The U.S. Needs a New Strategy

The U.S. has far too many commitments around the world, and it cannot realistically honor all of them with the forces that it has today.

Gil Barndollar and Matthew Mai discussed the U.S. military’s recruitment problems in an article for Vox two weeks ago. It’s worth reading in full, but framing recruitment shortfalls as a “crisis” avoids the more important question of whether current U.S. strategy makes any sense. The U.S. has far too many commitments around the world, and it cannot realistically honor all of them with the forces that it has today. Given the difficulty that the military has meeting its recruiting goals right now, policymakers should be focused on how they can responsibly reduce U.S. commitments. Some of that will involve shifting the burden permanently to allies in as many places as possible, and some of that will require reassessing U.S. interests in certain parts of the world. The U.S. cannot sustain a strategy of global dominance, and so it needs a much less ambitious and less militarized strategy.