What Could Austerity America's Defense Posture Look Like?

By Philip Ewing Monday, August 1st, 2011 11:21 am
Posted in Rumors

The Pentagon is staring at the prospect of as much as $850 billion in budget reductions over the next 10 years and beyond — which, as DoD and service officials keep saying, will require some major strategic recalculations. Even now, we can only imagine what’s in the PowerPoint slide decks rocketing back and forth across the Building as staffs come up with alternatives and scenarios for absorbing those kinds of cuts. The only upside, from DoD’s perspective, is that it sounds as though the White House and Congress are sold on the idea of a grand strategy that lays out how to move forward and where to accept risks.

Two old caveats remain in effect, though: First, whatever the Pentagon comes up with has to survive Congress, where defense lawmakers in the age of austerity will fight harder than they ever have to keep their pieces of the military-industrial complex. And second: The Pentagon needs a better bad guy than “persistant global instability” when it’s fighting to keep budgets and hardware, and we all know what that means: China. It’s a fair bet that the Mother of All Reviews will call for the military to keep or increase its focus on the Western Pacific, even as it dials back the U.S. forces positioned elsewhere around the world.

Here’s one vision for how this movie plays out:  Read more