The United States National Security Strategy establishes that America would prefer to trade with people—even enemies if they would let go of that framing—as an alternative to waging war against them. But if an enemy is determined to fight America and undermine our national security, the National Defense Strategy seeks the ability to reach out and inflict damage on a scale we choose to inflict. Consider it the 2x4 strategy that seeks to knock sense into the heads of foreign leaders who prefer war to trade.
The latest national defense strategy (NDS) is out. This follows the national security strategy that I went into over numerous posts:
America is concurrently reforming the American military to focus on combat capabilities. Such a military makes it both better able to secure the Western Hemisphere and take the fight overseas when necessary if allies and partners cannot hold the line on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without direct American military assistance. Losing those allies and partners not only takes away part of America’s overseas shield but potentially strengthens an enemy sword to eventually reach America’s shores. I worried about that ten years ago and still understand that risk.
The primary means for security are economic development to strengthen American friends, partners, and allies; and to provide enemies and potential enemies enough reason to shun war that may reduce American security—and needlessly risk their own.
That kind of American military power combined with economic and diplomatic initiatives is simply a different form of global intervention that seeks to avoid war.
Yet America has been more than willing to use military power under the administration that wrote the 2025 national security strategy document. Using military power for narrow missions against a number of states and organizations rather than directly committing large forces for extended campaigns is clearly preferred.
We’ll see how the Israel-America campaign against Iran works within those parameters. Clearly we didn’t deter Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons and its continuing empire of actively hostile proxies with our far greater military strength.
Let me highlight what I think are key components of using our military to defend our national security as defined in the national security strategy. Because the enemy gets a vote and may not go along with our preference for limited military action in defense of capable allies.
The priorities are defending the American homeland, deterring China by being strong without seeking confrontation, getting allies to share more of the burden of common defense, and restoring our defense industrial base.
That’s all good. But I caution that our view of what not being confrontational means will differ greatly from China’s. Yes our approach of being strong enough to defend allies and partners in INDOPACOM seems reasonable as we frame our military’s mission in the western Pacific (from the NDS):
Not for purposes of dominating, humiliating, or strangling China. To the contrary, our goal is far more scoped and reasonable than that: It is simply to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies. This does not require regime change or some other existential struggle. Rather, a decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under, is possible.
Sure, it is possible. Yet China thinks it is their absolute right to control or dominate territory and countries around their periphery—most relevantly in the Western Pacific where critically important America allies are located. America merely standing in the way of China’s ambitions will be seen as confrontational by the Chinese Communist Party unwilling to accept our reasonable offer. We will need to be ready to use our strengthened defense industrial base and more capable military to support our more powerful allies and partners overseas.
I’ve repeatedly argued America is not becoming isolationist—it is simply diverging from allies in priorities. The NDS states:
Ours is not a strategy of isolation. As the NSS directs, it is one of focused engagement abroad with a clear eye toward advancing the concrete, practical interests of Americans. Through this America First, commonsense lens, America’s alliances and partners have an essential role to play—but not as the dependencies of the last generation. Rather, as the Department rightly prioritizes Homeland defense and deterring China, other threats will persist, and our allies will be essential to dealing with all of them. Our allies will do so not as a favor to us, but out of their own interests.
Fair enough. This is the American national defense strategy, after all. But do not assume that allied and partner interests will be identical to ours. Just as our interests diverge from theirs, their interests will diverge from ours—in ways we may not like. Counting on even close allies to defend American interests for us is too much like a strategy of leading from behind dressed up as Smart Diplomacy® America First.
And the defense industrial base portion is vital. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brutally revealed Western logistics weakness. That line of effort will let us build a military capable of fighting longer than our enemies, projected from a secure Western Hemisphere foundation. And it will help sustain allies and partners fighting on the borders of common enemies overseas. This is what America and Europeans—prodded by a more distant America to do more for their closer Russian threat—are doing to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. No country is sending their troops to die in a war against Russia. Just the type and scale of assistance is in question.
And again, America is not isolationist. Europeans who are used to a much higher level of American involvement from 1917 to 1991 can be forgiven for being frankly shocked by America’s reduced defense needs—yet far from zero—in Europe. We want a stronger and confident Europe because America simply can’t be expected to care about the defense of Europe more than Europeans do1:
A stronger defense industrial base is intended to give an American president wider options when dealing with enemies alone or alongside allies and partners who will be better prepared to fight (back to the NDS):
With the Department laser-focused on these priorities, we will ensure that the Joint Force is ready to deter and, if called upon, to prevail by achieving the nation’s objectives against the most dangerous threats to Americans’ interests. At the same time, this Strategy will enable the Joint Force to provide President Trump with the operational flexibility and agility required for other objectives, especially the ability to launch decisive operations against targets anywhere—including directly from the U.S. Homeland[.]
