US empire is collapsing Pentagon –
More force needed, says report
ASTUDY by the Pentagon says the US framework of international order that was established after World War II is “fraying” and “collapsing”.
“While the United States remains a global political, economic and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report says.
“In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by US strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for the DoD (Department of Defence) is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.”
The study entitled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World” is based on a year of research and was released last month by the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the department’s approach to assessing risk at all levels of Pentagon policy planning.
Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence”, Washington now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable, “competitive”, “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority”, the document says, conceding its imperialist nature.
According to the Pentagon’s findings, the nation’s power is in decline because of a world that has essentially entered a new phase of transformation, in which international order is unravelling and authority of governments everywhere is crumbling.
The report warns “global events will happen faster than the defence department is currently equipped to handle”, and the US “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union”.
It recounts that competing powers, Russia and China, along with others like Iran and North Korea, have played a major role in removing the US from its position of global “pre-eminence”. It describes Russia and China as “revisionist forces”, who benefit from the US-dominated international order, but now “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to US dominance”.
The US should consider the “post-primacy” milieu as a “wake-up call” and if it doesn’t adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly defy (DoD’s) current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases”.
The US Army War College study concludes that it’s not just the US that is seeing a decline. “All states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces…
“The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the internal fraying in the political, social and economic fabric of practically all states,” it says.
The report suggests expanding the US military as the only option by which it can gain back its stature in the world sphere, and it further demands US military force needs to be powerful enough to preserve “maximum freedom of action”, and allow Washington to “dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes”.