2018 US National Defense Strategy Cover Shot

U.S. National Defense Strategy 2018

February 10, 2018 Fatih Siyasi 1375 Views U.S. National Defense Strategy

Inter-state competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security

Last month the U.S. Department of Defense released the Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of The United States of America. The eleven-page document (linked below) is a sanitized, unclassified synopsis of the classified 2018 National Defense Strategy that “articulates [America’s] strategy to compete, deter, and win” in a period of “global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order”, according to the introduction. “Inter-state competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”

This state of affairs is attributed to the rising influence of what the document refers to as the “revisionist powers” of Russia and China, echoing the new Cold War that the Obama Administration tried so hard to get going, as wells as Trump’s favorite bogeymen, North Korea and Iran. The “war on terror” theme that has been the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 still has some mileage left in it, so there is also an honorable mention for the threat of [radical Islamic] terrorism “[d]espite the defeat of ISIS’s physical caliphate.”

American Imperialism First!

Using what sounds like re-hashed Cold War terminology, the report paints efforts by the alleged bogeymen listed above to assert their influence in their respective regions, as well as their willingness to build their respective defense capabilities to a level that might present a real challenge to an American threat, as somehow posing a security threat to the United States. However, buying into this idea requires willful ignorance of the fact that the U.S. has a long history of attacking countries unprovoked. The rest of the world understands this as international polls have been showing for years that the world population views the United States of America as the number one threat to world peace.

The National Defense Strategy acknowledges both that (1) the United States is currently in “the longest continuous stretch of armed conflict” in its history, and that (2) there is concern regarding America’s influence on the global scene. But there is no discussion regarding the obvious connection between the two phenomena. Instead, the document stresses the need to ensure that “balances of power remain in our [America’s] favor” in the Indo-Pacific, European and Middle East regions. The theme of interstate competition, with a little bit of terrorism mixed in, will play well on television and in the boardrooms of the military industrial complex in its justification of America’s over-bloated national security apparatus.

Lies that only Americans continue to believe

However, the fact that the U.S. national defense strategy is so focused on regions that are thousands of miles away from American borders is telling of the real underlying theme of the U.S. “defense” strategy — U.S. imperialism. Although the document tries to give credit to the United States for the decline in the ISIS threat, as well as to the winding down of hostilities in Syria, everybody outside of the United States (and the mainstream media) knows that the opposite is true.

The Trump Administration has been making the same claims as of late, but the rest of the world is well aware that (1) U.S. interference in Syria likely prolonged and expanded the conflict, (2) ISIS defeat was the result of Russian military interference at the request of the sitting Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, and (3) the Syrian conflict is winding down due to recent cooperation between Russia, Iran and Turkey to the exclusion of the United States. The fact that U.S. imperialism is the number one thing eroding U.S. global influence has only further been underscored by Turkey’s invasion of northwest Syria in pursuit of American supported Kurdish forces, which Turkey deemed as terrorists long before there ever was a Syrian conflict.

Justifying Skynet and Star Wars

In an era where the United States outspends the next seven countries combined, shifting bogeymen around won’t be enough to keep feeding the military industry’s voracious appetite for taxpayer dollars. Enter the double-edge sword of rapid technological advancement. The 2018 National Defense Strategy asserts that underlying the state-competition/terrorism theme is a thread of technological threats, both real world and cyber threats, that are going to require the commitment of even more resources (and money).

If that wasn’t bad enough, the document actually identifies as some of America’s military goals some of the very things that science fiction has been warning us will bring about the end of the human race. Specifically the National Defense Strategy states “[n]ew technologies include advanced computing, ‘big data’ analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and biotechnology — the very technologies that ensure [America] will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.”

New technologies include advanced computing, “big data” analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and biotechnology — the very technologies that ensure [America] will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.

Autonomy is short for “advanced autonomous systems”. In other words, Skynet and the Terminators from the Terminator movies or the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. There’s also mention of “space and cyberspace as warfighting dimensions”, as well as “space forces” as part of the Pentagon’s “forward force maneuver and posture resilience” program.

Reading these passages gives me flashbacks to many warnings from science fiction over the past decades about the dangers of unchecked development of military technology. Unfortunately it looks like the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex it serves, took these warnings as inspiration instead of warning. Will the American empire survive long enough to have humanity wiped out by self-teaching AI drones armed with directed energy weapons from space? Or will America’s thirst for global dominance trigger World War III with the United States playing Germany in this sequel?

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