Weekend Edition January 13-15, 2012
Pentagon’s New Strategic Guidance
The Grim Implications of Obama’s New Defense Plan
In early January the Obama Administration released the Pentagon’s new Guidance, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense. It
is clearly designed less to cut U.S. military spending than to reorder
Pentagon priorities to ensure full spectrum dominance (dominating any
nation, anywhere, at any time, at any level of force) for the first
decades of the 21st century. As President Obama himself said,
after the near-doubling of military spending during the Bush era, the
Guidance will slow the growth of military spending, “but…it will still
grow:, in fact by 4% in the coming year.”
The new doctrine places China and Iran at the center of U.S.
“security” concerns. It thus prioritizes expansion of U.S. war making
capacities in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, by “rebalanc[ing]
toward the Asia-Pacific region…empahsiz[ing] our existing alliances.”
This means Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and now Australia and
India as the U.S. “pivots” from Iraq and Afghanistan to the heartland of
the 21st century global economy, Asia and the Pacific. The
implications for Okinawa and Japan should be clear: Washington will be
doing all that it can to ensure that Japan remains its unsinkable
aircraft carrier, including pressing for construction of the new air
base in Henoko.
Russia “remains important,” but the priorities are ensuring that
China’s rise occurs within the post-WWII global systems dominated by the
West and Japan. The Iran focus is to ensure that Tehran’s ambitions do
not jeopardize the West’s neo-colonial control of Middle East oil
essential to their economies and militaries.
China and Iran are thus the primary targets of: weapons systems to be
developed; of expanded U.S. military alliances, bases, access
agreements and an increased tempo of military exercises; as well as
advanced cyber and space war capabilities.
Related to Middle East oil, the Guidance explicitly stresses NATO’s
out of area (read Global South) responsibilities “in this
resource-constrained era.” This is to be reinforced by the
counter-terrorist operations on a global scale, including increased
emphasis on covert Special Forces operations. And, among the many
fault-lines of the Guidance is the emphasis given to financial and
war-fighting “burden-sharing” by NATO and other U.S. allies, goals
unlikely to be achieved midst Europe’s economic meltdown.
The Guidance signals that the President’s National Security Council
is currently conducting a nuclear posture review that could at least
minimally reduce the roles of nuclear weapons in U.S. war fighting
doctrines and the numbers of weapons in the U.S. arsenal in a second
Obama administration. This needs to be seen in the contexts of the
President’s Prague speech, as well as the political extortion that led
him to embrace the $185 billion increase in spending for new nuclear weapons and delivery systems over the next decade in order to win New START Treaty ratification.
Dr. Joseph Gerson is Disarmament Coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee and Director of the AFSC’s Peace and Economic Security Program in New England.
