How do you fundamentally change the military posture of the United States without losing your job as president? You can increase military spending and expand the Pentagon’s mandate. If anyone questions you, you can accuse them of recklessly endangering national security. But what if you want to shrink the military?
In such a case, there is no avoiding the charge that you are recklessly endangering national security, so the safest bet is to wait until your second term in office when you won’t be facing the electorate again.
But what if you don’t want to wait until a second term, considering that you may not be reelected?
In that case, you’d probably want to make the changes as early in your first term as possible, while you still have a mandate and you have plenty of time for the debate to fade before you have to face the voters.
But, there’s another way. What Obama chose was to announce the change in an election year. He made sure that his foreign policy credentials, for both toughness and competence, were extremely well-established. He’s banking that he can’t be convincingly accused of weakening national security after he signed the START treaty, ordered the risky mission to kill Usama bin-Laden, ended the war in Iraq, and oversaw a, so far, successful mission in Libya. And he’s probably right.
It would be nice if a president could come into office and slash military spending and roll back the Pentagon’s mandate without weakening his or her administration and party. But it isn’t that easy. It takes careful preparation. It helps if some left-wingers are convinced they’re a warmonger and no different from the hawks they replaced. That provides cover, too.
Mr. Obama, who spoke surrounded by a tableau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in dress uniforms and with chests full of medals, underscored the national security successes of his administration — the ending of the Iraq war, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — before declaring that the United States would downsize to a smaller ground force, get rid of “outdated cold war-era systems” and step up investments in intelligence-gathering and cyberwarfare…
…The new strategy document finally defines away the Defense Department’s historic requirement to have the ability to fight and win two wars at once — a measure that one official said “has been on life-support for years.”
The strategy released under Mr. Obama in 2010 said the military was responsible for “maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.”
In contrast, the strategy released Thursday said the military must be able to fight one war, but is responsible only for “denying the objectives of — or imposing unacceptable costs on — an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”
The bottom line?
The change is also driven by a new age of austerity hitting the nation. As $350 billion in scheduled cuts are made over the next decade, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the military “will be smaller and leaner.” (The Pentagon says those cuts will result in a $480 billion cut to planned spending.)
It’s still not as much as I would like, but if you are going to be fair, Obama is delivering in a major way on reducing defense spending, and he’s doing it at a time that maximizes the risks to him politically.
I believe this shows both courage and leadership. I also think he did the groundwork to get away with it.
