The Defense Department announced on Monday that it has concluded its Global Posture Review. The review is a worldwide assessment of U.S. military bases, access arrangements, and forces. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said it will “improve our global response capability and inform the draft of the next National Defense Strategy.”
Actually, this review represents a missed opportunity.
China is the preeminent threat facing the United States. No other nation comes close to displaying the military might and economic power that Beijing possesses — or the influence that it could exert. Within decades, Asia is expected to account for nearly half of the world’s GDP. Should China become the dominant power in the region, it will seek to impose its will on its neighbors, exerting a decisive influence on the world’s economy and on the lives of everyday Americans.
This prospect should alarm us.
In recent months, China has threatened both Taiwan and Lithuania and lied about conducting a hypersonic weapons test. The Pentagon’s recent report on Chinese military power estimates that Beijing is rapidly expanding its capability to project power, including its nuclear arsenal. Accordingly, countering and deterring Chinese aggression has become a stated priority for the U.S. and some of its allies. The Biden administration has even sought to connect the Global Posture Review to these efforts. The review, Pentagon officials told reporters, “will strengthen the department’s focus on China by reducing posture requirements in other theaters to enable improved warfighting readiness and increase activities in the Indo Pacific.” The region is the “priority theater,” and China is the “pacing challenge,” Pentagon officials said.
As Becca Wasser, a fellow at the Center for New American Security, noted, normally, the Global Posture Review is merely meant to “provide a baseline to measure future deployments and posture requests.” However, in this case, the Pentagon has explicitly linked the review to countering China. And by this metric, it has failed. The review recommended the tough decisions that are necessary to deter China. As Andrew Eversden reported, it ultimately concluded that no major strategic shifts are needed. Pentagon officials say that some operational level adjustments and a few unannounced measures will occur, but that’s about it.
What was needed, however, was a big rethink in U.S. defense posture, a rethink predicated on not only the growing threat posed by China but on current and projected U.S. capabilities and defense spending. The U.S. faces severe constraints, both military and economic, as well as declining popular support for foreign interventions. This means that to deter China, the U.S. must prioritize competing with China. This requires shifting forces and bases from elsewhere in the world to the Indo-Pacific. The Global Posture Review, which is supposed to be the foundation for the National Defense Strategy, does not fulfill this need.
As Alex Velez-Green, the national security adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley, observed, the review was an “opportunity for the DoD to show it’s serious about focusing its scarce resources on deterring China … That means doing less elsewhere.” Velez-Green correctly noted that the review was “an opportunity missed. And we don’t have the time or luxury for that.”
Others have also found the review to be underwhelming, at best. Craig Singleton of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has said that it “does almost nothing to reposition for China.”
The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, recently said that the rise of China is “one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power” in history. Someone might want to tell the rest of the Pentagon. The U.S. is on cruise control, and its complacency will be costly.
And perhaps very bloody.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
