Changing the focus of the military going forward

Bill Gertz and Sara Carter:

The Pentagon is reorienting U.S. military forces toward battling insurgents and terrorists, and on Monday released its new four-year strategy and a $708 billion defense budget request to support it.

Despite the cancellation of numerous weapons projects, the defense spending request to Congress grew by 3.4 percent from 2010, with $159.3 billion to be allocated for U.S. military missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. That war funding adds on to a base Pentagon budget of $548.9 billion.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the new strategy and budget reflect an effort to "enhance our ability to fight the wars we are in today, while at the same time providing a hedge against current and future risks and contingencies."

"We have, in a sober and clear-eyed way, assessed risk, set priorities, made trade-offs, and identified requirements based on plausible, real-world threats, scenarios and potential adversaries," Mr. Gates told reporters at the Pentagon.

The Quadrennial Defense Review, which was made public separately Monday and reflected the budget's emphasis on counterinsurgency, lists China as one of the United States' main "potentially hostile" nations, along with North Korea and Iran.

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The new strategy abandons the decades-long policy of maintaining large numbers of troops and weapons that could fight two major regional wars at the same time, for example in the Middle East and Asia.

The immediate priority of U.S. military strategy will be the "substantial" forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said, noting that the conflicts "will substantially determine the size and shape of major elements of U.S. military forces for several years."

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The focus seems to reflect the reality of the current threats the military must deal with. If you break down those threats into counterinsurgency and major combat operations, Iran and North Korea fit the latter. China is a whole other animal and it would depend on where and how the Chinese attempted to use their forces. I guess Hugo Chavez was disappointed to find he did not rate a mention.