Is America losing her military edge?
David Wood has a good article on Iranian and Chinese efforts to create "no-go zones" where the U.S. military is unable to operate with impunity:
The United States, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. Potential target countries and even some lukewarm allies are figuring out ingenious ways to blunt American power without trying to meet it head-on, using a combination of high-tech and low-tech jujitsu.At the same time, U.S. naval and air forces have been shrinking under the weight of ever more expensive hardware. It's no longer the case that the United States can overwhelm clever defenses with sheer numbers.
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the problem this month, countries in places where the United States has strategic interests -- including the Persian Gulf and the Pacific -- are building "sophisticated, new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace.''
Those innocuous words spell trouble. While the U.S. military and strategy community is focused on Afghanistan and the fight in Marja, others â?? Iran and China, to name two â?? are chipping away at America's access to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and the increasingly critical extraterrestrial realms.
Now some of this we can chalk up to bureaucratic spin: it's hard to get worked up about the idea that other countries would plan their defense in such a way as to blunt U.S. strengths. I mean, what else are they supposed to do?
But some of this represents a conscious choice on behalf of the United States. As Wood's piece makes clear at the end, Secretary Gates has shifted the focus in the Pentagon to "winning the wars we're in." In other words, we are going to be investing more money in weapons and technologies useful for waging counter-insurgency and correspondingly less on systems and technologies useful for great power conflict (not that those won't still be funded). Still, in a world of limited resources you have to choose. Let's hope we've chosen wisely.
(AP Photo)
