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发帖数: 1846 | 1 http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/01/ameri
THE contours of the new military strategy announced by Barack Obama at the
Pentagon on January 5th have been fairly clear for some time. To talk of it
as “new strategic guidance” is thus slightly misleading. Short of some
cataclysmic event that reshapes the entire landscape, strategy should hardly
ever be new, but continually evolving to secure national interests (which
remain constant) in a dynamic environment (in which change occurs in
unpredictable ways and at varying speeds). As it happens, that pretty much
describes Mr Obama’s approach. It is realistic rather than new.
It starts out by acknowledging both explicitly and tacitly some painful
truths. The first of these is that America’s slow-burn budgetary crisis
requires that defence spending falls back to a more normal level after the
fat years presided over by this president’s predecessor. As Mr Obama
observed: “We must put our fiscal house in order here at home and renew our
long-term economic strength.” Whether that means the $450 billion worth of
cuts over the next decade the Pentagon has already been told to find or the
$1 trillion that could in theory be imposed if the budgetary stalemate in
Congress endures is still anyone’s guess. Which it is matters quite a lot.
The second is that the kind of industrial-scale counter-insurgency and
stabilisation operations that America has spent trillions of dollars on over
the last decade are simply unaffordable and cannot be repeated. The last
American combat soldier has left Iraq and the drawdown from Afghanistan has
begun, paving the way for a future in which America’s counter-terrorism
campaigns will be more targeted and fought with a mix of special forces,
local partners and armed drones. There is also a strong suggestion that
America will be more active in trying to prevent local conflicts from
getting out of hand in the first place: “Whenever possible, we will develop
innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our
security objectives.” America, says the document, should be able to fight
and win one war while being able to impose unacceptable costs on an
adversary elsewhere in the world, not fight two wars at the same time.
The third is the implicit recognition that the long wars against Islamist
fanatics distracted America from paying the kind of attention it should have
to “the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the
Indian Ocean region and South Asia”. Consequently, the Pentagon is now
promising that “of necessity” it will “rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific
region”. In particular, there is a firm commitment to maintain America’s
ability to project military power in the region despite the rapidly rising
military prowess of China and, in particular, its investment in asymmetric
“anti-access/area denial” capabilities designed to make it too dangerous
for American carriers to venture into its neighbourhood. The next decade
will be a test both of that commitment and the way in which the strategic
relationship with China–the first potential “near peer” military
competitor America has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union–
develops.
It looks as if one of the casualties of this rebalancing will be the
presence of American forces in Europe. Rightly, the document points out that
most European countries these days are “producers” rather than “
consumers” of defence and that there is no longer a direct need to station
substantial forces in the region. However, that ignores the utility of a
significant presence in a part of the world that is a lot closer to many of
the potential fights than bases in America. It also underestimates the value
that America derives from working closely with the armed forces of other
countries and maintaining vital military-to-military relationships with
America’s closest allies. While NATO leaves a lot to be desired and the
feeble defence effort of too many of its members riles Americans, it remains
the only vehicle that (fairly) reliably provides partners when America
wants to do something in the world and does not want to do it on its own.
With that exception, most of what Mr Obama announced is both sensible and a
belated recognition of realities that have been all too apparent for some
time. As ever, the devil will be in implementation. No battle plan survives
contact with the enemy and in this instance the enemy is likely to be
Washington’s hyper-partisan politics and the lobbying power of bruised
vested interests. |
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