Now that the pandemic crisis is hammering America’s finances, U.S. strategy risks veering even further into permanent insolvency. Even before the crisis, the military demands of an intense global competition with China, Russia, and secondary competitors like Iran and North Korea were becoming financially untenable. Now, the costs of the current crisis — in both the short and long term — are likelyto lead to further cuts from the defense budget and may call into question the sustainability of major U.S. commitments. The United States is likely to soon be engaged in a painful exercise: undertaking a truly fundamental prioritization, identifying defense capabilities and commitments that can be abandoned, or pursued in more efficient ways, without undue risk. One item that needs to be on that list of priorities is expeditionary power projection.
