Four Contradictions in Obama's New Defense Plan

By Spencer Ackerman, Wired

07 January 12

any of the key points in President Obama's new blueprint for the next decade of U.S. defense strategy are straightforward. More spy gear; more special forces; fewer land wars; Asia, Asia, Asia. Whatever you think of the merits of those points, at least they're internally consistent.

Others… not so much.

Sometimes the analysis in the strategy suggests a policy choice that the strategy actually disavows. Sometimes it walks back controversial points. Sometimes it makes pledges that sound sensible at first blush - but don't actually make sense the more you think about them. Here are four of the most glaring contradictions within the strategy.

The Military Should Leave Europe (But Won't). The whole point of the new plan is to build "the joint force of 2020, a force sized and shaped differently than the military of the Cold War," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta boasted Thursday. But the U.S. just can't vacate the Cold War's primary battlefield: Europe. In fact, the plan makes a strong case for the Army to take its brigades home. "Most European countries are now producers of security rather than consumers of it," the strategy says, bolstered by NATO's success in Libya.

But the Pentagon won't take its own advice. The closest it comes is to pledge that the military's force structure in Europe will "evolve." Asked if that means the U.S. will pull out of Europe 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Panetta replied, "Not only are we going to continue our commitments there, but we are going to maintain the kind of innovative presence there that we think will make clear to Europe, and those to those who have been our strong allies in the past, that we remain committed."

Translation: maybe there will be another shave and a haircut to the U.S. military's nearly 70-year European expedition, but not much more than that. Even though Europe is united, safe, at peace and the U.S.' real security interests are halfway around the world.

"Limited Counterinsurgency". One thing critics and advocates of counterinsurgency can agree on: it requires a lot of time, cash and, especially, people. So it's baffling for the Pentagon strategy to say that U.S. forces will remain prepared "to conduct limited counterinsurgency operations." What are limited counterinsurgency operations?

To give the Pentagon a generous interpretation, limited counterinsurgency operations might mean training partner militaries to wage their own battles against insurgents. That's more properly called "security force assistance," but whatever. Less generously, the Obama administration is trying to walk away from counterinsurgency without getting bashed by critics for scrapping the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Either way, after Thursday press conference, Pentagon reporters who tried to figure out what the term actually means were unable to reach a consensus. Several of us ended up more confused the longer we debated each other.

The Army Is Getting Cut (Until We Surge It). This one is more sugar-coating than outright contradiction. But one of the major implications of the new plan is "smaller conventional ground forces," in President Obama's words. (Panetta didn't cite a number for how small the Army will get, but we're hearing around 480,000 soldiers, a drop of nearly 100,000 from current levels.) No sooner did the Pentagon announce that, however, than it said: well, for now.

Plans for shrinking the Army (and the Marine Corps) will build in "reversibility," Panetta pledged. Should unforeseen land wars arise - you know, like the two post-9/11 wars the Army didn't anticipate fighting - the Army will be able to "surge, regenerate and mobilize… quickly." True, it's a lot easier to start recruiting more soldiers than it is to, say, build more ships or planes. But it also sounds like the Obama team is afraid of taking criticism for downsizing the Army rather than confidently defending a major aspect of its new strategy.

This Is The Pentagon's Blueprint, Until It Isn't. Even the fundamental purpose of the strategy isn't free from contradiction, thanks to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's supposed to be the cornerstone for crafting the military of 2020, as Panetta put it. But Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military's top officer, walked that back: the strategy is merely "a waypoint" for a "continuous and deliberate process" of building that future force.

Maybe it's Dempsey's Army background talking, but he sounded lukewarm on the document. "It's not perfect," he told reporters, and it's open to criticism for slashing the military too deeply or not reorienting it enough to meet future threats. "That probably makes it about right," Dempsey intoned, "for today."

Should that change, the military would simply "adjust" what the strategy says, and it'll have an opportunity to do so every year when it issues its budget, Dempsey said. Maybe that would be a mere tune-up; maybe it would be something more drastic. After all, the strategy effectively scraps the Pentagon's last four-year plan, after only two years. It's ironic that the Pentagon's blueprint for the future might not be built to last.