|
In response to
"China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, offers robust support for Putin."
by
crash davis
|
A Pentagon strategy document outlines more dangerous challenges posed by Russia and China
|
WASHINGTON — Eight months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as China pushes to increase its nuclear, space and cyberforces, the Pentagon outlined a sweeping new strategy on Thursday that called for more robust deterrence at an increasingly tense moment in international security.
The document, the National Defense Strategy, which also includes reviews of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defenses, has been circulating for months in classified form on Capitol Hill. The unclassified version published on Thursday is devoid of much specificity about how the Pentagon will shift its weapons and personnel to fit a new era of heightened superpower competition.
The last national defense strategy, published in 2018 by the Trump administration, was the first since the end of the Cold War to refocus U.S. defenses on what it called the twin “revisionist” powers of China and Russia. President Biden’s document builds on that theme but distinguishes between describing China as a “pacing” technological and military challenger, and Russia as an “acute” threat but a declining power.
It prioritizes threats to the country, maps out the military’s response in broad terms and guides Pentagon policy and budget decisions on a range of issues, such as what weapons to develop and the shape of the armed forces.
The new document describes a Russia armed with 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons and not bound by any treaty that limits the number, raising “the possibility it would use these forces to try to win a war on its periphery or avoid defeat if it was in danger of losing a conventional war.”
That is exactly what President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has threatened.
— Eric Schmitt, David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
|