The Biden NDS advances a strategy based on the concepts of integrated deterrence, campaigning, and building enduring advantages. The first, integrated deterrence, is the centerpiece of the Pentagon’s Strategy. It calls for the use of “every tool at the Department’s disposal, in close collaboration with out counterparts across the U.S. Government and with Allies and partners, to ensure that potential foes understand the folly of aggression.”
Translation: It’s a whole-of-government and coalition approach to deterrence, which relies not only on the military but also the other instruments of national power—diplomatic, information, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement—to clearly signal U.S. intentions and capabilities to deter adversaries. In other words, it’s old-fashioned deterrence. What the Pentagon views as a novel concept, integrated deterrence, has, in fact, been the bedrock of U.S. grand strategy for decades. There is little new here.
More worryingly, the Pentagon places a grand strategic concept—integrated deterrence—at the core of its defense strategy. Paradoxically, as a result of the DoD’s own broad strategy, the implementation of the NDS is not entirely within the Pentagon’s scope of responsibilities. Rather than look to other government agencies to deter U.S. adversaries through diplomacy and economic sanctions, the Pentagon ought to focus on its core mission—preparing to fight and win future wars. In other words, it should focus less on inter-agency process—the task of the National Security Council—and more on the substance of developing new operational concepts and making changes to U.S. force structure and posture to keep pace with China.
The second tenet of the strategy, campaigning, is too broad a concept for setting clear priorities. The Biden NDS defines campaigning as the “conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military activities” to “change the environment to the benefit of the United States and our Allies and partners, while limiting… competitor activities… in the gray zone.” That’s little more than a description of any national defense strategy, and effectively renders the concept of campaigning a tautology. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, the Department of Defense is an instrument of policy. The purpose of a national defense strategy is to lay out a vision for how the Pentagon will serve as that instrument of policy, or how it will campaign—to use the preferred terms of the new NDS—to achieve U.S. national security objectives. On this essential task of strategy, however, the Biden NDS is disappointingly short on specifics.
The final component of the Biden NDS—building enduring military advantage—strikes familiar themes about technological innovation, force modernization, and defense capacity. Almost every secretary of defense promises to reform the department and accelerate the acquisition and fielding of new advanced technologies. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a serious effort to overhaul defense procurement and acquisition, but more than a decade and six secretaries of defense later, fundamental change remains an elusive goal.
Of course, with the U.S. defense budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion per year, there are few financial incentives for the department to become more innovative or efficient. Equally important, the Biden NDS leaves unanswered fundamental questions about the balance between building the force around smaller numbers of expensive and exquisite capabilities and larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, and attritable systems, as well as the ability of the industrial base to surge production in wartime.
If the Biden administration is right that the next ten years will be the “decisive decade,” then the Department of Defense needs more thinking on actual strategy, rather than mere buzzwords. While my colleagues Christopher Preble and James Siebens find merit in the concept of integrated deterrence, I caution the Department of Defense against confusing a grand strategic concept for actual defense strategy. Instead, it should jettison the concepts of integrated deterrence and campaigning in defense strategy for the more precise concept of deterrence by denial, and reorient U.S. defense posture and capabilities towards that end.
Experts React: The Biden Administration’s National Defense Strategy
In Defense Policy & Posture
On October 27, the Biden administration released the unclassified version of the National Defense Strategy (NDS), along with the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Missile Defense Review (MDR). In the introduction to the strategy, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that the NDS lays out the Department of Defense’s “path forward” into a “decisive decade—from helping to protect the American people, to promoting global security, to seizing new strategic opportunities, and to realizing and defending our democratic values.” Stimson Center experts responded and offered different perspectives to the vision and priorities outlined in these guiding documents.
Three key themes emerged:
These expert commentaries offer a wide-ranging discussion of the issues confronting DoD at a time of profound strategic and operational change.
A Clear Consensus from the National Security Community
While not a radical or revolutionary change from the last NDS, this is a very good document. I believe this is a clear indication that the national security leadership and apparatus of our country has broad consensus and a common understanding of the threats we face: The pacing threat is China with its rapid military modernization, improved technology, and an increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party.
