Pentagon defends Obama's plan for leaner military

WASHINGTON -- Top Pentagon officials stressed Thursday that even the shrinking military they envision under President Obama's new strategy will be strong enough to take on all comers, a view not shared by some leaders on Capitol Hill.

For decades, fighting and winning two wars at once has been an underlying tenet for Pentagon planners. The strategy announced Thursday foresees a smaller Army and Marine Corps, far less appetite for wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, greater emphasis on special operations forces and intelligence-gathering, and shifting focus to China and the Pacific.

The new strategy was necessitated by the need to cut military spending by at least $480 billion over the next decade and the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Even the downsized military will be strong enough, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey maintained, to take on all comers.

"We can confront more than one enemy at a time," Panetta said.

Dempsey was more explicit, saying the U.S. military could handle a war in Korea and problems with Iran in the Persian Gulf.

"Fundamentally, our strategy has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they happen," Dempsey said. "This does not change. We will always provide a range of options for our nation. We can and will always be able to do more than one thing at a time."

Some in Congress challenged that assertion.

Rep. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican who chairs a committee on military readiness, said the strategy is inappropriately based on a budget cuts rather than the challenges America faces.

"To me this is not a strategy for a superpower," Forbes said in an interview. "This is more a menu for mediocrity."

The previous peak in U.S. defense spending was an inflation-adjusted $517 billion in 1985. It then fell in real terms the next 15 years but jumped after the 9/11 attacks, growing an average 4.4% annually. Fifty years ago, defense spending accounted for 47% of total federal spending. Today, it accounts for 19%, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The Heritage Foundation states in a report based on figures from the federal government that defense spending is already at a low compared with the past 45 years. It says defense spending is now about 4% of GDP, down from a high of 9.5% at the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and from California, echoed those remarks in a statement, saying the strategy does not account for threats America faces.

"This is a lead-from-behind strategy for a left-behind America," McKeon said in a statement. "The president has packaged our retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy to mask his divestment of our military and national defense."

Scaling back from the ability to fight two wars is not as "big a change as it looks," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. The likelihood of having to fight two large land wars is slim. Even in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States was forced to focus first on Iraq before it was able to build up forces in Afghanistan.

The strategy still allows for fighting one land war and another contingency, which gives the U.S. military the flexibility required to respond to an additional threat or extend the length of a conflict if needed, he said.