RAND's David Ochmanek discusses the erosion of U.S. military power and influence. Ochmanek, who previously served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense under two different administrations, breaks down why U.S. defense strategy and posture have become “insolvent,” lessons from the war in Ukraine that the United States could apply to future conflicts, and how the U.S. military can learn to “fight differently.”
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You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast by RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. Today, we're joined by David Ochmanek. He's here to discuss the decades-long erosion of U.S. military power and influence and what might be done to restore it. David is a senior international defense researcher at RAND, he previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy from 1993 to 1995, and more recently as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development from 2009 to 2014. David, thanks for being here.
All right, let's jump right in. You wrote in a highly influential RAND report published two years ago that U.S. National security was at a pivotal inflection point. What did you mean by that?
So for those who aren't mathematically-inclined, an inflection point is where a curve stops going down and goes up, or vice versa, stops going up and turns down. And as we looked at the situation the United States found itself in, we found three trend lines that were pointing us to the need for some very fundamental rethinking of our strategy and our military forces. First, at the end of the Cold War, we had a fairly benign international environment. Our most consequential adversaries were what were known as regional adversaries, the Irans, the Iraqs, the North Koreas of the world, with really second or third class military capabilities. That's fundamentally changed now, particularly with China emerging as a adversary state, well equipped with world-class military systems, Russia turning overtly hostile, and these other regional states acquiring new military capabilities. So we're in a much more challenging international environment than we were before. At the same time, military technologies are changing, really eliminating our near-monopoly on modern military capabilities, such as near real-time sensing, precision strike. And finally, we were well aware of trends within our own society that are undermining the consensus we've had as a nation about the need for the United States to remain globally-engaged as a leading country and as a security guarantor. So the confluence of those three trends to us created a situation where we've really got to, as a nation, take stock of where we are and decide what role we want to play in the world, and if we want continue to play an activist role, to remake our military capabilities in some fairly fundamental ways.
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