December 10, 2020
Finding Strength in Decline
The U.S. Military Needs a Plan to Compete Without the Advantages of the Past
President-elect Joe Biden will enter office at a crucial time for the U.S. military. After decades of focusing on minor powers and substate actors, the United States must prepare for a new era of great-power competition with China and, to a lesser extent, with Russia. That realization makes the new administration’s review of U.S. defense strategy the most important of its kind since the end of the Cold War.
The United States must prepare for a new era of great-power competition with China and, to a lesser extent, with Russia.
Russia is a shadow of its Cold War self, but it retains its nuclear arsenal and has developed formidable cyberwarfare capabilities. Its conventional forces remain more than a match for those of NATO’s frontline states, stretching from Estonia to Bulgaria. China poses a much greater threat as a burgeoning economic, technological, and military superpower. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears intent on constructing an Orwellian state even as it presents its political and economic model as superior to that of the United States. In recent years, it has flexed economic and military muscle in pursuit of its ambitions, expanding territorial claims along its land and maritime borders and seeking to establish a hegemonic position in the western Pacific.
Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.
More from CNAS
-
Swarms over the Strait
Executive Summary Drones have transformed battlefields in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ukraine, but in a companion report, Evolution Not Revolution: Drone Warfare in Russia’s ...
By Stacie Pettyjohn, Hannah Dennis & Molly Campbell
-
Differentiating Innovation: From Performance Art to Production Scale
The Department of Defense has an innovation problem, and it’s not the one you are probably thinking about. Certainly, the Department needs to improve its ability to move with ...
By Andrew Metrick
-
The Pentagon Isn’t Buying Enough Ammo
Even in today’s constrained budget environment, the U.S. Defense Department needs to do more to prioritize munitions buys and prove it has learned the lessons of Ukraine....
By Stacie Pettyjohn & Hannah Dennis
-
Space to Grow
Executive Summary In the more than 50 years since the first satellite launch, space has become irrevocably intertwined with the American way of life and the American way of wa...
By Hannah Dennis