Pentagon Plans for Three-Front "Long War" Against China and Russia
Tuesday, April 03, 2018
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch | News Analysis
Sailors inspects the landing gear of an F/A-18F Super Hornet on the flight
deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Think of it as the most momentous military planning on Earth right now.
Who's even paying attention, given the eternal changing of the guard at the
White House, as well as the latest in tweets, sexual revelations, and
investigations of every sort? And yet it increasingly looks as if, thanks to
current Pentagon planning, a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War
(with dangerous new twists) has begun and hardly anyone has even noticed.
In 2006, when the Department of Defense spelled out its future security
role, it saw only one overriding mission: its "Long War" against
international terrorism. "With its allies and partners, the United States
must be prepared to wage this war in many locations simultaneously and for
some years to come," the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review explained
that year. Twelve years later, the Pentagon has officially announced that
that long war is drawing to a close -- even though at least seven
counterinsurgency conflicts still rage across the Greater Middle East and
Africa -- and a new long war has begun, a permanent campaign to contain
China and Russia in Eurasia.
"Great power competition, not terrorism, has emerged as the central
challenge to US security and prosperity," claimed Pentagon Comptroller David
Norquist while releasing the Pentagon's $686 billion budget request in
January. "It is increasingly apparent that China and Russia want to shape a
world consistent with their authoritarian values and, in the process,
replace the free and open order that has enabled global security and
prosperity since World War II."
Of course, just how committed President Trump is to the preservation of that
"free and open order" remains questionable given his determination to
scuttle international treaties and ignite a global trade war. Similarly,
whether China and Russia truly seek to undermine the existing world order or
simply make it less American-centric is a question that deserves close
attention, just not today. The reason is simple enough. The screaming
headline you should have seen in any paper (but haven't) is this: the US
military has made up its mind about the future. It has committed itself and
the nation to a three-front geopolitical struggle to resist Chinese and
Russian advances in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Important as this strategic shift may be, you won't hear about it from the
president, a man lacking the attention span necessary for such long-range
strategic thinking and one who views Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi
Jinping as "frenemies" rather than die-hard adversaries. To fully appreciate
the momentous changes occurring in US military planning, it's necessary to
take a deep dive into the world of Pentagon scripture: budget documents and
the annual "posture statements" of regional commanders already overseeing
the implementation of that just-born three-front strategy.
The New Geopolitical Chessboard
This renewed emphasis on China and Russia in US military planning reflects
the way top military officials are now reassessing the global strategic
equation, a process that began long before Donald Trump entered the White
House. Although after 9/11, senior commanders fully embraced the "long war
against terror" approach to the world, their enthusiasm for endless
counterterror operations leading essentially nowhere in remote and sometimes
strategically unimportant places began to wane in recent years as they
watched China and Russia modernizing their military forces and using them to
intimidate neighbors.
While the long war against terror did fuel a vast, ongoing expansion of the
Pentagon's Special Operations Forces (SOF) -- now a secretive army of 70,000
nestled inside the larger military establishment -- it provided surprisingly
little purpose or real work for the military's "heavy metal" units: the
Army's tank brigades, the Navy's carrier battle groups, the Air Force's
bomber squadrons, and so forth. Yes, the Air Force in particular has played
a major supporting role in recent operations in Iraq and Syria, but the
regular military has largely been sidelined there and elsewhere by lightly
equipped SOF forces and drones. Planning for a "real war" against a "peer
competitor" (one with forces and weaponry resembling our own) was until
recently given far lower priority than the country's never-ending conflicts
across the Greater Middle East and Africa. This alarmed and even angered
those in the regular military whose moment, it seems, has now finally
arrived.
"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our
competitive military advantage has been eroding," the Pentagon's new
National Defense Strategy declares. "We are facing increased global
disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based
international order" -- a decline officially attributed for the first time
not to al-Qaeda and ISIS, but to the aggressive behavior of China and
Russia. Iran and North Korea are also identified as major threats, but of a
distinctly secondary nature compared to the menace posed by the two
great-power competitors.