The strategy also highlights the threats from a challenged Russia, a potentially unstable Iran, and an isolated North Korea. Two additional points stand out: First, the strategy highlights the non-traditional threats we face such as climate change and extremist threats to democratic institutions. Second, the strategy talks about escalating competition across the full spectrum of the instruments of national power. We are in constant and ever-increasing competition with potential threats in the diplomatic, informational, military and economic realms. We need to win in each of these competitions to prevent conflict.
A Conceptual Muddle
The NDS offers a nuanced assessment of the threat environment, but it lacks a convincing answer to meet the challenge.
The Biden administration has declared that the United States faces a “decisive decade” in its rivalry with China, but the Pentagon’s just-released NDS is lacking. In a world of many threats, China is a “pacing challenge,” Russia is an “acute threat,” and North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations constitute “persistent threats” to U.S. national security. The new NDS usefully moves beyond the “2 plus 3” threat framework to highlight the temporal nature of these threats, and the resulting need to prioritize and sequence U.S. attention and resources in a predetermined way across multiple regions. What is missing, however, is a clear and convincing vision for how to reorient the DoD to meet this challenge.
The Biden NDS advances a strategy based on the concepts of integrated deterrence, campaigning, and building enduring advantages. The first, integrated deterrence, is the centerpiece of the Pentagon’s Strategy. It calls for the use of “every tool at the Department’s disposal, in close collaboration with out counterparts across the U.S. Government and with Allies and partners, to ensure that potential foes understand the folly of aggression.”
Translation: It’s a whole-of-government and coalition approach to deterrence, which relies not only on the military but also the other instruments of national power—diplomatic, information, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement—to clearly signal U.S. intentions and capabilities to deter adversaries. In other words, it’s old-fashioned deterrence. What the Pentagon views as a novel concept, integrated deterrence, has, in fact, been the bedrock of U.S. grand strategy for decades. There is little new here.
More worryingly, the Pentagon places a grand strategic concept—integrated deterrence—at the core of its defense strategy. Paradoxically, as a result of the DoD’s own broad strategy, the implementation of the NDS is not entirely within the Pentagon’s scope of responsibilities. Rather than look to other government agencies to deter U.S. adversaries through diplomacy and economic sanctions, the Pentagon ought to focus on its core mission—preparing to fight and win future wars. In other words, it should focus less on inter-agency process—the task of the National Security Council—and more on the substance of developing new operational concepts and making changes to U.S. force structure and posture to keep pace with China.
The second tenet of the strategy, campaigning, is too broad a concept for setting clear priorities. The Biden NDS defines campaigning as the “conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military activities” to “change the environment to the benefit of the United States and our Allies and partners, while limiting… competitor activities… in the gray zone.” That’s little more than a description of any national defense strategy, and effectively renders the concept of campaigning a tautology. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, the Department of Defense is an instrument of policy. The purpose of a national defense strategy is to lay out a vision for how the Pentagon will serve as that instrument of policy, or how it will campaign—to use the preferred terms of the new NDS—to achieve U.S. national security objectives. On this essential task of strategy, however, the Biden NDS is disappointingly short on specifics.
The final component of the Biden NDS—building enduring military advantage—strikes familiar themes about technological innovation, force modernization, and defense capacity. Almost every secretary of defense promises to reform the department and accelerate the acquisition and fielding of new advanced technologies. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a serious effort to overhaul defense procurement and acquisition, but more than a decade and six secretaries of defense later, fundamental change remains an elusive goal.
Of course, with the U.S. defense budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion per year, there are few financial incentives for the department to become more innovative or efficient. Equally important, the Biden NDS leaves unanswered fundamental questions about the balance between building the force around smaller numbers of expensive and exquisite capabilities and larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, and attritable systems, as well as the ability of the industrial base to surge production in wartime.
If the Biden administration is right that the next ten years will be the “decisive decade,” then the Department of Defense needs more thinking on actual strategy, rather than mere buzzwords. While my colleagues Christopher Preble and James Siebens find merit in the concept of integrated deterrence, I caution the Department of Defense against confusing a grand strategic concept for actual defense strategy. Instead, it should jettison the concepts of integrated deterrence and campaigning in defense strategy for the more precise concept of deterrence by denial, and reorient U.S. defense posture and capabilities towards that end.
