The Pentagon Is in Desperate Need of an Intervention From the Top
Dustin Walker
January 27, 2022
It’s time for an intervention. For the last decade, the Pentagon has been promising a more distributed and resilient posture in the Indo-Pacific, but it has not kept that promise. Highly concentrated with few active or passive defenses, American forces — and lives — remain dangerously vulnerable to attack. As Chinese military capability and capacity continue to grow, the failure to address this vulnerability is one major reason America has failed to reverse the erosion of the conventional military balance in the Indo-Pacific and restore the credibility of American deterrence.
In a superb article in these pages, Stacie Pettyjohn eloquently makes the case for reducing “the vulnerability of American forces to Chinese air and missile attacks by distributing them across more locations and putting in place a system of passive defenses on existing bases.” A more distributed and resilient posture with a mix of active and passive defenses will not eliminate risk to U.S. forces. But it would enhance deterrence by sowing doubt in the minds of Chinese leaders about the ease or likelihood of success in a conflict. It would impose targeting dilemmas for the Chinese military and force it to expend its missile inventory at a faster rate — and it would provide the margin of safety required to keep U.S. forces in the fight at critical moments of a crisis or conflict.
Most importantly, Pettyjohn argues that changing America’s military posture in the Indo-Pacific requires “a senior champion” to overcome bureaucratic incentives and internal divisions within the Pentagon. She cites a Cold War example of an Air Force general — callsign “Spike” — who successfully advocated for defensive measures to protect U.S. aircraft in Europe with the backing of the Air Force chief of staff who declared, “I’m with Spike.”
https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/the-pentagon-is-in-desperate-need-of-an-intervention-from-the-top/
