VALERIE INSINNA
WASHINGTON — After six months of delays, the Biden administration today released the unclassified version of its National Defense Strategy — and despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the department remains confident the long-term threat lies not in Moscow, but in Beijing.
The focus on China as the larger threat — as opposed to a joint focus on China and Russia — is one of the biggest ways the latest National Defense Strategy diverges from its predecessor, a senior defense official told reporters ahead of the official rollout.
The 2018 strategy “said we are worried about Russia and we’re worried about the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. And I think one of the things we did as we were going through our assessment of the security environment was actually see that those needed to be looked at a little bit differently,” the official said. “What that means is that as we are looking at our investments, our activities, our exercises, our posture, we’re going to be thinking in that vein.”
The 2018 National Defense Strategy marked a major shift for the Pentagon as it pivoted toward the challenge of great power competition against China and Russia after more than a decade of being focused on counterterrorism in the Middle East.
Largely, the 2022 NDS doubles down on that framework, naming China as the “pacing challenge” for the department, with Russia ranked as an “acute threat” that is “immediate and sharp,” as seen in its ongoing war with Ukraine and nuclear saber rattling. North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations followed on the list of threats.
However, the official added that there are areas of overlap in how the US military would need to resource and structure itself to defeat either China or Russia, such as increasing investments in areas such as cyber, space and undersea capabilities. “I like to think of it as sort of the two for one,” the official said.
To accomplish its goal of staying ahead of China, the document lays out three priorities, each linked to a somewhat opaque concept.
The first, integrated deterrence, is the bedrock of the Defense Department’s strategy. It calls for the military to work within all domains, theaters and spectrums of conflict seamlessly with other US government agencies and international allies and partners, in the hopes of shoring up multiple options to deter enemy aggression.
“Integrated deterrence means using every tool at the Department’s disposal, in close collaboration with our counterparts across the U.S. Government and with Allies and partners, to ensure that potential foes understand the folly of aggression,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in a memo accompanying the strategy.
The second priority — campaigning — involves military actions and initiatives meant to advance the department’s strategic priorities over time, such as exercises that allow the US military to train how it will mobilize and conduct logistics during a conflict.
Finally, the strategy calls for “building enduring advantages.” This includes internal Pentagon reforms such as investments in the Pentagon’s workforce, improvements to acquisition processes and making US military infrastructure more resilient in the face of climate change.
For the first time ever, the Pentagon created the NDS in parallel with the Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review, two other strategy documents that help shape the department’s force posture and future budgets.
“That led to substantive coherence, a more integrated and seamless approach to issues like deterrence and risk management and it resulted in a very tight strategy resources linkage,” the defense official said.
Today’s release of the unclassified version of the NDS — along with the NPR and MDR — comes two weeks after the Biden administration finally revealed its National Security Strategy, a broader document that helps inform thinking at the Defense and State departments, along with other interagency organizations.
However, the classified version of the NDS was sent to Capitol Hill in tandem with the president’s budget request in late March, a decision that department officials said then was meant to assure lawmakers that the department’s fiscal 2023 budget was shaped by the strategy, not created in a vacuum.
The senior defense official remarked that classified version of the strategy hadn’t changed the months since it was first released, in part because the Biden Administration had foreseen Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine and had “baked that into our thinking” as it devised the strategy.
However, the official noted that “that some of the core ideas within the reviews have proven to be even more salient as this war has continued,” such as the role of allies and partners who have supported Ukraine by providing military and humanitarian aid.
‘Anti-Access Area Denial’ Is Back
While defense strategies typically say little about technologies needed in the future — and even less about specific defense programs — the official laid out a list of operational challenges that all have implications for the defense industry: information advantage; command, control and communications; detection and targeting; mitigating anti access area denial capability; and logistics and sustainment.
During the Obama administration, the Pentagon frequently used the term “anti-access/area denial” or “A2/AD” to describe how an adversary could seek to prevent US forces from operating in a battlespace — a problem especially posed by China, given the long distance between islands in the Indo-Pacific region and China’s proliferation of long-range missile systems. Although the term fell out of fashion during the Trump administration, it’s back in the Biden administration’s NDS.
“Competitor strategies seek to exploit perceived vulnerabilities in the American way of war, including by creating anti-access/area-denial environments,” the strategy states. In a section on force planning, the strategy calls for the military to develop concepts and capabilities that can mitigate an enemy’s A2/AD capability, including weapons “that can penetrate adversary defenses at range.”
Another sign of shifting jargon is the absence of the “joint all domain command and control” — the Pentagon’s concept to connect the military’s sensors, allowing platforms to share information that cannot currently be directly transmitted.
But although JADC2 is not referenced explicitly in the strategy, it contains several calls to “build strength and capability” in the realm of resilient command and control, space-based surveillance technology and information technology — speeding up the US military’s timeline for detecting and striking a target.
“To maintain information advantage, the Department will improve our ability to integrate, defend, and reconstitute our surveillance and decision systems to achieve warfighting objectives, particularly in the space domain, and despite adversaries’ means of interference or deception,” the strategy states. “To preserve command, control, and communications in a fast-paced battlefield, we will make our network architectures more resilient against system-level exploitation and disruption so as to ensure effective coordination of distributed forces.”
Innovative ways of doing logistics and sustainment also remain a priority, particularly capabilities that will allow the military to mobilize and keep fighting even after enemy attacks.
The Pentagon needs to take steps to increase the speed of defense acquisition, with the strategy stating that the Defense Department will double down on rapid experimentation and fielding efforts to get technologies to troops more quickly. In particular, the department is placing a premium on open systems that can adopt improved tech as it becomes available.
The Pentagon “will fuel research and development for advanced capabilities,” including in directed energy, hypersonics, integrated sensing, and cyber, as well as providing seed funding for biotechnology, quantum science, advanced materials, and clean-energy technology.
“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 strategy states.
The department also wants to forge a closer partnership with the commercial technology companies, particularly the burgeoning commercial space industry, to leverage “its technological advancements and entrepreneurial spirit to enable new capabilities.”
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