The defense strategy serves the broad national objectives of peace, freedom, and prosperity. Diplomatic and economic efforts seek to promote these objectives globally by encouraging democracy and free markets. U.S. defense strategy seeks to defend freedom for the United States and its allies and friends, and it helps to secure an international environment of peace that makes other goals possible.
Defense Policy Goals
The Department of Defense has developed a new strategic framework to defend the nation and secure a viable peace. This framework is built around four defense policy goals:
- Assuring allies and friends;
- Dissuading future military competition;
- Deterring threats and coercion against U.S. interests; and
- If deterrence fails, decisively defeating any adversary.
Assuring Allies and Friends. The United States cannot retreat from the world. The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitment to allies and friends. The U.S. military plays a critical role in assuring allies and friends that the Nation will honor its obligations and will be a reliable security partner. Through its willingness to use force in its own defense and that of others and to advance common goals, the United States demonstrates its resolve and steadiness of purpose and the credibility of the U.S. military to meet the Nation's commitments and responsibilities. Toward these ends, the U.S. military will promote security cooperation with allies and friendly nations. A primary objective of U.S. security cooperation will be to help allies and friends create favorable balances of military power in critical areas of the world to deter aggression or coercion. Security cooperation serves as an important means for linking DoD's strategic direction with those of U.S. allies and friends.
Dissuading Future Military Competition. Through its strategy and actions, the United States influences the nature of future military competitions, channels threats in certain directions, and complicates military planning for potential adversaries in the future. Well targeted strategy and policy can therefore dissuade other countries from initiating future military competitions. The United States can exert such influence through the conduct of its research, development, test, and demonstration programs. It can do so by maintaining or enhancing advantages in key areas of military capability. Given the availability of advanced technology and systems to potential adversaries, dissuasion will also require the United States to experiment with revolutionary operational concepts, capabilities, and organizational arrangements and to encourage the development of a culture within the military that embraces innovation and risk-taking. To have a dissuasive effect, this combination of technical, experimental, and operational activity has to have a clear strategic focus. New processes and organizations are needed within the defense establishment to provide this focus.
Deterring Threats and Coercion Against U.S. Interests. A multifaceted approach to deterrence is needed. Such an approach requires forces and capabilities that provide the President with a wider range of military options to discourage aggression or any form of coercion. In particular, it places emphasis on peacetime forward deterrence in critical areas of the world. It requires enhancing the future capability of forward deployed and stationed forces, coupled with global intelligence, strike,2 and information assets, in order to deter aggression or coercion with only modest reinforcement from outside the theater. Improving intelligence capabilities is particularly important, as these assets provide U.S. forces with critical information on adversaries' intentions, plans, strengths, and weaknesses. This new approach to deterrence also requires non-nuclear forces that can strike with precision at fixed and mobile targets throughout the depth of an adversary's territory; active and passive defenses; and rapidly deployable and sustainable forces that can decisively defeat any adversary. A final aspect of deterrence, addressed not in the QDR but in the Nuclear Posture Review3, is related to the offensive nuclear response capability of the United States.
If Deterrence Fails, Decisively Defeat Any Adversary. U.S. forces must maintain the capability to support treaty obligations and defeat the efforts of adversaries to impose their will on the United States, its allies, or friends. U.S. forces must maintain the capability at the direction of the President to impose the will of the United States and its coalition partners on any adversaries, including states or non-state entities. Such a decisive defeat could include changing the regime of an adversary state or occupation of foreign territory until U.S. strategic objectives are met.
Strategic Tenets
These defense policy goals are supported by an interconnected set of strategic tenets. It is only through careful attention and commitment to each of these tenets that the defense policy goals will be achieved. These tenets comprise the essence of U.S. defense strategy.
Managing Risks
The United States faces a world in which change occurs with ever- increasing speed. New challenges are constantly emerging, while longstanding threats endure. DoD must prepare for future challenges over time, while meeting extant threats at any given time. This tension between preparations for the future and the demands of the present requires the United States to balance the risks associated with each. Because resources are always finite, hard choices must be made that take into account a wider range of risks than was necessary in the past. Some of these risks are familiar, such as the possibility of a major war. Other risks - such as the possibilities of mass casualty terrorism, cyber warfare, or CBRNE warfare - are less well understood. Through the QDR, the Department has developed a new defense strategy and an associated risk management framework, and is in the process of building new performance measures, both to better manage the risks the United States faces and to meet the defense policy goals.
