While other roles and missions create important demands, the shape of the U.S. national security thinking, planning, and investment today is focused on the ability to flow war-winning levels of military power to distant corners of the globe to contend with potential aggression in highly demanding, localized contingencies directly adjacent to potential adversaries. But the time has come to reassess the balance of the most demanding missions implied by those commitments with issues that more directly menace Americans - a change that would demand a new approach to defense planning. China poses a rising threat to security in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States should lead efforts to respond. This is not a plea to withdraw from the world: The United States plays important deterrent and balancing roles in key regions, and it should sustain its pledges to help defend allies.
EXAMPLE OF STRATEGIC WAR FREE
That more fundamental debate should consider a radical proposition: that the United States should free itself from the tyranny of discrete localized contingencies as the cornerstone of national security planning and prioritize threats to the well-being of Americans while also preserving ample military capability to prevent broad regional hegemony by any hostile power. Yet, it has become the firmly entrenched guiding paradigm of defense planning - one that, in its path-dependent hold on American thinking, obstructs a critical, and long overdue, conversation about the essential purposes of the U.S. Applied to world-class powers like Russia and China, it is a recipe for persistent means-ends imbalances, skewed defense programs, and misplaced emphasis in American grand strategy. It was taxing enough when dealing with second-tier militaries.
It is easy to forget the radical ambition of this approach, reflecting as it did the defense strategy component of a claim to global primacy.
The United States would henceforth assess the adequacy of its defense program based in large part on the demands of such contingencies and build many of its forces to suit their requirements. defense strategy: projecting technological dominance to the far corners of the earth to win, decisively and at relatively little cost, discrete and limited wars on the very doorstep of the adversary. But this success locked into place a brash vision for U.S. forces had won a crushing victory against Iraq, and the brave and brilliant troops returned to waving flags and celebratory parades. It certainly didn’t seem like that at the time, of course: U.S. It turns out that January 1991 may have been the most problematic moment for U.S.
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