By Van Jackson
What’s behind the Pentagon’s thinking?
When the Department of Defense (DoD) undergoes strategic change, allies and partners would benefit greatly from not only paying attention, but reading between the lines and playing a constructive shaping role. Even small changes in how DoD does business in Asia can lead to big implications for the strategies and defense investments of allies and partners.
Since 2014, the Pentagon’s most senior officials—former Secretary Chuck Hagel, Deputy Secretary Bob Work, and now Secretary Ash Carter—have delivered numerous speeches expounding on what they describe as a “third offset strategy.” Although many seem interested, there is remarkably little public discourse or debate among Asian allies and partners about the third offset.
I can think of three plausible reasons for the lack of such discussion among Asian allies and partners (including their citizens): they are wholly reassured by DoD’s efforts to regain military-technical superiority; they don’t see changes in U.S. weapons investments, doctrine, or force posture as having an impact on them; or ignorance—they don’t know what the Pentagon is talking about once the hyphenated word “military-technical” is introduced and subsequently don’t know what questions to ask or what issues to debate. The former two explanations, that they’re confidently assured and that they think it’s irrelevant, seem far less likely than the latter.
More in-depth historical context is offered here and here, but the important thing to know is that past offset strategies involved explicit decisions to leverage a U.S. technological advantage to help address strategically significant vulnerabilities to U.S. military operations. The first offset strategy (in the 1950s) leveraged U.S. nuclear superiority to address the Soviet Union’s numerical advantage in conventional ground forces in Europe, while the second offset (in the 1970s) leveraged a suite of U.S.-monopolized technologies to enable long-range precision-strike weapons, which addressed the Soviet Union’s nuclear parity as its nuclear arsenal caught up with the U.S. lead. Now, the basic problem is power projection amidst proliferating anti-access weapons and doctrines. I’m sure the Pentagon primarily thinks about China in this regard, but they’re far from the only one developing the ability to check the power projection capabilities of others.
So for Asian states who see the United States as important to their security, the following questions and answers are intended to help them understand what the Pentagon is thinking, where it might be headed, and what it might mean for them.
Read the full story at The Diplomat