On a rare visit to the Pentagon, Mr Obama said the US needed to rethink its military strategy, placing a greater emphasis on naval and air power while reducing the size of the army, because of both the fiscal crisis and the drawdown of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We are now turning the page on a decade of war,” he said. “We have to renew our economic strength here at home, which is the foundation of our strength in the world.” However, he noted that the US would still spend more on its armed forces than the next 10 biggest military powers combined.
The new strategy underlines the Obama administration’s focus on the Asia-Pacific region in the coming decades, alongside the Middle East. While Mr Obama and other officials did not mention China by name, a strategy paper was more blunt in describing potential military threats from Beijing, at one stage listing it alongside Iran as one of the principal challenges.
“States such as China and Iran will continue to pursue asymmetric means to counter our power projections capabilities,” the document says. It also notes: “Over the long-term China’s emergence as a regional power will have the potential to affect the US economy and our security in a variety of ways.”
Defence chiefs rejected suggestions that the US was abandoning a strategy of being able to fight two large ground wars at the same time, saying that the new strategy would allow response to any threats that might emerge. But they reaffirmed that ground forces will not be structured to conduct the sort of long-term counterinsurgency campaigns unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The subsequent scaling back of the army and parts of the marine corps could have big implications for the continuing US military presence in Europe, which Leon Panetta, defence secretary, said would “adapt and evolve”.
The new military strategy is based around $487bn in cuts from planned spending that the Pentagon will have to make over the next decade. A further $500bn in cuts could be forced on the Pentagon if Congress cannot agree on other deficit reduction plans. Mr Panetta said that these extra cuts would threaten “core US national security interests”.
Aware of the likely criticisms from Republicans, Mr Obama cited advice from Dwight Eisenhower, the late Republican president, that defence spending should be balanced against other important national programmes.
But Buck McKeon, Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, described the changes as “a lead-from-behind strategy for a left-behind America”.
By Geoff Dyer in Washington
5 January 2012
@ Financial Times