There is much to like about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s interim national defense strategic guidance document, reported recently in the Washington Post.
In keeping with the defense strategies of President Trump in his first term, as well as those of former President Biden, the document e
mphasizes the centrality of the China challenge, with a particular focus on deterring a possible invasion of Taiwan. In recognition of the fact that 100,000 Americans a year have been dying from overdoses, largely from fentanyl crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the document rightly recognizes this danger as a national security threat and not simply a law enforcement problem.
And the document raises the possibility that defense of the American homeland, from missile attack and now also from drones, may be a more technologically realistic and important defense priority than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
Depending on how these insights are translated into actual policy, all could do good for the nation. Perhaps on defense policy more than most matters these days, we can have a reasoned and spirited debate on the merits of the issues.
In keeping with this approach, I offer several caveats about some these ideas — not disagreements, but cautionary notes. Disruptive ideas from new leaders can sometimes usefully challenge conventional wisdom, but only to the extent that they do not become impulsive or reckless. I would offer these warnings about pushing the new agenda too far.
Yes, a Chinese assault on Taiwan to seize the island of 23 million people — and most of the world’s best semiconductor production facilities — is the worst-case scenario that should concern American defense planners. But it is also probably the least likely way that China might attack Taiwan.
Much more plausible is a gradual intensification of the kind of pressure China has already been applying in recent years, up to and including a naval blockade designed to strangle the island into submission. China’s large missile inventories, growing attack submarine force, sophisticated cyberattack capabilities and the advantage of proximity make this kind of threat credible.
China is less likely to attempt a massive roll of the dice with a modern version of a D-Day assault than it is to try to squeeze the Taiwanese people into coerced submission through a gradual cutoff of their access to the outside world. Deterring this scenario puts the onus on America to protect large, vulnerable assets such as ships near Taiwan. It requires a different mix of forces to succeed in breaking such a blockade. We must not lose sight of this kind of military contingency in our obsession with the invasion scenario.
Because of the importance and difficulty of deterring China, the defense of South Korea and Eastern Europe should be relegated to a slightly lower priority than before, as Hegseth rightly says. Indeed, this observation influenced the modest differences between Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s National Defense Strategy of 2018 — which emphasized the China and Russia threats roughly equally — and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s Strategy of 2022, which, even though it was released after Russia again invaded Ukraine in February of that year, prioritized China as the “pacing challenge.”
As such, the Army might be slightly less central in U.S. strategy than it was during the Cold War or the war on terror. But taking this argument too far would be a mistake. North Korea is still a real threat to South Korea. Russia still is a threat to the Baltic states in particular; these countries and our other NATO allies do not yet have a robust deterrent against a Russian threat to the alliance’s eastern flank.
Moreover, the Army remains the world’s preeminent ground-combat organization. Neither Trump nor Hegseth would wish to sacrifice that amazing American advantage on their watch. Bear in mind too that the Army has already downsized nearly 10 percent over the last three years because it could not recruit enough soldiers to fill all its ranks. We should not forget that many war scenarios against China itself could involve substantial Army capabilities to defend bases and logistics operation, fire surface-to-surface missiles from islands in the western Pacific against Chinese ships, and perhaps even help Taiwan defend itself against Chinese ground and air forces that had managed to come ashore but not yet seized the island.
Fentanyl is a real threat to the U.S. and was not adequately addressed by the previous administration. But the military tools available to tackle it are limited.
As my colleague Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on fentanyl, has argued, it is most important to forge alliances with Mexico in these efforts. Even if instructed to conduct major attacks against fentanyl labs and distribution lines, the U.S. military’s ability to do so would be highly dependent on intelligence of a type than only a reformed and strengthened Mexican government can provide. We need to avoid the kind of unilateralist action that might, in a surprise attack, achieve a few impressive hits, only to founder thereafter as cooperation with Mexico dried up and fentanyl production went further underground.
Reducing the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East is a sound aspiration, shared by all American presidents since George W. Bush. But is it easier said than done.
Only two months in office, Trump has felt the need to strike Houthi positions in Yemen while helping Israel deal with an Iran threat and other dangers. Biden shared the same desire in his first few months in office — only to find that, after the regrettable pullout from Afghanistan, he no longer had the luxury of thinking he could further downsize U.S. military regional presence without serious risks to core American friends and interests. Reductions of our presence in the Middle East are best made surgically and gradually, not dramatically.
Selective expansion of air and missile defense probably makes good sense at this strategic moment. However, the White House’s Jan. 27 document aspiring to a “iron dome” over the U.S. remains out of reach. Even attempting to deploy it would likely cost $100 billion a year, as former Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim and others have estimated. Big new ideas on homeland defense are welcome, but they must retain an element of pragmatism.
If Hegseth and his incoming team bear in mind these kinds of practical considerations, they can indeed galvanize a useful rethink of American strategic priorities and defense resource allocation.
But one final warning: It will be difficult to pursue any such agenda simply by reorienting 8 percent of the annual defense budget. There is lots of waste in the military, but it is marbled into the muscle, and hard to excise. Modest real defense spending increases will likely be needed in the second Trump administration as well.
Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of the forthcoming book “To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.” ...read more read less
