By Van Jackson
What the next phase of the US rebalance might look like.
Pentagon strategists obsess about the future of war; it’s their job. The Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, does as well, and as he traveled through Asia for meetings with U.S. allies last week, he clarified his vision for the next phase in the U.S. rebalance to Asia as calibrating the U.S. military presence in the region, not just toward the modern, but the hi-tech. The Pentagon is making a bet that the future of war in Asia is going “high end.”
Before accusing the Pentagon of warmongering or making the region a powder keg, let’s remember that a defense budget must be submitted to Congress every year, and that budget must contain everything the Department of Defense (DoD) thinks is necessary to man, train, and equip U.S. warfighting commands with what they need to defend U.S. interests. How should one go about such a weighty task? Imagining plausible future conflicts (that is, the future of war) helps DoD figure out what types of missions the military might be called on to execute. If you have a sense of these likely missions, you can then take a reasonable guess at what the U.S. military’s size, composition, and concepts for employment should be. You can’t know the future, of course, but as long as the military is going to spend billions of dollars to defend the country from threats that arise, you’ve got to try, and you’ve got to hedge against the plausible worst case scenarios. It’s hard to imagine a method for determining the size and shape of the U.S. military—and corresponding defense budget—without imagining the ways in which the U.S. military might be asked to fight in the future.
Read the full story at The Diplomat