The priorities are no shock given the national security’s statement of the same that I went through in more detail in that series of essays:
The 2025 National Security Strategy
The new National Defense Strategy is out. I commented on the document in seven pieces, including this one. Links to Parts 1-6 follow my final thoughts on the document.
The priorities are, in descending order, the American homeland and the broader Western Hemisphere, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
I remarked that people were being hasty in their horrified reactions to the national security strategy that didn’t explicitly name potential enemies. And here in the unclassified national defense strategy, the main state enemies are named.
The part on Russia is key—especially in light of European concerns about the changes in American policy:
Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future. …
It follows that, although we are and will remain engaged in Europe, we must—and will—prioritize defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China.
I know our European allies feel like America has unilaterally changed the terms of NATO by being less willing to fight for Europe against the Russian threat. But Europeans already changed the terms of NATO by letting their military strength atrophy on the assumption that America would continue to bear a large burden.
And European NATO members have been on notice since 2014 when under American pressure the alliance established a goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. More recently, that has been increased to 5% (with 1.5 percentage points directed toward defense infrastructure, which is insufficient).
Iran may be fourth in line of priorities (but third in named enemies), but it popped up to the top of the enemies list given its nuclear and regional mayhem ambitions that the mullahs refuse to abandon with negotiations. Fingers crossed that this portion of the national defense strategy is obsolete by the time this is published.
But America fighting side-by-side with Israel against a common threat is the model for our alliances, no? America is fighting with a capable Israel against Iran and not for an insufficiently capable Israel.
North Korea is the last named enemy. Given that it is already a nuclear weapons states, our options are limited and pose severe problems. Keep that in mind in regard to dealing with Iran while they lack nukes.
Finally, the NDS brings up the issue of our military and our allies being able to meet more than one threat simultaneously:
It is only prudent for the United States and its allies to be prepared for the possibility that one or more potential opponents might act together in a coordinated or opportunistic fashion across multiple theaters.
Come to poppa! I’ve long complained about this inadequacy of our military, starting during the Cold War Peace Dividend era in this 1997 Land Warfare Paper about our projected defense requirements in light of Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980:
The United States military’s current role, pursuant to the Bottom-Up Review (BUR), is to fight two major regional conflicts (MRCs), nearly simultaneously, in concert with our allies.2
I was not happy with that nearly simultaneously planning formulation for Major Theater Wars (MTWs):
According to the Quadrennial Defense Review’s recommendations, the Army must stay ready to fight two MTWs, nearly simultaneously. With budgetary pressures, the National Defense Panel’s review could be an opportunity to simply say that the Army needs to be prepared for only a single MTW. Our Army suddenly would be transformed on paper from dangerously overcommitted to more than large enough to fight a war and disperse troops in operations other than war around the globe. Yet by the same reasoning that says we can currently fight two MTWs nearly simultaneously, we could just as easily assert an ability to fight 100 MTWs nearly sequentially. This reasoning is shortsighted. Our “two-MTW” Army really gives us the margin to win a single MTW. Like our Cold War standards of fighting “two and a half,” “one and a half’ or “one plus” wars, our two-MTW strategy is more a goal than a concrete reality. In addition, our assumption that five Army divisions are enough to win a single MTW is flawed. The flaw is the simple fact that winning a battle “isn’t a victory unless it ends the war.”
One caveat to that final quote about battlefield victory and a victorious war is that we have to define what the “war” we are in is. I’ve argued that the Cold War and Long War against jihadi terrorists were really the wars comprised of numerous battles and campaigns that we sometimes labeled as “wars”. America could afford not to absolutely win those battles and campaigns as long as they helped win the actual wars.
America did that in 1989 as the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact alliance crumbled and reverberated into the USSR to fragment that contiguous empire into Russia and now-independent states on the frontiers of the Soviet empire.
And we may have done well enough by blunting and weakening the jihad that we began to fight after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks here at home.
Like that template for the Cold War and War on Terror, our current “war” may be to defend the global system we set up after World War II and which we are revising right now after the Russian Decline Era. For smaller allies and partners who think they can skimp on defense because America will provide enough power, they should think twice. What they may consider an existential war may simply be one battle or campaign in our war to maintain the global system. And America may be able to accept a limited win or even a loss under certain circumstances in the larger war.
Finally, the NDS lays out broad lines of efforts for our priorities. Nothing is shocking and I think this document is a fine basis for dealing with our enemies, allies, and partners in a much-changed strategic environment.
Yet no document is perfect and can’t predict the future. It must not be considered written in stone as reality punches us in the face in defiance of our plans, priorities, and lines of effort.
And more so than the end of the Cold War which began this process, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the key event that has ratified the end of the Russian Decline Era that justifies America not worrying about the defense of Europe nearly as much as it did for so long.
Eventually I settled on the term Major Theater War (MTW), but it’s a tomato/tomahto thing despite the debates over which to use.