A Capabilities-Based Approach
The new defense strategy is built around the concept of shifting to a "capabilities-based" approach to defense. That concept reflects the fact that the United States cannot know with confidence what nation, combination of nations, or non-state actor will pose threats to vital U.S. interests or those of U.S. allies and friends decades from now. It is possible, however, to anticipate the capabilities that an adversary might employ to coerce its neighbors, deter the United States from acting in defense of its allies and friends, or directly attack the United States or its deployed forces. A capabilities-based model - one that focuses more on how an adversary might fight than who the adversary might be and where a war might occur - broadens the strategic perspective. It requires identifying capabilities that U.S. military forces will need to deter and defeat adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives. Moving to a capabilities-based force also requires the United States to focus on emerging opportunities that certain capabilities, including advanced remote sensing, long-range precision strike, transformed maneuver and expeditionary forces and systems, to overcome anti-access and area denial threats, can confer on the U.S. military over time.
Defending the United States and Projecting U.S. Military Power
Defending the Nation from attack is the foundation of strategy. As the tragic September terror attacks demonstrate, potential adversaries will seek to threaten the centers of gravity of the United States, its allies, and its friends. As the U.S. military increased its ability to project power at long- range, adversaries have noted the relative vulnerability of the U.S. homeland. They are placing greater emphasis on the development of capabilities to threaten the United States directly in order to counter U.S. operational advantages with their own strategic effects. Therefore, the defense strategy restores the emphasis once placed on defending the United States and its land, sea, air, and space approaches. It is essential to safeguard the Nation's way of life, its political institutions, and the source of its capacity to project decisive military power overseas. In turn, the ability to project power at long ranges helps to deter threats to the United States and, when necessary, to disrupt, deny, or destroy hostile entities at a distance.
Strengthening Alliances and Partnerships
America's alliances and security relations give assurance to U.S. allies and friends and pause to U.S. foes. These relationships create a community of nations committed to common purposes. The defense strategy is premised on efforts to strengthen America's alliances and partnerships and to develop new forms of security cooperation. The American commitment to these security arrangements bolsters the security of U.S. allies and friends. Likewise, as witnessed in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States, NATO's invocation of Article V demonstrates the commitment of America's partners to collective defense, which bolsters the security of the United States. These mutually reinforcing security relationships underpin the political stability on which the prosperity of civilized nations is built. And these arrangements are based on the recognition that a nation can be safe at home only if it is willing and able to contribute to effective security partnerships abroad.
The need to strengthen alliances and partnerships has specific military implications. It requires that U.S. forces train and operate with allies and friends in peacetime as they would operate in war. This includes enhancing interoperability and peacetime preparations for coalition operations, as well as increasing allied participation in activities such as joint and combined training and experimentation.
Maintaining Favorable Regional Balances
The defense strategy also places emphasis on maintaining favorable military balances in critical geographic areas. By maintaining such balances, the United States can secure peace, extend freedom, and assure its allies and friends. It can create high costs on a decision by potential adversaries to pursue dangerous forms of military competition. Finally, it may convince potential adversaries that the benefits of hostile acts against the interests of the United States are far outweighed by their costs and consequences.
Developing a Broad Portfolio of Military Capabilities
Creating substantial margins of advantage across key functional areas of military competition (e.g., power projection, space, and information) will require developing and sustaining a portfolio of key military capabilities to prevail over current challenges and to hedge against and dissuade future threats. Building upon the current superiority of U.S. conventional forces, this portfolio will include capabilities for conducting information operations, ensuring U.S. access to distant theaters, defending against threats to the United States and allied territory, and protecting U.S. assets in space. It will also require exploiting U.S. advantages in superior technological innovation; its unmatched space and intelligence capabilities; its sophisticated military training; and its ability to integrate highly distributed military forces in synergistic combinations for highly complex joint military operations.
Transforming Defense
Finally, the defense strategy calls for the transformation of the U.S. military and Defense establishment over time. Transformation is at the heart of this new strategic approach. The Department's leadership recognizes that continuing "business as usual" within the Department is not a viable option given the new strategic era and the internal and external challenges facing the U.S. military. Without change, the current defense program will only become more expensive to maintain over time, and it will forfeit many of the opportunities available to the United States today. Without transformation, the U.S. military will not be prepared to meet emerging challenges. At the same time, it would be imprudent to transform the entire force all at once. A balance must be struck between the need to meet current threats while transforming the force over time. Therefore, the Department is committed to undertaking a sustained process of transformation - based on clear goals - and strengthening the spirit of innovation in its people, while remaining prepared to deal with extant threats.
2. "Strike," as used in this report, is meant to represent the nature of the military objectives sought, not necessarily the weapons used. Strike capabilities may include not only long-range precision attacks delivered from aircraft and missiles, but also appropriately structured ground force attacks, naval fires, and other capabilities, depending on the circumstances - and particularly combinations of these capabilities.
3. The Nuclear Posture Review is mandated by the Congress and due in December 2001. It will describe the size, structure, and posture of the nation's nuclear forces and the contribution they can make to deterrence in the coming decades.
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