In the military, an old adage still rings true: “Amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics.”
Especially important for small unit leaders, it’s a reminder that there are finite quantities of ammunition, food, water, medical supplies, batteries, and other critical materials to support a given operation. Any military undertaking, no matter how important the objective or how brilliant the scheme of maneuver, is limited to what can be logistically sustained.
The same is true of strategy.
No matter how vital the national interest at stake or what instrument of power is used, a nation’s foreign policy is limited by what it can reasonably support. Resources, especially military and economic resources, are scarce and zero-sum. Ships, aircraft, missiles, and troops cannot be in two places at once. An economy is only so large, and an industrial base can only produce so much. There are real limits to a state’s power. It is the duty of the strategist to develop a plan for allocating a state’s limited resources against prioritized geopolitical objectives using the diplomatic, military, economic, and informational instruments at its disposal. This scarcity, therefore, circumscribes state action. We are limited to the art of the possible.
In this sense, the Biden administration’s recently released National Defense Strategy is plagued by inherent contradictions. Along with its parent National Security Strategy, it emphasizes the 2020s as the supposed “decisive decade,” particularly in the competition with China, while outlining a plan that sheds military capacity and capability in this decade in order to invest in modernization programs that will bear fruit in the 2030s. This so-called divest-to-invest strategy assumes risk precisely in the “decisive decade” when Washington ought to be executing a full-court press.
The defense strategy’s capstone concept of “integrated deterrence” is another inherent contradiction. It proposes to rely on other instruments of power, such as diplomacy and economic statecraft, in order to make up for projected military shortfalls. Notwithstanding the illogic of this concept coming out of the Pentagon rather than the White House, which is supposed to synchronize all the elements of statecraft, these other instruments are largely outside the Pentagon’s control. Moreover, we have already witnessed the empirical failure of integrated deterrence in the case of Russia and Ukraine. Untethered from the prospect of military force, economic sanctions and diplomacy held little deterrent value. Integrated deterrence is a distraction from what ought to be the military’s overriding task: preparing for, and thereby seeking to deter, a major power war against China along the first island chain.
To be sure, there are some redeeming qualities to the new defense strategy, including many continuities from the Trump administration’s document. At its core, the Biden defense strategy clearly prioritizes China over all other threats, including over Russia, even after the Ukraine invasion, optimizes U.S. forces for a denial defense along the first island chain, and maintains the one-war force planning construct. These are prudent, if fairly obvious, choices. Any strategy is only as good as its execution, however. When we juxtapose the Biden defense strategy with the administration’s actions to date, its flippancy comes into focus.
Two budgetary cycles in a row, the administration has proposed real cuts to the annual defense authorization, particularly in the procurement and operations accounts that would fund near-term preservation of capability and capacity. Even the Democratic-controlled House and Senate were obliged to supplement the administration’s paltry proposals. The expansive catalogs of “we wills” and “we musts” in the security and defense strategies ring hollow given this inadequacy: Biden talks like Kennedy but spends like Carter or Clinton.
Even more troubling is the profligacy with which the administration has allocated its military resources to Europe over the Indo-Pacific region, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many of the systems and munitions Washington has provided Kyiv would have substantial utility in a U.S.-China defense planning scenario, and the added production to make up for this provision will have outsize opportunity costs given the anemic capacity of the defense industrial base.
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine escalation in February, Biden has actually increased U.S. force posture in Europe by about 20,000 troops, bringing the total to over 100,000. This is irrational because the threat to NATO has decreased, given the attrition of Russian military power, which ought to allow an opportunity to shift resources to the Indo-Pacific. This all combines to erode the delicate military balance in Asia. Policymakers love to talk about the “why” and “what” of foreign policy — the geopolitical ends and various ways to get there. It is the strategist’s duty to connect these aspirations with a realistic appraisal of the “how.”
Limited means necessitate focus and choice. This is where we are failing, to the detriment of deterrence.
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Austin Dahmer is an analyst and consultant on national security policy and defense strategy. Follow him @austinjdahmer.