A More Tailored Approach Needed for Effective Deterrence
The NDS posits a sophisticated but still incomplete vision for what is needed to deter dangerous behavior.
The National Defense Strategy (NDS) acknowledges that integrated deterrence, one of the three main points of emphasis in the document (along with “campaigning” and “building enduring advantages”), is about much more than the Department of Defense. Indeed, part of what makes integrated deterrence unique is the recognition that “all instruments of U.S. national power” may be relevant to deterring behavior that would threaten U.S. security, impede U.S. prosperity, or undermine Americans’ liberty. Integrated deterrence must be tailored, the document explains “to specific competitors and coordinated to maximum effect inside and outside the Department.”
But while my colleague Kelly Grieco would jettison integrated deterrence, I believe the concept does have some merit. The tailored and coordinated parts are especially relevant. An adversary may be deterred from taking certain actions, for example, by the threat of economic sanctions. But if key allies and partners do not join in enforcing such economic isolation and punishment, or if U.S. businesses are reluctant to do so, then sanctions are unlikely to be effective. And, of course, the U.S. Department of Defense has little to do with sanctions enforcement. Or, at least, it shouldn’t.
With respect to the NDS’s view that deterrence must be tailored “for specific problems, competitors, and settings,” that has always been the case. The threat to retaliate against Russia, for example, including through the use of a broad range of military and non-military tools (i.e. integrated deterrence), did not deter Putin from initiating his brutal and unjust war of aggression against Ukraine. That doesn’t mean, however, that a similar set of threats would be similarly ineffective against another adversary contemplating a similar bid to seize territory by force.
The NDS posits three types of deterrence: deterrence by denial, deterrence by resilience, and “deterrence by direct and collective cost imposition.” In conjunction, these are intended to alter perceptions of what can be gained from, for example, an early attack or even preventive war. As with sanctions, however, our societal resilience is little affected by policy within the Department of Defense.
This recognition that one size doesn’t fit all with respect to deterrence doesn’t easily square with the DoD’s determination to press forward with an enormously costly nuclear modernization, effectively tripling down on deterrence by punishment to the detriment of the other forms of deterrence. To be sure, such threats are critical, but the United States could retain a credible capability to inflict horrendous punishment by nuclear means without a triad of land-based missiles, long-range manned bombers, and nuclear tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles. A nuclear dyad — or even a monad — should have been given serious consideration. Other nuclear-armed states, including U.S. allies and partners such as the United Kingdom, France, and Israel, operate capable and effective arsenals postured for deterrence with just one or two types of delivery vehicles.
One final point: effective deterrence paradoxically relies as much on reassurance as on the credibility of one’s threats to punish unwanted behavior. The overarching object is to signal that a certain action is unlikely to confer advantages, and thus is not worth taking. Put differently, the target of deterrent threats must also believe that “compliance will be rewarded and…that the threatening state will not simply carry out its threat regardless of the target’s behavior.”
But decades of experience have likely taught at least some U.S. adversaries a different lesson. Although the recently released National Security Strategy explicitly disavows such operations, past U.S. presidents’ willingness to attempt regime-change operations by force calls into question the United States’ enduring commitment to respecting state sovereignty, a crucial component of the international rules-based order. Some states have hedged their bets, either by developing nuclear weapons, or by creating an infrastructure that would allow them to do so in the future. To make deterrence truly effective, the United States must recommit to upholding crucial norms of international behavior, though that is admittedly beyond the NDS’s remit.
Let there be no mistake: the U.S. military is exceptionally capable, and not “weak” as some commentators have suggested. But the wars of the past quarter century have revealed that even the most exquisite militaries are unsuited to solving the greatest challenges facing us. As the saying goes, just because you have a big hammer doesn’t mean that everything is a nail. The NDS couldn’t have hoped to resolve this conundrum; the Pentagon will remain the leading single recipient of the discretionary budget, and by a very wide margin. DoD officials should nevertheless focus on a narrow range of missions for which the U.S. military is particularly well-suited, and otherwise allow scarce resources to flow where they are most needed.
Not a New Defense Strategy
The 2022 NDS represents more continuity than change in the Pentagon’s thinking and defense priorities.
