New National Defense Strategy could leave adversaries, and allies, guessing: Analysts

WASHINGTON — As analysts digest the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, one theme seems to be coming up again and again: “ambiguity.”

The NDS is traditionally viewed as a guiding light for how the Pentagon will execute the geopolitical goals set out in the White House’s National Security Strategy. The public discussion around the NDS, therefore, tends to look for indications as to policy and investments that are to come. 

But according to four analysts who talked with Breaking Defense, the 2026 version of the NDS obscures more than it clarifies — leaving a lot of space for allies, enemies and national security watchers to try and fill in the blanks. 

“It’s very ambiguous, and I don’t know if they even recognize the contradictions that they’re creating,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, told Breaking Defense on Monday.

One source familiar with the document, however, said that’s not a mistake. The decision to leave some key specific country-level plans out of the unclassified version, the source said, was made so that real negotiations can take place behind closed doors, without public pronouncements that could ultimately get in the way of progress. 

The sense of ambiguity was not helped by the way the NDS appeared suddenly, in what in contrast to previous rollouts of the document felt like a news dump. 

The document was released with no warning at 7 PM on a Friday night, as the East Coast was bracing for a winter storm. As of Wednesday afternoon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had yet to issue a social media post, his primary way of communicating to the public, about it. (One industry official sent a note to Breaking Defense reading, simply, “What. The. Fuck Is. Happening.”)

“Releasing it late Friday night by just dropping it on a website is also pretty nontraditional,” said Mara Karlin, who helped craft the 2022 NDS while in the Pentagon. “This is supposed to be a splashy declaration that offers insight into how the department plans to spend around a trillion dollars. One should want to stand by that and proclaim it loudly.”

Broad Takeaways: Name-Dropping Trump, And Shift In Strategy

Analysts did have broad takeaways, primarily in how the 2026 edition contrasts with the 2022 edition by the Biden administration and the 2018 edition from the first Trump administration. 

One way is style: A number of analysts called out the political nature of the document. Notably, Trump’s name crops up 47 times in the document — Trump, of course, being the 47th president — while President Joe Biden’s last name surfaced only two times in the 2022 version his Pentagon produced. 

The latest strategy also takes political swipes at the Biden administration with an attached memo from Hegseth, saying the US government has been neglecting and rejecting “American interests” with previous administrations squandering military advantages. 

Karlin, currently a visiting researcher with the Brookings Institute, called this version “uncharacteristically political,” adding,  “No previous NDS has been either this partisan, or this vicious towards its predecessors.”

Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump admin who is now president of Fogbow, told Breaking Defense there are clear departures from those previous documents, especially since it does not label Russia as an adversary, pulls away from its historic allies in Europe and focuses primarily on controlling the Western Hemisphere.

“And we are seeing some of this play out in practice. Venezuela activities, Greenland, recalling ambassadors from the continent of Africa, withdrawal from dozens and dozens of international organizations,” Mulroy told Breaking Defense over the weekend. “Whether this strategy will continue past this administration is unknown. There are still many Republicans in the Reagan-wing of the party who would like to see it change.”

The Pentagon had been expected to focus on the homeland, though Karlin called it a bit of a departure since the US typically focus on the “away fight,” while this NDS is more a geographic approach instead of a strategic approach. 

“Its pretty clear their main threat is migrants and drugs,” she added. 

Brooking’s director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon called the significance of the NDS “modest” since there are few binding decisions or concrete policies.

“There’s a fair amount of bluster, but most of it is relatively harmless,” O’Hanlon wrote in a Monday email to Breaking Defense. 

Noting the Indo-Pacific is a top priority inside the NDS,  O’Hanlon said that the emphasis there is on Asia — China is the first topic of discussion after the Western Hemisphere — was “welcome.”

Meanwhile the “insouciance about Russia is somewhat concerning, but the commitment to NATO is reassuring.” The strategy says Russia will remain a “persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members,” but pointedly says US forces will be prepared to defend “against Russian threats to the U.S. Homeland.”

What that stance means for European security is among the unanswered questions.

“The public version is a bit vague but in many ways it’s clear enough about the priorities. It’s less ideological than the NSS, but just about as grim from a European perspective,” a European defense official told Breaking Defense. “In its own way, it is also a very clear call for Europe to be responsible for its own defense.”

