By Dan Gouré
While the U.S. military likes to talk about being in an era of great power competition, it acts like there is only one real challenger: China. The armed forces are moving to reorganize and re-equip themselves to meet the specific dictates of potential future crises and conflicts in the Indo-Pacific region. Each is seeking to stake a claim on future resources and the prominence of their roles in countering the advance of China.
Unfortunately, in their rush to make China the more imminent threat, the Pentagon is downplaying the threat from Russia, the actual most likely adversary, at least in the near term. Yes, Russia is a power in decline, with a struggling economy and demographics below the replacement rate, but its military power has improved significantly over the past 15 years. As a result, Moscow is poised to spoil the Pentagon’s desire to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific.
It is remarkable how in just a few years, the specter of China has come to dominate thinking in the Department of Defense and the Military Services. The Navy wants more ships and missiles to outgun the rapidly growing Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). The Marine Corps has decided that its central mission is to become the 21st century equivalent of the old coastal artillery, employing land-based ISR and anti-ship missiles to help the U.S. Navy sink its Chinese counterpart. To that end, it is shedding capabilities necessary to seize and control land. Even the Army is looking to frame its modernization priorities to make land operations relevant to a theater consisting mostly of air and water.
The reality is that the Pentagon has been extraordinarily poor at predicting both where and how it will fight the next war. For decades, it planned and prepared for a conflict with a great power rival, the former Soviet Union, on the plains of central Europe, only to find itself sending stealth fighters—Apache helicopters and even a division of Marines—to the Middle East to defeat Saddam Hussein. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Colin Powell observed that the United States had pretty much run out of enemies, a misreading of history that was the basis for sweeping reductions in the size of the U.S. military as well as the decisions by several administrations to withdraw forces from Europe.
But within a decade, the military was in full occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and fighting violent extremist organizations on multiple continents. Post-Cold War military planners had anticipated neither of these situations. The military spent tens of billions of dollars buying capabilities such as IED jammers and MRAPS while delaying modernization of platforms and weapons intended for high-end conflict against so-called near-peer competitors.
Now the era of great power competition has returned, and the U.S. military finds itself unprepared largely because neither it nor the country’s political leaders saw the threat coming. Efforts are underway to alter the manning, equipping, and organization of U.S. forces to address the emerging threat posed by great power competitors, primarily China.
The strategy of focusing U.S. military strategy and force modernization primarily on China makes sense in the abstract. But there is a well-known adage in military planning that the enemy gets a vote. This is particularly the case with respect to Russia. With its massive arsenal of theater and strategic nuclear weapons, improved conventional military posture and geographic position near NATO’s eastern border, and growing skills in operating within the so-called “grey zone”—that is, below the threshold that would trigger a Western military response—Russia can pose a threat to the Alliance and other Western strategic interests that cannot be ignored.
Since 2014, when Russia illegally occupied Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, Moscow has demonstrated the ability to grab the attention of Western governments, forcing them to reconsider their assumptions about the threat Russia poses. Just last month, Russia again demonstrated its ability to change the strategic calculi of the U.S. and the rest of NATO by conducting a massive military exercise along the Russian border with Ukraine. While the Russian government claims that the exercise is over, there are reports that some 80,000 troops remain in position, capable of exercising a short-notice attack.
Russia is also pressuring Ukraine and countries in southeast Europe, notably NATO allies Romania and Bulgaria, to dominate the security situation in the Black Sea. Former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, warned that the Black Sea could be the flashpoint of a confrontation between NATO and Russia, should the latter seek to impose a naval embargo on Ukraine.
Some of the investments being made that would address the threat posed by China could play well into deterring Russia. The Army’s Long-Range Precision Fires program—particularly systems such as the Extended Range cannon artillery and the Precision Strike Missile—is relevant to a European scenario. The ability of the candidate aircraft being developed in the Future Vertical Lift Program to fly low and fast will be just as relevant to operations across the vast expanses of Eastern Europe as in the Indo-Pacific region.
But a conflict with Russia will be primarily a land war. Deterring the threat of a conventional conflict with Russia requires both the deployment of additional forces along NATO’s eastern frontier and the modernization of conventional forces. The deployment of the Initial Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (IM-SHORAD) system is an example of a positive step. The U.S. should deploy additional armored brigade combat teams to Eastern Europe along with more air and missile defenses, logistics units and intelligence capabilities.
Washington should also support efforts by allies in the region, such as Poland, to modernize its military. For its part, Warsaw is already acquiring the Patriot air and missile defense system and the F-35 fighter. It would also make sense for the U.S. to offer Poland several hundred excess M1 tanks to replace that country’s obsolescent Soviet-era platforms.
The only way of preventing Russian President Vladimir Putin from using the threat of military action against Ukraine, or even NATO, to bolster his domestic political position is by building up the Alliance’s conventional military capabilities. Otherwise, Moscow will have the ability to challenge U.S. and NATO security interests whenever it chooses. This means our attention can never be completely focused on China.
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