The ability of the US national security establishment to craft, implement, and adapt effective long-term strategies against intelligent adversaries at acceptable costs has been declining for some decades. Granted, US strategic performance since the late 1960s has not been uniformly poor, as the outcome of the Cold War testifies. US strategies such as offsetting Warsaw Pact numerical superiority with precision strike, increased US defense spending in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and the covert arming of mujahedin fighters to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan all contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, even if the more fundamental causes were economic decline and the loss of confidence in the Soviet system. And, while long overdue, the improvement in US strategy in Iraq since 2006 has also been impressive. Nevertheless, the overall trend in the strategic performance of American political and military elites appears to be one of decline.
Reversing this decline in US strategic competence is an urgent issue for American national security in the twenty-first century. The reason lies in the multi-faceted security challenges that the United States now faces. The three challenges most likely to persist and possibly grow more acute in coming years are: defeating both the Sunni Salafi-Takfiri and Shia Khomeinist brands of Islamist radicalism; hedging against the rise of a more confrontational or hostile China; and preparing for a world in which there are progressively more nuclear-armed regional powers than there were in the early 1990s. These challenges present the United States with a more complex and diverse array of security concerns than did the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Islamist radicalism and nuclear proliferation present challenges far different from the large-scale, high-intensity, non-nuclear (or “conventional”) warfare at which the US military excels. At the same time, the Chinese military appears to be systematically targeting weaknesses in the current American way of war, especially US power projection in the western Pacific and dependence on space systems.