Unsurprisingly enough, this shift will require not only greater spending on
costly, high-tech military hardware but also a redrawing of the global
strategic map to favor the regular military. During the long war on terror,
geography and boundaries appeared less important, given that terrorist cells
seemed capable of operating anyplace where order was breaking down. The US
military, convinced that it had to be equally agile, readied itself to
deploy (often Special Operations forces) to remote battlefields across the
planet, borders be damned.
On the new geopolitical map, however, America faces well-armed adversaries
with every intention of protecting their borders, so US forces are now being
arrayed along an updated version of an older, more familiar three-front line
of confrontation. In Asia, the US and its key allies (South Korea, Japan,
the Philippines, and Australia) are to face China across a line extending
from the Korean peninsula to the waters of the East and South China Seas and
the Indian Ocean. In Europe, the US and its NATO allies will do the same for
Russia on a front extending from Scandinavia and the Baltic Republics south
to Romania and then east across the Black Sea to the Caucasus. Between these
two theaters of contention lies the ever-turbulent Greater Middle East, with
the United States and its two crucial allies there, Israel and Saudi Arabia,
facing a Russian foothold in Syria and an increasingly assertive Iran,
itself drawing closer to China and Russia. From the Pentagon's perspective,
this is to be the defining strategic global map for the foreseeable future.
Expect most upcoming major military investments and initiatives to focus on
bolstering US naval, air, and ground strength on its side of these lines, as
well as on targeting Sino-Russian vulnerabilities across them.
There's no better way to appreciate the dynamics of this altered strategic
outlook than to dip into the annual "posture statements" of the heads of the
Pentagon's "unified combatant commands," or combined Army/Navy/Air
Force/Marine Corps headquarters, covering the territories surrounding China
and Russia: Pacific Command (PACOM), with responsibility for all US forces
in Asia; European Command (EUCOM), covering US forces from Scandinavia to
the Caucasus; and Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees the Middle East
and Central Asia where so many of the country's counterterror wars are still
underway.
The senior commanders of these meta-organizations are the most powerful US
officials in their "areas of responsibility" (AORs), exercising far more
clout than any American ambassador stationed in the region (and often local
heads of state as well). That makes their statements and the shopping lists
of weaponry that invariably go with them of real significance for anyone who
wants to grasp the Pentagon's vision of America's global military future.
The Indo-Pacific Front
Commanding PACOM is Admiral Harry Harris Jr., a long-time naval aviator. In
his annual posture statement, delivered to the Senate Armed Services
Committee on March 15th, Harris painted a grim picture of America's
strategic position in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to the dangers
posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, he argued, China was emerging as a
formidable threat to America's vital interests. "The People's Liberation
Army's rapid evolution into a modern, high-tech fighting force continues to
be both impressive and concerning," he asserted. "PLA capabilities are
progressing faster than any other nation in the world, benefitting from
robust resourcing and prioritization."
Most threatening, in his view, is Chinese progress in developing
intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and advanced warships. Such
missiles, he explained, could strike US bases in Japan or on the island of
Guam, while the expanding Chinese navy could challenge the US Navy in seas
off China's coast and someday perhaps America's command of the western
Pacific. "If this [shipbuilding] program continues," he said, "China will
surpass Russia as the world's second largest navy by 2020, when measured in
terms of submarines and frigate-class ships or larger."
To counter such developments and contain Chinese influence requires, of
course, spending yet more taxpayer dollars on advanced weapons systems,
especially precision-guided missiles. Admiral Harris called for vastly
increasing investment in such weaponry in order to overpower current and
future Chinese capabilities and ensure US military dominance of China's air
and sea space. "In order to deter potential adversaries in the
Indo-Pacific," he declared, "we must build a more lethal force by investing
in critical capabilities and harnessing innovation."
