Avoiding a Strategy of Bluff: The Crisis of American Military Primacy

If strategy is the calculated relation of means to ends, then today America is careening toward strategic insolvency. Following the Cold War, the United States possessed unrivaled military primacy, both globally and in all the world’s key strategic theaters. Yet today, Washington faces military challenges that are both more severe and more numerous than at any time in decades, precisely as its own defense cutbacks have significantly reduced U.S. military capabilities.

Executive Summary

This state of strategic insolvency poses numerous dangers to both the United States and the broader international order that American grand strategy has traditionally supported. It will undermine U.S. alliances, by creating new doubts regarding the credibility of Washington’s guarantees. It will undercut deterrence, by tempting adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran to calculate that the United States may be unwilling—or unable—to oppose aggression. It will make for far harder fights should conflict erupt in key areas from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia, and it may ultimately result in a situation in which the United States simply cannot defend countries it has pledged to defend. The United States would currently face grave difficulties defending the Baltic states from a Russian assault, for instance; the military balance around Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia has also eroded dramatically. Finally, as U.S. military power becomes less imposing, U.S. diplomacy is likely to encounter greater difficulties as well. American officials continually aver that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the history of the world, but today, U.S. military power has become dangerously insufficient relative to the grand strategy and international order it has traditionally supported.

Great powers facing strategic insolvency have three basic strategic options. First, the United States could decrease its global commitments, thereby bringing its strategic obligations back into alignment with a diminished military resource base. In practice, this might mean dispensing with U.S. security commitments to the most geographically exposed allies and partners—such as Taiwan and the Baltic states—in hopes of reconsolidating a more defensible strategic perimeter. Yet the appeal of this option is largely illusory, for even reducing defense spending will not come close to balancing the U.S. federal budget absent major changes in tax and entitlement policies, and U.S. retrenchment from East Asia, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe is likely to generate profound geopolitical instability. Aggressive revisionist powers may well be emboldened by U.S. retreat; remaining U.S. allies may lose confidence in the credibility of American defense pledges. Retrenchment may somewhat narrow the gap between U.S. capabilities and commitments in the short run, but only at the likely price of a further erosion of the global order that U.S. strategy has been meant to defend.

A second option is living with greater risk. In practice, this would mean either gambling that enemies will not test increasingly precarious commitments or employing riskier approaches—such as relying on nuclear weapons or other escalatory strategies—to sustain those commitments. This approach has a certain intuitive appeal—it substitutes deterrence by punishment for deterrence by denial—and the United States indeed relied on such approaches during the Cold War. Yet it also entails profound liabilities. Simply hoping that exposed commitments will not be challenged could work for a time, but this approach carries enormous risk that those guarantees will eventually be tested and found wanting, with devastating effects. Likewise, more escalatory approaches to deterrence may lack credibility—if America is not willing to bear the fiscal costs associated with making its defense commitments credible through conventional means, would it really risk the astronomically higher costs associated with nuclear escalation in a conflict over Taiwan or the Baltic states? This approach thus risks leading the United States into a trap where, if its interests are challenged, it is confronted with a choice between pursuing escalatory options that carry a prohibitive price or simply acquiescing to aggression.

This leaves a final option, which is to make the significant resource investments necessary to expand U.S. capabilities and restore strategic solvency. In the case of American strategy today, this would probably entail a major, sustained military buildup comparable to that undertaken by the Carter and Reagan administrations near the end of the Cold War, complemented by defense reforms, development of future capabilities and new operational concepts, and other steps. The purpose of this buildup would be to create an authentic two-plus or even three-theater capability, and to enable a range of investments that are supported by a broad expert consensus as being necessary to maintaining U.S. primacy in a more competitive environment.

Under this approach, the United States could, for instance, invest in a more robust and survivable Eastern European presence featuring heavy brigades, enhanced airpower and ground-based fires, and critical enablers. It could significantly increase its investments in existing capabilities—from additional Zumwalt-class destroyers and nuclear attack submarines, to stealthy fighters and long-range bombers, to vastly enhanced stocks of precision-guided munitions, to improved capabilities in space, cyberspace, and electronic warfare—necessary to penetrate anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) bubbles and retain air and sea control in high-end conflicts, as well as to maintain the upper hand in fights with Iran and North Korea. This approach would ease the tradeoffs between critical capabilities for today’s fight (and particularly for counterterrorism operations), such as the A-10, and those critical for confronting more advanced adversaries in tomorrow’s fight, such as the F-35. Crucially, it would ensure that the United States is able aggressively to fund development and production of future technologies that are now receiving initial seed funding but cannot be fielded in numbers without additional resources. Finally, this approach would provide for the increased force structure that is necessary not simply to cover a larger number of contingencies, but to reduce stress on the current force.

As we acknowledge, the costs of this approach would be significant. But they would hardly be unmanageable for a wealthy superpower that currently spends relatively low levels of its gross domestic product on defense. Under even the most aggressive buildup currently contemplated, military spending would consume only around 4 percent of GDP, as compared to 10–12 percent at the peak of the Cold War. Moreover, such a buildup can be eminently tenable from a fiscal perspective if tax and entitlement issues are addressed; if those issues are not addressed, the U.S. fiscal position will become untenable regardless of how much or how little the country spends on defense. Other objections to this approach—such as the idea that it would spur arms races with adversaries or simply encourage allies to “free-ride” on U.S. efforts—are also unpersuasive. Significantly expanding U.S. capabilities therefore represents the best approach to sustaining deterrence, upholding an existing international system that has been remarkably congenial to American interests, and ensuring that the United States is not left in a position of worsening strategic overreach that will, eventually, be exposed and punished.

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