Grieco did credit the Pentagon for creating a strategy document instead of other versions that “often just read like wish lists.”

“The question is of course if it is a coherent, successful strategy?” she added. “I don’t think it is.”

Force Plans To Come? 

For the better part of a year, there has been speculation on if the Trump administration would reduce the US troops presence in places like South Korea and Europe as part of the refocusing on the Western Hempheriere.

The NDS alone does not answer that question, but seemingly paves the path for a future shift, possibly in a future Global Force Posture Review.

“It actually creates ambiguity,” Grieco said about the NDS, as it leaves allies trying to interpret how they will be impacted. 

What does this mean for US forces stationed abroad? The language on Europe certainly seems to be indicating a withdrawal, as the NDS explicitly states that Europe should be able to handle Russia on its own, outside of, perhaps, nuclear weapons. 

What the force posture changes coming to the Pacific are harder to glean. Multiple administrations have listed China as the top peer competitor and attempted to refocus US military might on preparing for a possible conflict in the Indo-Pacific Theater. 

This time around, the 2026 NDS lists deterring China in the Indo-Pacific region as the second priority, noting that the department plans to focus on supporting strategic stability, deconfliction and de-escalation “more broadly” working to ensure “trade flow openly.” 

Karlin said she is assuming there will be some sort of downgrading and downsizing of the US presence in South Korea, pointing to language about Seoul being “capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring North Korea with critical but more limited U.S. support.”

She also pointed out that other key regional allies like Australia are not mentioned by name in the new NDS, and there is very little on Japan.

Hence, it’s notable that in the wake of the release, Elbridge Colby — the Pentagon’s top policy official who ran the NDS — made Seoul and Tokyo his first stops on a tour that seems designed to push the NDS out to partners and allies.

Speaking in South Korea Monday, Colby called the Indo-Pacific region the “primary center of gravity of global growth, a hub of global manufacturing” and specifically identified Seoul as “a model ally.” 

“With stakes of this magnitude, clarity matters,” Colby said according to a transcript posted on the Pentagon’s website. “Americans need to be clear-eyed about what our interests are in Asia, what we are prepared to do to defend those interests, and what a satisfactory equilibrium looks like.”

Interestingly, the NDS includes several references to “strong denial defense along the First Island Chain,” which would cover Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines. But the lack of details in the document once again leaves ambiguity, the analysts said. 

“It’s hard to know what that signals,” Grieco added. “It seems quite intentional that the word Taiwan is not in there, but what is it trying to signal? Is it just to avoid? To leave some ambiguity? To try to create pressure on Taiwan to do more for its defense?”

The source familiar with the document said that the First Island Chain mentions should be read as a commitment by the US towards the region, but that the ambiguity around what is covered was intentional, leaving more specific negotiations about force posture for behind closed doors – and leaving China guessing. The source also noted the $11 billion in arms sales approved by the Trump administration in December as a sign of the underlying commitment. 

Industrial Callouts

Unlike previous NDS documents, the newest contained a heavy emphasis on the defense industry, naming it fourth and final listed priority.  But even so, this topic only received three paragraphs of text and no roadmap for what it would take to “supercharge” the manufacturing base.

“Ideally, an NDS is a decoder ring for the activities of the Department of Defense over the coming years,” Karlin said. “It shows the philosophy of the secretary, how the resources will be spent, where attention will focus or not focus, how tradeoffs will be made. And it informs who the winners and losers are of the budgets and major decisions of the administration.” 

Karlin acknowledged that there are hints in the document justifying potential future investments in areas like nuclear, missile defense, cybersecurity, and counter-drone tech, but noted the lack of detail on those broad areas won’t help industry much. 

Grieco called the highlighting of industry “fascinating,” given that Pentagon leaders have spent so much time over the past 12 months working to streamline acquisition through a number of channels that has included software reform, buying more small drones, an overhaul of the Army’s acquisition workforce, and other sweeping changes to the way the department buys weapons. 

“The administration has actually made some … smart decisions with some of the procurement reforms it’s done, and regulatory reforms,” Grieco said.

“The [NDS] doesn’t even highlight its own initiatives and work in that area and it’s all just very, very vague. It’s a little bit strange,” she later added. 

Valerie Insinna and Aaron Mehta contributed to this report.