WASHINGTON – The U.S. military has put countering China and Russia at theheart of a new national defense strategy unveiled on Friday, the latestsign of shifting American priorities after more than a decade and a half offocusing on the fight against Islamist militants.
The strategy document, the first of its kind since at least 2014, setspriorities for the U.S. Defense Department that are expected to bereflected in future defense spending requests. The Pentagon released anunclassified, 11-page version of the document on Friday.
The so-called “National Defense Strategy” represents the latest sign ofhardening resolve by President Donald Trump’s administration to addresschallenges from Russia and China, despite Trump’s calls for improved tieswith Moscow and Beijing.
“We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China andRussia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with theirauthoritarian models,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a speechpresenting the document.ADVERTISEMENT
Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy andforce development, said at a briefing with reporters that Russia was farmore brazen than China in its use of military power.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and intervenedmilitarily in Syria to support its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.Still, Moscow was limited by its economic resources, Colby said.
China, on the other hand, was described as economically and militarilyascendant by the document. It has embarked on far-reaching militarymodernization that Colby said was in “deep contravention to our interests.”
“This strategy really represents a fundamental shift to say, look, we haveto get back, in a sense, to the basics of the potential for war and thisstrategy says the focus will be on prioritizing preparedness for war, inparticular major power war,” he added.
The document also listed North Korea among the Pentagon’s top priorities,citing the need to focus U.S. missile defenses against the threat fromPyongyang, which beyond its nuclear weapons has also amassed an arsenal ofbiological, chemical, and conventional arms.
It said that while state actors would have to be countered, non-stateactors like Islamist militants would continue to pose a threat.
The document said that international alliances would be critical for theU.S. military, by far the world’s best-resourced. But it also stressed aneed for burden-sharing, an apparent nod to Trump’s public criticism ofallies who he says unfairly take advantage of U.S. security guarantees.
Mattis said that the U.S. military’s competitive edge has eroded “in everydomain of warfare” and blamed that partly on spending caps andcongressional budget dysfunction.ADVERTISEMENT
“As hard as the last 16 years of war have been, no enemy in the field hasdone more to harm the readiness of the U.S. military than the combinedimpact” of the caps and short-term funding.
In sheer spending terms, the United States’ military outlay per year isstill far more than China and Russia, the rivals cited by Mattis. TheUnited States is spending $587.8 billion per year on its military, China$161.7 billion and Russia $44.6 billion.