A new eye-opening report from the Pentagon concluded that the U.S.-backed framework of international order established after World War II is slowly crumbling, putting the longtime superpower at risk of losing its position of “primacy” on the world stage.
The report, published on June 29, cites a year-long research effort by the U.S. Army War College examining the Department of Defense’s approach to assessing risk at all levels of military and strategic planning policies for the Pentagon. It noted that while the U.S. continues to be an economic, military and political power, it no longer holds an “unassailable position” against world competitors.
“In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has, for decades, been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing,” the report states.
Having lost its prior status of “pre-eminence,” the document declared that America is now part of a dangerous, unstable “competitive, post-primacy” world whose defining feature is “resistance to authority.” This eminent danger not only comes from rival powers like China and Russia, who’ve upped their military efforts and threats against American interests, but also from Arab Spring-style events, which made headlines in 2010.
The Pentagon’s findings attributed the U.S.’s power decline to the fact that the world has entered a new phase of transformation where the international order and the authority of governments everywhere are slowly deteriorating.
“This new post-primacy period is distinct from either of the previously mentioned eras,” the report stated, adding that, “Consequential global events will happen faster than the DoD is currently equipped to handle. U.S. defense capabilities and concepts will rarely be a perfect fit for the conditions they encounter.”
To help begin to solve this issue, researchers called on senior defense leadership to invest in more surveillance and essentially expand the military if the U.S. ever wants to regain its stature as a global superpower. They also suggested a few recommendations that involved efforts to adopt an objectives-based approach to enterprise-level risk assessment and plan to integrate core alliances and partners into the risk-assessment process.
“If preservation of maximum freedom of action is the objective, future risk assessments at the strategic and military levels of analysis will need to account for a much broader set of threats and threat vectors,” the report concludes.
“From this point forward, hazards to core interests and enduring defense objectives will be more diverse and … preservation and extension of U.S. military advantage will require a more nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of both the advantages and limitations of U.S. and partner military forces.”