Regaining strategic competence

Regaining strategic competence

[Washington, D.C.]

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

2009

xi, 49 pages

Strategy for the long haul series

Reversing this decline in US strategic competence is an urgent issue for American national security in the twenty-first century. The reason lies in the multi-faceted security challenges that the United States now faces. The three challenges most likely to persist and possibly grow more acute in coming years are: defeating both the Sunni Salafi-Takfiri and Shia Khomeinist brands of Islamist radicalism; hedging against the rise of a more confrontational or hostile China; and preparing for a world in which there are progressively more nuclear-armed regional powers than there were in the early 1990s. These challenges present the United States with a more complex and diverse array of security concerns than did the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Islamist radicalism and nuclear proliferation present challenges far different from the large-scale, high-intensity, non-nuclear (or 'conventional') warfare at which the US military excels. At the same time, the Chinese military appears to be systematically targeting weaknesses in the current American way of war, especially US power projection in the western Pacific and dependence on space systems.

Английский