The soft-pedal rollout of the National Defense Strategy—a Friday-night email to press as the Washington, D.C., area braced for a crippling snowstorm—has experts wondering whether there’s an implementation plan to go with it.
“My real cynical take is the strategy isn’t worth the paper it’s written on because the president’s going to do whatever he wants and he’s not going to even try to adhere to it, which might be why it was released with such little fanfare,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a CNAS senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, which hosted a Wednesday discussion on the strategy.
And while there are always some tensions or contradictions in an NDS, because they’re written by a group of people, this latest document seems to go in several directions at the same time, said Becca Wasser, a CNAS adjunct senior fellow.
New world order
The thesis of the NDS is that the rules-based international order, an American-led framework that promoted liberal democratic values and diplomacy as a means to prevent another world war, was a far-fetched fantasy. It’s a favored worldview of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and key NDS author.
The strategy proposes to replace that framework with what the Trump administration has coined the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: “American military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere that denies “adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities” there.
“What is interesting about that, though, is that, of course, it doesn’t say much about what this is,” said Dustin Walker, policy director at Anduril. “What is replacing that order, what are the sort of higher-order strategic objectives that we are pursuing here?”
Experts have described the new NDS as a sharp departure from previous U.S. strategy, but the document itself is thin on details of how defense posture or priorities will shift to support it.
“You don’t really have much of a description of how the size and shape of our military is going to change pursuant to these strategic priorities,” Walker said. “You don’t really hear much about sort of procurement priorities. I think Golden Dome is literally the only specific capability area mentioned in the document. So you don’t have a lot of guidance for force design and development here. There’s no description of the budget or sort of investment profile that’s going to be required to do this.”
China
The NDS says the U.S aims not to “strangle” or “humiliate” China, but instead to forge a detente that halts the growth of Chinese economic inroads in the Western Hemisphere and uses “dominance” to keep China in line, including by increasing defenses along the First Island Chain.
“And I think you see that a lot on the China front, which is sort of stripping away any of any discussion about, essentially any normative judgment about the competition between the United States and China, and simply saying that, on pure power terms, we will deny them their ability to assert interest in military force in the region,” Walker said.
And at the same time, even more than the National Security Strategy does, he added, it proposes diplomacy to ensure a “decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under,” in the NDS’s words.
But, Wasser said, “that isn’t necessarily how China might perceive it as well… And so when you have that, plus the aim of bolstering posture along the First Island Chain, there’s a lot of incongruencies.”
‘Marauder force’
The NDS also has a novel approach to simultaneity, the idea that the U.S. military might have to manage conflicts in multiple regions at once. Rather than talk about the capabilities needed to respond to, say, a Russian incursion into NATO territory while China invades Taiwan, the strategy downplays the possibility by suggesting that the U.S. will stay mostly in its own hemisphere, except when it wants to quickly put down conflicts in other regions.
“The strategy seems to be saying that they want to maintain the capacity for the United States to conduct these sort of sudden, short-notice, large, sharp strikes all over the world, essentially while erecting the First Island Chain-denial defense…to have a marauder capability, where, if the president has a problem with a particular country, a particular leader, a crisis emerges, whatever the case may be, we want to suddenly be able to shift a lot of forces to conduct high-tempo, short-duration operations,” Walker said.
It would be interesting to see how they work out the math on that, he added, without a significant change in force design or posture, just based on the Defense Department’s shuffling of forces to simultaneously home in on Venezuela while putting pressure on Iran to end its violent clashes with protestors.
“It’s interesting. This document came as we were waiting for a carrier to depart the South China Sea, to get to the Persian Gulf, because we had taken one and moved it to the Caribbean,” Walker added.
And it will only get more difficult if, as the strategy seems to suggest, the “you’re on your own” message to allies means a withdrawal of permanently stationed U.S. troops around the globe, which will mean fewer access points from which to launch these strikes.
“We’re going to lose basing access, probably because less people are going to be willing to work with us when we’re using force wantonly and at the president’s discretion for these marauding raids, right?” Pettyjohn said. “And we’re not consulting, necessarily, in the same way and treating alliances as enduring partnership. It’s a much more transactional thing, which means we’re going to need more access-insensitive forces, which means long-range bombers and tankers, or you need the Navy—the surface fleet is one of the most stressed forces right now in terms of readiness.”
‘$1.5-trillion budget’
While the NDS suggests that the U.S. wants to reduce its involvement around the world, it doesn’t intend to save any money while doing it. Earlier this month, Trump announced in a social media post that he’d like to see the defense budget increase by half, to $1.5 trillion.
Much of that will go to paying for Golden Dome, experts said, as that effort alone is estimated to cost around $1.1 trillion.
But it may also fund this self-sustaining precision strike force that the document hints at.
“Essentially, what this strategy almost sets up for me are two parallel force structures, right? Wasser said. “There’s the force structure that we have, that’s already budgeted for, that’s already bought, that’s already baked into the system, and that’s optimized for the Indo-Pacific, and then there’s this more flexible surge force…that sometimes is going to require a different set of capabilities.”
Economic-pressure campaigns like the one underway in Venezuela are going to require different assets than the ones the U.S. has been developing for combat against China. Those might be a tough sell to Congress, she added, based on how much recent defense authorizations and appropriations have focused on competition with China.
“But I thought that there wasn’t really the linking of the ways and means, other than making allies do more,” Pettyjohn said. “There was no sort of context or specificity about what the U.S. is going to do…and what our force looks like as a result of this.”
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