That’s it? Biden’s Overdue Pentagon Strategy Underwhelms
After nearly two years, experts were hoping for more.
KEVIN BARON | OCTOBER 27, 2022
Delayed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration’s Pentagon policy team finally released their first National Defense Strategy. It arrives just two weeks after the White House’s broader National Security Strategy, and in conjunction with the nearly-as-important nuclear and missile defense strategies—one PDF to rule them all.
The result is that we can now see on paper the administration’s thinking behind what was already largely in practice at the Pentagon anyway: China is a “pacing challenge,” Russia is an “acute threat,” and the United States will keep building and improving its nuclear umbrella and missile defenses.
But not there’s not much more than that in this NDS, and that’s troublesome.
Look, a strategy is not a detailed budget with operational plans. It’s a think-tank Ph.D.’s dream assignment. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called the NDS “our department’s North Star.” But the world is changing before our eyes and two years into the Biden era, after four years of the Trump administration’s hodgepodge Pentagon teams of amateurs and empty desks, today’s national security experts have been eagerly expecting more. They anticipated from this administration’s team of well-groomed rising scholars a strategy document that reflects a bold new vision for a new world of threats, but also one that comes with some major action items or directions to reorient the entire defense apparatus.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/10/s-it-bidens-overdue-pentagon-strategy-underwhelms/379030/
