Building a Modern Military: The Force Meets Geopolitical Realities

Bottom Line: After decades of increased spending and overseas engagement designed to bolster military primacy, it’s time for the United States to take a more restrained approach to military spending. Doing so will serve the country’s fiscal and defense objectives alike.

“For decades...U.S. national security policy has been oriented around a military-centric approach” which holds that “U.S. military power explains the absence of a major-power war since the end of World War II and the attendant rise in productivity and living standards.”

The dominance of the “primacy” theory explains why the “U.S. officials see only grave and urgent dangers,” particularly in the Middle East, even though the United States has enjoyed a period of relative peace and is ostensibly adjusting to a new era of great power competition.

But this approach has outlived its accuracy and efficacy. “Inertia and strategic indecision” have caused U.S. military spending to swell beyond budgetary constraints, without any attendant security gains. As the COVID-19 outbreak reveals some of the country’s resource shortages and portends a global economic crisis, the time has come to reevaluate U.S. military strategy and develop “a more realistic and prudent military budget.”

The Trump administration’s most recent budget proposal fits nicely within the security establishment’s “overmatch” strategy, which holds that the United States ought to spend what’s necessary to trounce any comparable military power. But “this quest for global dominance is taking place as the United States’ capacity for sustaining supremacy is waning.” Our capacity has atrophied in recent years, while adversarial nations have built up their military capacity.

Indeed, few of the global challenges we face can be fixed by inflating U.S. military capabilities. “Instead, U.S. grand strategy should encourage allies and partners—the leading beneficiaries of global peace and stability—to take a greater role in sustaining it. The United States cannot be the world’s police force or coast guard.” This means, first and foremost, abandoning the “overmatch” position in favor of a more restrained plan for military spending.

This is not to say that the defense establishment ought to make trimming pork its top priority, although there is certainly room to cut waste. But the fact is that a reduction in military spending is consonant with the type of restrained strategy the United States ought to adopt. Rather than a military-centric view that relies heavily on force, the defense establishment should emphasize “trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange” in the international arena, while using the military primarily for defense, not offense.

This new grand strategy will require the U.S. military to rethink its position on “forward deployment,” reduce its overseas military presence, and focus instead on encouraging U.S. allies to take on a greater share of regional defense burdens. The United States would retain certain bases and an arsenal of nuclear weapons to deter attacks, but it would not rely on an abundance of either as the primary guarantor of deterrence.

To facilitate this transition, the Pentagon must reevaluate how it budgets for defense. Currently, it “refuses to budget based on what is possible and realistic and instead spends to satisfy perceptions of need...with too little consideration of constraints and tradeoffs.” Spending is further fueled by ongoing “overseas contingency operations, for which the Department of Defense has received $2 trillion since 9/11. As long as the United States is perpetually involved in OCOs, the Pentagon will have no incentive to budget with an eye to future priorities, and will instead continue funneling money into expensive conflicts.

“The force of the future is likely to be smaller, particularly in terms of numbers of personnel in uniform, and thus will need to be more adaptable.” That means recruiting and retaining fit, adaptable troops and making targeted reforms to each branch of the military. For instance, the joint forces must focus on “standardizing a system of operations across multiple domains,” including space and the cyber world as well as air, land, and sea.

Modernizing the Army will require downsizing the force and developing more effective and sophisticated artillery and unmanned vehicles. Meanwhile, the Air Force also needs to focus on innovation and developing new technology, but should also prioritize filling gaps with less expensive aircraft.

“For at least two decades, the U.S. military has been trapped in a cycle of small‐​scale wars and nation‐​building fiascos that have eroded America’s unique advantages.” Now, as the COVID-19 outbreak causes the world to pause and rethink the path ahead, the defense establishment should begin the long, hard work of modernizing the military.

Read the full white paper here.