President Obama unveiled the Pentagon’s new defense strategy last week, calling it a moment to “turn the page” on the past decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new strategy places a greater emphasis on Asia and reduces ground forces in favor of air and sea forces. It accepts greater risks in some areas — most notably in abandoning the policy that the United States must be able to fight two major, protracted ground wars at once. The Pentagon argues that a two-war construct does not do justice to the complexity of the current threat environment. It has to be able to adapt to a wide, complex array of global threats rather than prepare for an arbitrary number of simultaneous wars.
But while changing threats are no doubt a factor in the shift, constraints from last summer’s budget deal also play an important role. Under the bipartisan budget agreement reached last August, the 2013 defense budget will return to roughly the same level it was in 2008 and grow only with inflation for the rest of the decade. This is a $487 billion reduction from the growth the administration had planned over the next 10 years.
There is a glaring oversight in the Pentagon’s plan. The new strategy claims to plan for a wide array of contingencies, but it fails to plan for perhaps the most likely contingency of all: further defense cuts and the sequestration process set in motion by the super committee’s failure to reach a deficit reduction deal last November.
That failure means that an additional $500 billion in cuts will take effect beginning in January 2013 beyond what the Pentagon already planned for in the new strategy. Unless Congress and the administration act, there will be uniform cuts across every account in the defense budget — the antithesis of a strategic and targeted approach. The new strategy effectively ignores this possibility, and defense officials acknowledge that if sequestration occurs, the new strategy essentially will be thrown out the window.