TRYFECTA
Pentagon unveils a trio of key documents all at once
For the first time, the Defense Department has rolled out its three key strategic documents — the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review, and the Missile Defense Review — all at once (PDF). Think of it as a hat-trick of hegemony, a Kellogg’s Variety Pack of kinetic carnage designed to keep China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the bad guys in Iran and North Korea at bay. “By weaving these documents together, we help ensure that the entire department is moving forward together, matching our resources to our goals,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin saidOctober 27.
They’re blueprints to do what is needed to protect the nation today as well as tomorrow “across all theaters, across the full spectrum of conflict, and across all domains,” Austin told reporters as he released the three reports as a single 80-page tome (and no, Afghanistan didn’t come up). Analysts weighed fresh buzz phrases in the new strategy — like “integrated deterrence” and “acute threat” — while wondering what had happened to old favorites like “global operating model” and “dynamic force employment.”
Bottom line: This is what happens when a thesaurus gets loose inside the Pentagon.
All three reports, like their predecessors, are fundamentally political position papers. Tweaks are only at the margins. Supposedly, they’re the building blocks of future Pentagon budgets, but without money they’re just firing blanks. Predictably, conservatives zinged the effort for not putting forth enough resources — money, in other words — to achieve the Pentagon’s goals. Liberals protested a Brobdingnagian nuclear-weapons complex seemingly on automatic pilot.
The Biden administration has decided it doesn’t need the new nuclear-armed submarine-launched cruise missile, despite the military’s support for it. “Our inventory of nuclear weapons is significant,” Austin said in a stunning understatement. Yet Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review plows ahead when it comes to operating and rebuilding all three legs — Navy submarines (PDF) as well as Air Force bombers (PDF)and ICBMs (PDF) — of the nation’s nuclear triad (cost over the next 10 years: $600+ billion).
Missile defense remains a growth stock. The Pentagon wants “a full-spectrum approach to prevent and defeat adversary missiles in all domains, all timelines, through a mix of kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities,” a senior Pentagon official said.(Yeah, and The Bunker wants to be as rich as a decent Elon Musk).
In a nutshell, the new strategy is old whine in a new canteen. It focuses on three areas: “integrated deterrence,” which means coordinating military, diplomatic, and economic actions to thwart foes (what we used to call the “whole-of-government” approach); “campaigning” by taking military steps in the right order (what we used to call “victory”); and making “the right technology investments” (which we used to call “more bang for the buck”).
“We will be a fast-follower where market forces are driving commercialization of militarily-relevant capabilities in trusted artificial intelligence and autonomy, integrated network system-of-systems, microelectronics, space, renewable energy generation and storage, and human-machine interfaces,” the National Defense Strategy says.
That pledge sounded familiar, and it sent The Bunker pawing through his notebooks. “We want to partner with businesses on everything from autonomy to robotics to biomedical engineering; from power, energy, and propulsion to distributed systems, data science, and the Internet of things,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said back in 2015.
Unfortunately, he passed away three days before he got to see his words recycled.