The 2022 NDS presents the most practical discussion of the DoD’s requirements for “integrated deterrence” to date. Somewhat surprisingly, it proposes precious few substantive modifications of U.S. defense strategy. However, it at least acknowledges the problems that integrated deterrence is intended to address: that “deterrence has too often been hindered by competing priorities; lack of clarity regarding the specific competitor actions we seek to deter; an emphasis on deterring behaviors in instances where Department authorities and tools are ill-suited; and stovepiping.” The NDS also recognizes that U.S., ally, and partner actions are causally linked with adversaries’ perceptions of threats, both military and political, and wisely cautions that the DoD “must seek to avoid unknowingly driving competition to aggression.” (Perhaps we might also take care to avoid doing so knowingly…)
The NDS also includes much needed emphasis on the roles of crisis management, arms control, international norms, and diplomacy in the prevention and management of escalation. It draws essential connections between norms of state conduct and deterring unwanted behavior, particularly in the use of emerging dual-use technologies. It states that “U.S. leadership in shaping norms for appropriate conduct in the cyber, space, and other emerging technology domains will reinforce deterrence by increasing international consensus on what constitutes malign and aggressive behavior, thereby increasing the prospect of collective attribution and response when these norms are violated.” If the U.S. hopes to continue to shape others’ conduct in these domains by establishing and advancing international rules and norms, it must first win the battle of ideas about what the rules should be and ensure that it is willing to live within those strictures itself. The DoD is unlikely to have a major role in the process of norm entrepreneurship but will have a major role in norms adoption and leading by example.
Like the NDS, the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review offers little in the way of new thinking, and continues to declare a broad, largely ambiguous threshold for the U.S. considering nuclear weapons use. However, it at least stipulates that it is intended to convey “a very high bar for nuclear employment,” and that “reducing reliance on nuclear weapons” and “moving toward a sole purpose declaration” are goals of U.S. policy. Unfortunately, “more far-reaching opportunities to move in this direction will require enduring improvement in the security environment, a commitment to verifiable arms control among the major nuclear powers, further progress in developing non-nuclear capabilities, and an assessment of how nuclear-armed competitors and adversaries may react.” The DoD would rather not need to threaten to use nuclear weapons in order to deter nuclear-armed competitors and reassure any number of U.S. allies and partners that fall under the protection of U.S. extended deterrence, but it does. If the security environment improves, the threat of a U.S. nuclear attack in response to a non-nuclear “strategic attack” on a third country may no longer be an integral component of U.S. defense strategy.
The NPR also makes clear that a nuclear attack of any scale would risk uncontrolled escalation, and states in no uncertain terms that “a near-simultaneous conflict with two nuclear-armed states would constitute an extreme circumstance.” In other words, the U.S. would need to consider the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict involving both Russia and China (or others, like North Korea). This assessment should be sobering to even the most callous brinksmen. As such, the NDS includes appropriate recognition of the security benefits of binding arms control regimes. It states that “Mutual, verifiable nuclear arms control offers the most effective, durable and responsible path to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and prevent their use. Consistent with our commitment to put diplomacy first, the United States will pursue new arms control arrangements that address the full range of nuclear threats and advance our global non-proliferation interests.” The world must now wait to see what “new arms control arrangements” the U.S. will advance amid its nuclear modernization and conventional arms race with Russia and China.
The Dilemma of Depending on Allies
Close military cooperation with allies and partners is a cornerstone of the new NDS, but the tension between U.S. values and interests remains unresolved.
The NDS highlights that “mutually-beneficial Alliances and partnerships are our greatest global strategic advantage – and they are a center of gravity for this strategy.” Across the strategy, foreign partners are seen as playing integral roles in both deterring adversaries and in ensuring the United States can prevail in the event of conflict.
A strategy so anchored in international alliances and partnerships will likely place new weight behind expanding already robust U.S. arms transfers and international military assistance efforts. But the increasing role of foreign partners in American defense strategy could create an incentive for the U.S. to look the other way when militarily important allies or partners behave in ways contrary to our values, be that in the domains of human rights, civilian protection, or good governance.