His budgetary wish list was impressive. Above all, he spoke with great
enthusiasm about new generations of aircraft and missiles -- what are
called, in Pentagonese, "anti-access/area-denial" systems -- capable of
striking Chinese IRBM batteries and other weapons systems intended to keep
American forces safely away from Chinese territory. He also hinted that he
wouldn't mind having new nuclear-armed missiles for this purpose --
missiles, he suggested, that could be launched from ships and planes and so
would skirt the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, to which the US is
a signatory and which bans land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
(To give you a feel for the arcane language of Pentagon nuclear cognoscenti,
here's how he put it: "We must continue to expand Intermediate Nuclear Force
Treaty-compliant theater strike capabilities to effectively counter
adversary anti-access/area-denial [A2/AD] capabilities and force
preservation tactics.")
Finally, to further strengthen the US defense line in the region, Harris
called for enhanced military ties with various allies and partners,
including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. PACOM's goal,
he stated, is to "maintain a network of like-minded allies and partners to
cultivate principled security networks, which reinforce the free and open
international order." Ideally, he added, this network will eventually
encompass India, further extending the encirclement of China.
The European Theater
A similarly embattled future, even if populated by different actors in a
different landscape, was offered by Army General Curtis Scaparrotti,
commander of EUCOM, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed
Services on March 8th. For him, Russia is the other China. As he put it in a
bone-chilling description, "Russia seeks to change the international order,
fracture NATO, and undermine US leadership in order to protect its regime,
reassert dominance over its neighbors, and achieve greater influence around
the globe. Russia has demonstrated its willingness and capability to
intervene in countries along its periphery and to project power --
especially in the Middle East."
This, needless to say, is not the outlook we're hearing from President
Trump, who has long appeared reluctant to criticize Vladimir Putin or paint
Russia as a full-fledged adversary. For American military and intelligence
officials, however, Russia unquestionably poses the preeminent threat to US
security interests in Europe. It is now being spoken of in a fashion that
should bring back memories of the Cold War era. "Our highest strategic
priority," Scaparrotti insisted, "is to deter Russia from engaging in
further aggression and exercising malign influence over our allies and
partners. [To this end,] we are. updating our operational plans to provide
military response options to defend our European allies against Russian
aggression."
The cutting edge of EUCOM's anti-Russian drive is the European Deterrence
Initiative (EDI), a project President Obama initiated in 2014 following the
Russian seizure of Crimea. Originally known as the European Reassurance
Initiative, the EDI is intended to bolster US and NATO forces deployed in
the "front-line states" -- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland -- facing
Russia on NATO's "Eastern Front." According to the Pentagon wish list
submitted in February, some $6.5 billion are to be allocated to the EDI in
2019. Most of those funds will be used to stockpile munitions in the
front-line states, enhance Air Force basing infrastructure, conduct
increased joint military exercises with allied forces, and rotate additional
US-based forces into the region. In addition, some $200 million will be
devoted to a Pentagon "advise, train, and equip" mission in Ukraine.
Like his counterpart in the Pacific theater, General Scaparrotti also turns
out to have an expensive wish list of future weaponry, including advanced
planes, missiles, and other high-tech weapons that, he claims, will counter
modernizing Russian forces. In addition, recognizing Russia's proficiency in
cyberwarfare, he's calling for a substantial investment in cyber technology
and, like Admiral Harris, he cryptically hinted at the need for increased
investment in nuclear forces of a sort that might be "usable" on a future
European battlefield.
Between East and West: Central Command
Overseeing a startling range of war-on-terror conflicts in the vast,
increasingly unstable region stretching from PACOM's western boundary to
EUCOM's eastern one is the US Central Command. For most of its modern
history, CENTCOM has been focused on counterterrorism and the wars in Iraq,
Syria, and Afghanistan in particular. Now, however, even as the previous
long war continues, the Command is already beginning to position itself for
a new Cold War-revisited version of perpetual struggle, a plan -- to
resurrect a dated term -- to contain both China and Russia in the Greater
Middle East.
In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, CENTCOM
commander Army General Joseph Votel concentrated on the status of US
operations against ISIS in Syria and against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but
he also affirmed that the containment of China and Russia has become an
integral part of CENTCOM's future strategic mission: "The recently published
National Defense Strategy rightly identifies the resurgence of great power
competition as our principal national security challenge and we see the
effects of that competition throughout the region."
