Pentagon rethinking how to array forces to focus on China
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration faces a conundrum as it rethinks the positioning of military forces around the world: How to focus more on China and Russia without retreating from longstanding Mideast threats — and to make this shift with potentially leaner Pentagon budgets.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a monthslong “global posture” review just days after taking office. It will assess how the United States can best arrange and support its far-flung network of troops, weapons, bases and alliances to buttress President Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
The review is part of the administration’s effort to chart a path for a military still caught in decades-old Mideast conflicts, facing flat or declining budgets and grappling with internal problems like racism and extremism.
Its outcome could have a long-lasting impact on the military’s first priority: ensuring it is ready for war in an era of uncertain arms control. Also at stake are relations with allies and partners, weakened in some cases by the Trump administration’s “America first” approach to diplomacy.
Austin’s review is closely related to a pending administration decision on whether to fulfill the prior administration’s promise to fully withdraw from Afghanistan this spring. And it is advancing separately from big-dollar questions about modernizing the strategic nuclear force.
Like the Trump administration, Biden’s national security team views China, not militant extremists like al-Qaida or the Islamic State group, as the No. 1 long-term security challenge. Unlike his predecessor, Biden sees great value in U.S. commitments to European nations in the NATO alliance.
That could lead to significant shifts in the U.S. military “footprint” in the Middle East, Europe and the Asia-Pacific, although such changes have been tried before with limited success. The Trump administration, for example, felt compelled to send thousands of extra air and naval forces to the Persian Gulf area in 2019 in an effort to deter what it called threats to regional stability. Biden has seen reminders of this problem in recent days with violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It might also mean a Biden embrace of recent efforts by military commanders to seek innovative ways to deploy forces, untethered from permanent bases that carry political, financial and security costs. A recent example was a U.S. aircraft carrier visit to a Vietnamese port. Commanders see value in deploying forces in smaller groups on less predictable cycles to keep China off balance.
Hints of change were surfacing before Biden took office.
In December, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of his own view that technological and geopolitical change argue for rethinking old ways of organizing and positioning forces.
The very survival of U.S. forces will depend on adapting to the rise of China, the spread of technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics, and the emergence of unconventional threats like pandemics and climate change, Milley said.
“Smaller will be better in the future. A small force that is nearly invisible and undetectable, that’s in a constant state of movement, and is widely distributed — that would be a force that is survivable,” he told a Washington conference. “You’re not going to accomplish any objective if you’re dead.”