U.S. Paratroopers conduct sling load training in Poland

U.S. Paratroopers assigned to 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division conduct sling load training in Zamość, Poland, March 18, 2022.(US Marine Corps/Sgt. James Bourgeois)

WASHINGTON: Defense policy wonks, get ready to add the phrase “acute threat” to your Pentagon bingo card.

That’s the term Defense Department leaders are using to describe Russia in its new defense strategy and budget. It’s an attempt to differentiate the very near-term threat of Russia from the longer-term, whole of government challenge of China, and you’re about to start hearing it everywhere.

“Russia poses an acute threat to the world order, as illustrated by its unprovoked invasion and vicious tactics [in Ukraine],” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Monday, during a rollout of the fiscal 2023 budget.

“Even as we confront Russia’s malign activities, the defense strategy describes how the department will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence with the [People’s Republic of China] as our most consequential strategic competitor and pacing challenge,” she said. China “has the military, economic and technological potential to challenge the international system and our interests within it.”

The Pentagon delivered the classified version of the National Defense Strategy to Capitol Hill on Monday in tandem with the release of the FY23 budget — an attempt to ensure that the proposed spending plan is viewed by lawmakers as being closely linked to the strategy.

The unclassified version will be released “in the coming months,” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl tweeted Monday evening. In the meantime, those without a security clearance will have to be content with the two-page fact sheet on the new strategy released by the Pentagon on Monday.

The Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy marked a distinct shift in US defense policy, stipulating that the Pentagon would pivot towards focusing on its greatest strategic competitor: China.

While the Biden administration’s strategy seems to uphold that view, calling Russia an “acute threat” is a new turn of phrase — and one that has been used not only by Hicks during budget briefings, but also by senior leaders such as Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Army budget director Maj. Gen. Mark Bennett.

So what does that mean?

“Acute is a sharper, sort of more immediate word,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I think that’s a response to Ukraine, and the fact that this is not a long term challenge, it is immediate, happening today.”

Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense programs at the Center for a New American Security, agreed that the change in terminology likely reflects the ongoing war in Ukraine, signaling the “urgent, pressing threat” posed by Russia due to its role in launching the conflict.

“But what I don’t like about it is just that it sort of implies to me that it is going to be acute, but that you’re going to move past it quickly. It’s not something chronic,” she said.

The idea of Russia as the “second-place” threat to China was echoed by Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the deputy assistant Navy secretary for budget, during a budget briefing on Monday.

This budget gets after a near-peer competitor, of which Russia is not,” he told reporters.  “Now, they have nuclear weapons and that’s concerning, but they are not a near-peer competitor.”

Pettyjohn said Russia’s stockpile of nuclear weapons suggests that it should be not be underestimated in US strategy, even as if it continues to decline both militarily and economically — a trajectory that will likely worsen in the future as it tries to recover from its losses during its war with Ukraine and the crippling sanctions that have shut it out from the global market.

“[The strategy] seems a bit dismissive of Russia. And Russia isn’t the same type of threat [as China], but it also could potentially be a more dangerous threat as a declining power — often it’s states that are facing this irreversible type of decline that lash out,” Pettyjohn said. “There is a real risk, I think, of escalation with what’s happening in Ukraine should the West decide to intervene, or depending on what happens on the ground.”

Experts Looking For Strategic Clarity After A “Pretty Mushy” Fact Sheet

There appears to be a great deal of continuity between the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the upcoming version, at least based on the preliminary information provided in the fact sheet.

China continues to be the pacing threat for the US military, and Hicks said the new strategy retains the same force sizing construct as the 2018 version: How can the US military defeat a major power in a conflict, while also deterring opportunistic aggression by a second entity elsewhere?

“Our classified NDS that we’ve shared with Congress goes into great, great detail in how we come at that issue of force sizing and provides a lot of forward-looking analysis in terms of how we will measure ourselves,” she said Monday.

“It’s very often in this town that folks are focused on a particular number — even dollar values but also numbers of platforms. We absolutely took a hard-nosed analytic look at what are the effects that we can create, and we use that to drive us in this strategy.”

The fact sheet lays out three ways that the department will achieve its goals:

  • Integrated deterrence, which entails “developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect, by working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, other instruments of U.S. national power, and our unmatched network of Alliances and partnerships.”
  • Campaigning, the term the department is using to describe a new way of operating forces, so as to complicate an adversary’s military preparations and pose logistics challenges
  • Building enduring advantages, which involves internal changes such as acquisition reform or investments in professional development

Cancian pointed out that the fact sheet also references “changes in global climate and other dangerous transboundary threats, including pandemics” — two areas of emphasis that would not likely be a major focus for the Pentagon if former President Donald Trump had won the 2020 election.

Both Cancian and Pettyjohn said they would be looking for the full, unclassified strategy to lay out clear objectives for how it will accomplish its goals.

“I look at those two pages, and it’s pretty mushy,” Cancian said. “I hope that the full document has more substance to it than these two pages.”

The Pentagon has made “integrated deterrence” the cornerstone of the new strategy, and it has emerged as the latest buzzword used by senior leaders. But because the concept calls for leveraging other US agencies or international partners in order to amass power, one major question moving forward, according to Pettyjohn, is “is everybody else going to get on board with that?”

Justin Katz and Andrew Eversden contributed to this report.