Pentagon plans for ‘long war’
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon laid out a new 20-year defense strategy Friday that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other untraditional threats, readying for what it calls a “long war.”
Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.
China is singled out as having “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States,” and the strategy in response calls for accelerating the fielding of a new Air Force long-range strike force, as well as for building undersea warfare capabilities.
The new strategy, summarized in a 92-page report, is a road map for allocating defense resources. It draws heavily on the lessons learned by the U.S. military since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations. The strategy significantly refines the formula – known as the “force planning construct” – for the types of major contingencies the U.S. military must be ready to handle.
Under the 2001 review, the Pentagon planned to be able to “swiftly defeat” two adversaries in overlapping military campaigns, with the option of overthrowing a hostile government in one. In the new strategy, one of those two campaigns can be a large-scale, prolonged “irregular” conflict, such as the counterinsurgency in Iraq.
Yet, although the Pentagon’s future course is ambitious in directing that U.S. forces become more versatile, agile and capable of tackling a far wider range of missions, it calls for no net increases in troop levels, and seeks no dramatic cuts or additions to currently planned weapons systems.
The new strategy marks a clear shift away from the Pentagon’s long-standing emphasis on conventional wars of tanks, fighter jets and destroyers against nation states. Instead, it concentrates on four new goals: defeating terrorist networks; countering nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; dissuading major powers such as China, India and Russia from becoming adversaries; and creating a more robust homeland defense.
Central to the first two goals is a substantial 15 percent increase in U.S. Special Operations Forces, or SOF, now with 52,000 personnel, including secret Delta Force operatives skilled in counterterrorism.
The review calls for a one-third increase in Army Special Forces battalions, whose troops are trained in languages and to work with indigenous fighters; an increase in Navy SEAL teams; and the creation of a new SOF squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles to “locate and target enemy capabilities” in countries where access is difficult.
To conduct strikes against terrorists and other enemies – work typically assigned to Delta Force members and SEAL teams – these forces will gain “an expanded organic ability to locate, tag and track dangerous individuals and other high-value targets globally,” the report says.