Pentagon Announces New Military Strategy

So 2MRC is dead. The question now is, "what's next"? There was an attempt at answering that yesterday, as President Obama and Secretary Panetta announced a new "strategy" yesterday that's focused on Asia and stresses 'cheap' stuff like drones and foreign engagement.

quotes, and more articles, after the jump...

President Barack Obama unveiled a defense strategy on Thursday that would expand the U.S. military presence in Asia but shrink the overall size of the force as the Pentagon seeks to slash spending by nearly half a trillion dollars after a decade of war.
The strategy, if carried out, would significantly reshape the world's most powerful military following the buildup that was a key part of President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cyberwarfare and unmanned drones would continue to grow in priority, as would countering attempts by China and Iran to block U.S. power projection capabilities in areas like the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.
But the size of the U.S. Army and Marines Corps would shrink. So too might the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the U.S. military footprint in Europe.
Troop- and time-intensive counter-insurgency operations, a staple of U.S. military strategy since the 2007 "surge" of extra troops to Iraq, would be far more limited.
"The tide of war is receding but the question that this strategy answers is what kind of military will we need long after the wars of the last decade are over," Obama told a Pentagon news conference alongside Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
The strategy drew varied reactions, with Republican Senator John McCain saying the United States could not afford a "budget-driven defense" and independent Senator Joe Lieberman warning it would "greatly increase the risk" that a U.S. adversary would underestimate the U.S. resolve to fight.

The scary part of this, of course, is the numbers...

Administration officials have said they expect Army and Marine Corp personnel levels to be reduced by 10 percent to 15 percent over the next decade as part of the reductions.
The Army's current strength is about 565,000 soldiers and there are 201,000 Marines, meaning an eventual loss of between 76,000 and 114,000 troops.
Panetta acknowledged the Pentagon's financial constraints would mean difficult choices and trade-offs that would require the United States to take on "some level of additional but acceptable risk in the budget plan we release next month."
Critics charged that the cuts were driven by budget woes rather than U.S. defense needs.
"The Pentagon is trying to put on a brave face that this is a pure strategy that has informed the 2013 defense budget," said Mackenzie Eaglen, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.
"Everyone knows that the cart was before the horse on this and that Congress and the president picked a budget and this is a strategy to chase down those numbers," she said.
"This is a classic resource-driven strategy document," said Gordon Adams, an American University professor who worked on defense budgets in the Clinton administration White House.

The Economist has their own sobering take on the situation:

The contours of the new military strategy announced by Barack Obama at the Pentagon on January 5th have been fairly clear for some time. To talk of it as “new strategic guidance” is thus slightly misleading. Short of some cataclysmic event that reshapes the entire landscape, strategy should hardly ever be new, but continually evolving to secure national interests (which remain constant) in a dynamic environment (in which change occurs in unpredictable ways and at varying speeds). As it happens, that pretty much describes Mr Obama’s approach. It is realistic rather than new.

What sort of power projection is needed? And how are the competitors countering it?

The third is the implicit recognition that the long wars against Islamist fanatics distracted America from paying the kind of attention it should have to “the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia”. Consequently, the Pentagon is now promising that “of necessity” it will “rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region”. In particular, there is a firm commitment to maintain America’s ability to project military power in the region despite the rapidly rising military prowess of China and, in particular, its investment in asymmetric “anti-access/area denial” capabilities designed to make it too dangerous for American carriers to venture into its neighbourhood. The next decade will be a test both of that commitment and the way in which the strategic relationship with China–the first potential “near peer” military competitor America has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union–develops.

The DoD has released the official statments from
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey and from Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta.

Much more on this later.

By: Brant