President Obama announced a new military review on 5 January(US time), 2012. For some reason or other he did it at Pentagon this time, unlike his previous annoucements(see my comment on Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars, 23 May 2011).
The main point of the annoucement is to change the 'outdated cold war-era systems'. Paraphrasing this the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, said that 'The two-war paradigm...is a residual of the cold war.' and therefore is going to be abandoned. The policy of fighting on two fronts simultaneously, which reminds us of the German strategist, Alfred Schlieffen, will have no place in the new military arrangement. This inevitably means cut in spending, and it will be introduced in the Army and the Marines.
The US was not able to fight even one single major war recently, let alone two, which is apparent from the unmanageable situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reducing its military mission is absolutely necessary for the US herself.
But not all the Americans are able to adjust themselves to the reality. After winning the New Hampshire Republican primary five days later, Mr.Mitt Romney criticized that Obama was weakening the US militarily.
Obama on his part, as if anticipating this, said that 'Yes, our military will be leaner, but the world must know that the US is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats.'
But how is this superiority to be deployed in geographical terms? It is in the Asia-Pacific. Said Dempsey, 'Our strategic challenges will largely emanate out of the Pacific region.' Some one was heard to say in the Press Conference that 'China wants to conquor the world.' How it is possible to try to get out of the 'outdated cold war-era systems' but at the same time to entertain this kind of war-like mentality is not easy to understand. After the cold war, the US tried to look for a new enemy, in order to keep its military-industrial complex always in good shape, while creating some formidable ones. It now seems to have come back to the time of the Korean War, when the US forces desperately fought the massive Chinese land forces in the rugged North Korea for months and months, although nobody really thinks of the possibility of the reemergence of those scenes.
There are also several sifnificant changes that have occured since then. One of them is the presence of economically and militarily strong, but politically and culturally silent, Japan, which is firmly allied to the US. How is the new US stance going to affect Japan, and how is Japan going to interact with it?
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