Great Power Competition and National Defense (US Report)

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Report to Congress on Great Power Competition and National Defense - USNI News

The following is the Oct. 29, 2020 report, Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress. From the report The post-Cold War era of international relations—which began in the early 1990s and is sometimes referred to as the unipolar moment (with the United States as...

news.usni.org

The renewal of great power competition has profoundly changed the conversation about U.S. defense issues from what it was during the post-Cold War era: Counterterrorist operations and U.S. military operations in the Middle East—which had moved to the center of discussions of U.S. defense issues following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and which continue to be conducted—are now a less-dominant element in the conversation, and the conversation now features a new or renewed emphasis on the following, all of which relate to China and/or Russia:

• grand strategy and the geopolitics of great power competition as a starting point for discussing U.S. defense issues;
• organizational changes within DOD;
• nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence;
• the global allocation of U.S. military force deployments;
• U.S. and allied military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region;
• U.S. and NATO military capabilities in Europe;
• new U.S. military service operational concepts;
• capabilities for conducting so-called high-end conventional warfare;
• maintaining U.S. superiority in conventional weapon technologies;
• innovation and speed of U.S. weapon system development and deployment;
• mobilization capabilities for an extended-length large-scale conflict;
• supply chain security, meaning awareness and minimization of reliance in U.S. military systems on foreign components, subcomponents, materials, and software; and
• capabilities for countering so-called hybrid warfare and gray-zone tactics.

(Full report can be viewed at link and/or downloaded there)