The Current Events Room
THE HEADWINDS LOOMING FOR THE U.S. ARMY
Since the end of the Cold War the US Army had been the first among equals. The Navy, USMC and Air Force were supporting primarily Army missions: Desert Shield/Storm, Iraqi Freedom, Afghanistan, etc.
Now with the pivot to the Indo-Asian sphere the Army will be taking the support role.
The U.S. Army is facing a stormy period that will be marked by wrenching change in the coming years. In the early weeks of the COVID-19 shutdown, we argued that the defense budget would decline as a result of the simultaneous health and economic crises facing the nation. Seven months later, the effects of the pandemic are alreadyworse than we could have predicted, and show no signs of abating as the virus continues to spread. That means that the Pentagon needs to prepare for even more sharply reduced budgets than it might have expected even a short while ago. And while this will force all of the services to make painful choices, the Army will face the most daunting challenges of all.
The rise of China and the primacy of the Indo-Pacific as the U.S. military’s most important theater of operations upend the Army’s longstanding role in American defense. For the first time in decades, land will not be the most critical domain of warfare, and it may not even be the decisive one. In a future war with China, the air and sea domains, together with space and cyber, will define the shape of the conflict. As a force organized, trained, and equipped for land warfare, the U.S. Army clearly will be at a huge disadvantage in both the strategic arguments and budget fights to come. Its budget, end strength, and force structure will all face significant cuts, which could easily exceed the cuts of the sequestration era. In order to adapt successfully to these tectonic shifts, the Army will have to grapple with becoming a supporting service, the shift from maneuver to fires, the growing mission of homeland defense, and rebalancing active and reserve forces.
Taking on a Supporting Role
Though the 2018 National Defense Strategy stressed great-power competition with both China and Russia, the Department of Defense is now explicitly prioritizing China over Russia. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has clearly stated that his goal is “to focus the department on China,” since he sees China as “the pacing threat” that the U.S. military must prepare for. And even though a potential Biden administration would voice much stronger support for NATO and U.S. allies in Europe, China will nevertheless remain the U.S. military’s most dangerous threat. The reasons why are simple and sobering: Only a rising China has the immense economic power, the cutting-edge technological prowess, and increasingly, the advanced military capabilities that could match (or even exceed) those of the U.S. armed forces — and potentially defeat them.
This shift has profound implications for the Army. For decades, the Army has arguably been the U.S. military’s primus inter pares, the first among equals, of the four services. During the Cold War, the U.S. Army formed the bulk of NATO forces postured to deter or defeat a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It also provided most of the forces that served in Korea, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has grown accustomed to being what’s called the supported service, where the other services help enable its land operations. Yet the explicit prioritization of China over Russia means that this relationship is about to flip. The Army will be a supporting service in any potential conflict with China, tasked with enabling the other services in a conflict that would span the vast air and maritime domain of the Western Pacific.
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Originally Posted by Cletus
