The Obama Administration recently released a military strategic category_idance document, which calls for a strategic \u201cpivot\u201d from the Middle East to East Asia. This bold move replaces President George W. Bush’s \u201clong war\u201d against violent Islamic extremism with a new, ongoing effort to shape China’s military rise.<\/p>\n
What are the strategic, military trade-offs of this historic shift? Wikistrat, the world’s first massively multiplayer online consultancy, recently tapped its global network of several hundred analysts to ponder this question. This online network offers a uniquely powerful and unprecedented strategic consulting service: the Internet’s only central intelligence exchange for strategic analysis and forecasting, delivered – for the first time – in a real-time, interactive platform. Exclusive to GPS, here are Wikistrat’s top ten strategic, military issues to bear in mind as this \u201cpivot\u201d unfolds:<\/p>\n
1. America will focus on machines, not people<\/strong> 2. Cyberwarfare will grow fast; counterinsurgency will wither<\/strong> 3. An East Asian replacement of NATO?<\/strong> 4. America, the arms merchant<\/strong> 5. The decline of the Obama Doctrine<\/strong> 6. China tries to stiff-arm the U.S. navy<\/strong><\/p>\n Continue reading: The Obama Administration recently released a military strategic category_idance document, which calls for a strategic \u201cpivot\u201d from the Middle East<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Admin","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"The Obama Administration recently released a military strategic category_idance document, which calls for a strategic \u201cpivot\u201d from the Middle East","magazineBlocksPostCategories":[],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":146,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":4,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg",113,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA pivot to East Asia brings America back to its strategic roots of protecting the world’s oceans, airspace, and outer space \u2013 the global commons. This mission is heavily dependent on machines such as aircraft carriers, stealth fighter jets, and satellites. It is less dependent on soldiers manning a distant battlefield. Now, since machines \u2013 aka \u201cplatforms\u201d \u2013 are super-expensive (e.g., billions for a single carrier), this shift will accelerate the already significant embrace of cheaper unmanned vehicles \u2013 drones that patrol the skies and seas, thus ensuring humans see even less of each other.<\/p>\n
\nAnthropologists are out and hackers are in. America now prefers simply killing terrorists to the time-consuming and expensive task of winning \u201chearts and minds.\u201d This means that the decade-long effort of the Army and Marines to revive this skill-set will go to waste \u2013 just as it did after Vietnam. Expect the Pentagon to be forced to relearn all those lessons \u2013 yet again \u2013 somewhere down the road. Until then, bet on cyber security sucking up every loose dollar in the shrinking defense budget. The scary part? Mess up counter-insurgency and you get a quagmire, but mess up cyber warfare and . . . nobody’s quite sure what you get.<\/p>\n
\nEurope’s population is rapidly aging and all its fiscal fights seem to be over growing entitlement burdens, so forget about our old allies being there for us when the shooting starts anywhere distant from their shores. Afghanistan drained NATO and Libya was its last-gasp stand. A strategic pivot to East Asia suggests that America will be highly incentivized to strengthen its existing bilateral military alliances into something more coherently anti-Chinese, if only to counter’s Beijing’s open attempts to foster regional economic integration that excludes the U.S. An East Asian NATO would be designed to keep America in, China down, and Russia \u2013 as always \u2013 out.<\/p>\n
\nYes, U.S. defense spending will go down as the U.S. concentrates its presence in East Asia. In an effort to compensate for it’s lack of presence, it will cover its strategic retreat from everywhere else by selling arms galore, like it’s been doing in the Middle East these past several years. Then there are all the arms to be sold to that \u201ccoalition of the nervous\u201d in East Asia \u2013 Japan, Korea, Australia\u2026namely, everybody but China. Cha-ching!<\/p>\n
\nYou witnessed the new drill in Libya: America provides some logistics, intelligence and firepower from afar, but expects other nations \u2013 as well as concerned locals \u2013 to really do the gritty fighting on the ground. It’s called \u201cleading from behind\u201d but it should really be described as \u201cleading from above,\u201d because it’s designed to keep the U.S. above the initial fray and subsequent quagmire. Question is: if NATO is slowly going out of business, who is going to wage these ground wars in its place? Look for the U.S. to expand ties with regional security groupings like the African Union and the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council.<\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com\/2012\/01\/15\/top-ten-military-strategic-issues-from-obamas-pivot-to-east-asia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"