Over the last two decades, the United States has greatly expanded its security cooperation enterprise and, in many cases, has found cause to compromise on its values for the sake of immediate security imperatives. Close military cooperation with abusive governments became an unfortunate feature of the Global War on Terror, undercutting American moral leadership and empowering dangerous actors in already unsettled geo-political environments. As the United States transitions to a focus on strategic competition, the stakes will feel even more acute, as will the arguments that, for the greater good, Washington should turn a blind eye to the abuses of partners who offer a tactical advantage over our adversaries.
The Biden Administration has made clear that it sees this decisive decade as defined by competing visions for the future of the global order – a competition of democracies and autocracies. In that context, it will be vital that the United States does not ignore the behavior or nature of its partners and focuses its security cooperation on those whose vision of a “free, open, prosperous, and secure world” aligns with our own.
The United States Lacks a Holistic Approach to Security in Current and Future Wars
While the NDS identifies the safety and security of American citizens as a core goal while highlighting the importance of NATO to U.S. national security, it lacks a coherent strategy on these concerns, both at home and within the Alliance.
Like the National Security Strategy, the NDS notes the overarching goal of ensuring the safety and security of American citizens and emphasizes the importance of the NATO Alliance. However, yet again, the document fails to discuss concepts that support the former and the latter, including the Protection of Civilians (PoC) and Human Security (HS). These topics are critical to addressing the future threat environment and essential to keeping Americans and our allies safe. The U.S. government can’t just hope for the best; it should work now to integrate strategies and build advanced capabilities to ensure they achieve these goals.
Russia is actively targeting civilians in Ukraine to sap the citizenry’s will to continue the fight and gain a strategic advantage in the conflict. These illegal attacks are not a new strategy for Russia; we have seen them before in Syria and Chechnya. Yet, the U.S. has done little as a government to develop the will, knowledge, skills, and capabilities to counter them. Now, imagine the war spilling over into a NATO ally’s territory where the Alliance would invoke Article 5. Consider the impact it would have on the cohesion of the Alliance if we and our allies could not protect our citizens.
The United States can and should set itself apart by vocally supporting PoC and HS–both at home and in the Alliance–and resourcing and building the capabilities needed to counter these threats. The failure to mention the importance of protecting civilians as a key competency in conflict and a critical determinant of winning future wars demonstrates lessons identified but not learned. Also, the U.S. government missed a significant opportunity to talk about things it is doing. For example, the Department of Defense recently issued the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response-Action Plan (CHMR-AP) to build capacity to avoid and address civilian harm in future conflicts—a core component of PoC. Operations research has shown us that doing so improves the efficacy of targeting, bolsters force protection, and increases mission success. This action plan is of great interest to NATO allies, and it was a missed opportunity for the NDS not to have showcased it as a forward-leaning policy priority. The United States can and should do better to lean into setting itself up for success in the conflicts and crises of the future by embracing a broader view of security and bringing itself in line with its NATO allies.
Hard to Square Military Expansion with Climate Goals and Constraints
The NDS elevates climate change in the defense agenda but lacks a comprehensive response to meet this new challenge.
Unlike the 2018 NDS, the Biden administration’s defense strategy rightly highlights the multifaceted threat that climate change poses to the United States. The document captures the threat succinctly, stating that “increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and more frequent extreme weather conditions will affect basing and access while degrading readiness, installations, and capabilities.” The NDS frames climate change as both a threat to the U.S. homeland and a transboundary challenge that is reshaping the strategic and operational environments, from risking new armed conflicts to creating unprecedented challenges for military readiness.
While the threat of climate change is appropriately framed in the document, it is not matched with a reasonable proposal for how the DoD will adapt its operational concepts and force posture in response. The document understandably focuses on competition with China and Russia, but it does not propose adaptations to mitigate the serious constraints that climate change will impose on U.S. forces. There is mention of working with allies and partners to build climate resilience in order to decrease the U.S. military’s role in responding to humanitarian incidents, but it is unreasonable to expect that burden being reduced in the document’s 10-year time horizon. The document pledges that “Strategic readiness planning will take climate change impacts into account” with no further explanation for how planning might be tempered by the recognition that climate change will drastically increase both domestic and international burdens for the DoD.
