that it will have the freedom of action in a conflict that it could have had in the past by gaining early superiority in the air, space, cyberspace, and maritime domains. In any future conflict, U.S. forces will need to fight for advantage across these domains—and then continue fighting to keep it—in the face of continuous Chinese efforts to disrupt and degrade U.S. battle-management networks.
One necessary shift is rethinking where U.S. military forces are deployed—with a reduced focus on the greater Middle East, which, even now, accounts for about one-third of U.S. forces deployed or stationed outside the United States. An ongoing global force posture review, initiated earlier this year at the direction of the president, aims to give greater priority to deterring China, which is likely to mean drawing down forces in the Middle East in order to make more available in the Indo-Pacific. To succeed, however, this change in strategy must be matched by more than a shift in global posture; it will require a wholesale realignment of concepts, culture, service programs, and budgets. Otherwise, there will be a gradual erosion of U.S. military superiority in the face of competition from other great powers. As a consequence, the United States could no longer be confident in its ability to deter Chinese aggression or protect its interests and allies in Asia. And in the event of conflict, it would pay a far higher price in both blood and treasure. The costs of inertia and inaction are unacceptably high.
When Chinese officials or strategists look at the U.S. military today, they see key systems—those used to detect threats, to communicate and navigate, and to target enemy forces—that are vulnerable to attack. What’s more, U.S. forces will be at a growing disadvantage, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the face of expanding Chinese military forces and Chinese investments in capabilities designed to prevent the U.S. military from getting within range of China’s shores.
In addition, top officials face a wide variety of urgent challenges, from overseeing current operations (many of them counterterrorism in the greater Middle East and Africa) to dealing with sexual assault in the forces and extremist groups recruiting members of the military.
Both Beijing and Moscow have invested in cyber, electronic, and kinetic weapons designed to disrupt the ability of U.S. forces to deploy, navigate, communicate, and strike, as well as layer upon layer of defenses to shoot down U.S. aircraft and sink U.S. ships before they can get within range of their targets.
Time is no longer on the United States’ side in this competition, and the stakes could not be higher.
It should be empowered to identify new ways of using current U.S. capabilities to strengthen deterrence against China and Russia—be it putting the U.S. Navy’s long-range antiship munitions on U.S. Air Force bombers or enabling U.S. fighters to disperse hundreds of microdrones to conduct surveillance or overwhelm an adversary’s air defenses.
THE DANGERS OF DECLINE
If the Pentagon maintains its inherited course, the United States’ ability to deter coercion and aggression will atrophy over the coming decade. That is especially dangerous as it relates to China: given Beijing’s persistent assumption that the United States is in decline, Chinese leaders could become increasingly aggressive, using their growing political, economic, and military might to pursue their claims in the East China and South China Seas or with Taiwan. The risk of miscalculation—and conflict—will rise sharply as a result.
A decline in relative military power would also undermine U.S. credibility with allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific, making it difficult to reassure them of the United States’ ability to deliver on commitments to their security. Some smaller countries would likely bend to Chinese coercion and influence in ways that could affect not only regional stability but also trade and economic relationships critical to U.S. economic recovery and future growth. Larger countries might pursue more independent security policies that could range from appeasing Beijing to acquiring their own nuclear weapons as a deterrent, neither of which would be in U.S. interests. Overall, U.S. influence would diminish in the very region on which the future prosperity and security of Americans most depends, lowering perceptions of U.S. power and leadership globally.