Through its support of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its efforts
to gain influence with other key actors in the region, Russia, Votel
claimed, is playing an increasingly conspicuous role in Centcom's AOR. China
is also seeking to enhance its geopolitical clout both economically and
through a small but growing military presence. Of particular concern, Votel
asserted, is the Chinese-managed port at Gwadar in Pakistan on the Indian
Ocean and a new Chinese base in Djibouti on the Red Sea, across from Yemen
and Saudi Arabia. Such facilities, he claimed, contribute to China's
"military posture and force projection" in CENTCOM's AOR and are signals of
a challenging future for the US military.
Under such circumstances, Votel testified, it is incumbent upon CENTCOM to
join PACOM and EUCOM in resisting Chinese and Russian assertiveness. "We
have to be prepared to address these threats, not just in the areas in which
they reside, but the areas in which they have influence." Without providing
any details, he went on to say, "We have developed. very good plans and
processes for how we will do that."
What that means is unclear at best, but despite Donald Trump's campaign talk
about a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria once ISIS and the
Taliban are defeated, it seems increasingly clear that the US military is
preparing to station its forces in those (and possibly other) countries
across CENTCOM's region of responsibility indefinitely, fighting terrorism,
of course, but also ensuring that there will be a permanent US military
presence in areas that could see intensifying geopolitical competition among
the major powers.
An Invitation to Disaster
In relatively swift fashion, American military leaders have followed up
their claim that the US is in a new long war by sketching the outlines of a
containment line that would stretch from the Korean Peninsula around Asia
across the Middle East into parts of the former Soviet Union in Eastern
Europe and finally to the Scandinavian countries. Under their plan, American
military forces -- reinforced by the armies of trusted allies -- should
garrison every segment of this line, a grandiose scheme to block
hypothetical advances of Chinese and Russian influence that, in its global
reach, should stagger the imagination. Much of future history could be
shaped by such an outsized effort.
Questions for the future include whether this is either a sound strategic
policy or truly sustainable. Attempting to contain China and Russia in such
a manner will undoubtedly provoke countermoves, some undoubtedly difficult
to resist, including cyber attacks and various kinds of economic warfare.
And if you imagined that a war on terror across huge swaths of the planet
represented a significant global overreach for a single power, just wait.
Maintaining large and heavily-equipped forces on three extended fronts will
also prove exceedingly costly and will certainly conflict with domestic
spending priorities and possibly provoke a divisive debate over the
reinstatement of the draft.
However, the real question -- unasked in Washington at the moment -- is: Why
pursue such a policy in the first place? Are there not other ways to manage
the rise of China and Russia's provocative behavior? What appears
particularly worrisome about this three-front strategy is its immense
capacity for confrontation, miscalculation, escalation, and finally actual
war rather than simply grandiose war planning.
At multiple points along this globe-spanning line -- the Baltic Sea, the
Black Sea, Syria, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea, to name just
a few -- forces from the US and China or Russia are already in significant
contact, often jostling for position in a potentially hostile manner. At any
moment, one of these encounters could provoke a firefight leading to
unintended escalation and, in the end, possibly all-out combat. From there,
almost anything could happen, even the use of nuclear weapons. Clearly,
officials in Washington should be thinking hard before committing Americans
to a strategy that will make this increasingly likely and could turn what is
still long-war planning into an actual long war with deadly consequences.
In these troubling and surreal times, honest journalism is more important
than ever. Help us keep real news flowing: Make a donation to Truthout
today.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the
latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular and the author most recently of The
Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources
(Metropolitan Books).
Related Stories
In "Call for Peace" Address, Bernie Sanders Takes on Endless War and Global
Oligarchy
By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams | Report
Trump Picks John Bolton, an Advocate for World War III, as National Security
Adviser
By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams | Report
Weapons for Anyone: Donald Trump and the Art of the Arms Deal
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch | News Analysis