Implicit in the ambitious NDS is that the United States must further expand its military to address the long list of threats it faces. This raises a number of issues, from the gargantuan costs that expansion would entail to the present failure to meet recruiting goals. With regard to climate, expansion is at odds with – and actually exacerbates – the threat: The DoD is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. While the Pentagon has made vague pledges to eliminate its carbon output by 2050, the current reality is that additional expansion of the U.S. military will entail significant increases in emissions, further fueling the threat posed by climate change that the NDS attempts to take on.
The NDS’s handling of climate change is ultimately missing half of what such a strategy needs: a plan for addressing the identified threats. While climate change is a challenge that goes well beyond the purview of the DoD, and securitization of environmental issues poses its own set of problems, the strategy falls short of its own expressed goals by outlining plans that are counterproductive for ameliorating the threats it identifies.
A Strategy that Reflects our Values Would have Mentioned the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda
The lack of mention of Women, Peace, and Security in the NDS is a strategic opportunity missed that leaves the US out of step with our partners and Allies and devoid of a leadership role in the changes happening within the field.
The United States has made commitments again and again to uphold and integrate the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda into our national security apparatus and our national defense. From the adoption of UNSCR 1325, and other resolutions making up the WPS agenda, to the passing of the U.S. WPS Act of 2017. Our Five Eyes (FVEY) peers and NATO have acknowledged the analytical advantage WPS offers to help see the unseen on the battlefield, reducing risk and increasing their military advantage. NATO touted the importance of WPS and gender equality in the new strategic concept agreed upon at the Madrid Summit this year.
So why does the U.S. NDS fail even to mention WPS?
Focusing on sexual assault and harassment is a step in the right direction after the pointed Internal Review Commission; however, it alone falls short of the opportunity that the WPS agenda as a tool offers to warfighters. The NDS focuses on nuclear escalation, “gray zone challenges,” and the changing nature of war. Yet, it does not mention or acknowledge the gendered nature of warfare—especially as we see it before our eyes in Ukraine, where rape is used as a weapon of war. This oversight is a critical strategic mistake. Not explicitly mentioning WPS and how it contributes to the DoDs stated goals keep WPS relegated to a “niche special interest” within the defense enterprise. The value of the smart application of its principles is anything but.
Understanding the interconnectedness between a military that acts in a way that encourages the participation of women in conflict resolution, prevention of violence against women and children, and equal access to relief and recovery during and after the conflict is essential to our national security. It strengthens the protection of our and our allies’ citizens and demonstrates our values as a fighting force. The WPS community has struggled to articulate this to warfighters in a way that is heard and understood. This means we are falling behind our allies–and adversaries–in understanding and gaining a competitive advantage in decoding the complexity of war and learning the lessons of conflicts past.
The United States should speak openly in support of, and adequately fund, its efforts on integrating the aspect of Women, Peace, and Security into its warfighting repertoire. Treating WPS as what it is: an essential tool in almost every aspect of the present and future of conflict and crises would bring us parity with our NATO and FVEY allies and increase interoperability. Finally, the U.S. should take a leadership role in the future of WPS in defense. Doing so encourages growth and ownership of the program by uniformed and federal employees, driving implementation and innovation for the future of war and peace.
Approach may accelerate strategic dynamics in southern Asia
The NDS’s framing of international politics in terms of great power competition is likely to intensify nuclear competition and instability in Southern Asia.
Following the National Security Strategy, the Biden administration’s NDS, along with the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), and Missile Defense Review (MDR), further clarifies that U.S. global policy will be shaped through the prism of a central contest between U.S.-led democratic allies and partners and China, Russia, and other authoritarian adversaries. However, this classical framing of traditional great-power balancing will intensify worrying Southern Asian security dynamics. To ensure positive security outcomes for this pivotal area to national interests, U.S. officials will need to demonstrate a flexibility and responsiveness to often quickly developing regional challenges and crises, and especially those driven by climate-related emergencies. But these new U.S. guiding documents do not appropriately or consistently recognize the seriousness of these threats.
India is clearly identified as the key regional U.S. partner, as is consistent with recent statements of the Biden and previous administrations. However, these new guiding documents are equally transparent that this defense partnership is premised upon augmenting India’s capabilities specifically to complicate and challenge China’s rise. There are certainly elements of this initiative that will be welcomed in New Delhi, such as the commitments to support India in addressing Chinese coercion across the Line of Actual Control, “advanced technology cooperation with partnerships like (…) the Indo-Pacific Quad,” and “co-development of technologies (and) greater intelligence and information sharing.” However, the NDS also prioritizes expanding U.S. military access to partner facilities for anti-China contingencies, of which the most likely will be an incident over Taiwan. India has been very wary in discussions on this point, with concerns of being dragged into what it views as a primarily U.S.-China conflict and suffering Chinese retaliation. While the NDS astutely recognizes that “the decisions that our Allies and partners face are rarely binary,” the overarching thrust of the document nevertheless suggests greater coming frictions on the Taiwan question and base access within the U.S.-India relationship. More robust U.S. expectations of Indian support in a U.S.-China crisis could elevate bilateral tensions on this question, and counterproductively complicate India’s rise.
The great power competition (GPC)-informed U.S. worldview will also do little to arrest nuclear competition and instability in Southern Asia. The NPR and MDR specify that Washington will continue to seek a diversified nuclear arsenal for multiple limited and major strategic operations against China; further invest in sensors to better track hypersonic and other missiles; and rely principally on missile defense to block North Korean missile attacks. Together, these initiatives will provide further supporting evidence for longstanding Chinese concerns that Washington seeks a first-strike capability against Beijing, incentivizing additional Chinese nuclear force expansion to maintain its survivability. Through the strategic chain dynamic, these Chinese measures will likely heighten perceived nuclear threats and demand for nuclear weapons in India, and then similar follow-on Pakistani responses to India’s actions. While these U.S. documents still devote greater attention to pursuing arms control and risk reduction measures than their Trump administration predecessors, a U.S. formal recognition of mutual nuclear vulnerability with China – as opposed to continuing the seeming efforts of previous U.S. administrations to seek a first-strike advantage – remains central to averting this cascading nuclear force buildup in South Asia.
The GPC framework also informs what the NDS terms a “ruthless prioritization” of risks which the DoD will be resourced to confront. While the NDS does not mention Pakistan by name – as is also the case in the NSS – it is clear that DoD equities with Pakistan will be largely reduced to partnering on counterterrorism operations against targets posing a direct threat to the U.S. The over-the-horizon approach of the al-Zawahiri strike is in this respect a potential indicator of the level of involvement which DoD will limit itself to.
However, what is perhaps most surprising in these strategies, especially as they apply to South Asia, is only a brief recognition in the NDS of climate change—an issue my colleague Evan Cooper further explores—as posing threats to U.S. force resilience, partner internal and external power projection, and international stability in general. While this small section also notes that there will likely be increased global demand for DoD climate-related disaster response efforts, there is not a through-line detailing how DoD will be resourced to respond to increased humanitarian and disaster relief (HADR) requests as climate-related crises intensify and occur with greater frequency. The recent flooding in Pakistan, with one-third of the country underwater, and projected mass public displacement in Bangladesh and the Maldives as sea levels rise, merit increased DoD and USG preparation commensurate with the scale of these challenges. Moreover, by focusing so strongly on military competition with China, these strategies ironically cede space for China to become a potential principal regional HADR provider, enabling Beijing to sustain and expand the influence in South Asia which the Biden administration is determined to curtail.
Maintaining the Status Quo on DPRK
The explicit callout of Kim Jong Un in the document demonstrates that North Korea continues to be viewed as a major threat and the policy of denuclearization remains fully intact.
If Kim Jong Un’s main purpose in developing a nuclear capacity is deterrence and regime survival, as many analysts believe, the National Defense Strategy will help convince him that he’s on the right track.
The NDS very clearly ties nuclear weapon use to the end of the Kim regime – and not the North Korean military. A closer read also reveals that while much of the review is spent talking about China and Russia, Kim is the only leader that is directly named among the three countries. In many ways the NDS signals business-as-usual on the Korean peninsula.
It repeats the long-stated U.S. goal of “complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which North Korea has already rejected.
The NDS mentions North Korea’s attempts to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its South Korean and Japanese partners, which is a real concern, but the lack of a new approach to the Korean peninsula might be setting up the U.S. for just such a situation. If relations with North Korea remain in stalemate and public opinion in South Korea becomes more favorable to having its own nuclear weapons, the U.S. will be in a situation where it may have to oppose its own ally.
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