Look clearly at defense spending

The world is changing, so our military must too. That's the point of the new national defense strategy President Barack Obama unveiled last week.

With long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, the threats of Iran and China rising, and spending pinched by the desire to limit borrowing, the time is right for a clear-eyed assessment of future security threats and the capabilities needed to meet them. Obama's plan to abandon the requirement that the military be able to fight two major ground wars at once in different parts of the world, and move instead to a smaller, leaner, more agile, technologically advanced military able to fight one ground war while meeting a range of contingencies elsewhere, is the right way to go. With no superpower adversary, troop-intensive land wars are increasingly unlikely.

That obvious logic didn't stop some Republicans in Congress and on the presidential hustings from reflexively blasting the plan as a budget-driven strategy that would put the nation's military dominance at risk and signal our retreat from the world. It's no such thing.

With a sluggish economy and trillion-dollar annual budget deficits, fiscal restraint is important -- something Republicans recognized last year when they led the charge to cut spending, including $1 trillion from defense over the next decade. That was the goal Congress set in the deal that ended last summer's debt-ceiling crisis. It also mandated automatic cuts to begin next year as a result of the deficit-reduction supercommittee's failure to agree on an alternative plan.

There's plenty of room to cut. The United States spent about $700 billion on defense in 2011. That's six times more than China, the next biggest defense spender, and almost half the global total.

Obama's strategy should and would cut spending, but it isn't that different from one sketched out in 2002 by President George W. Bush's Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. That's why this critical reassessment should be on the merits and not for partisan gain. Anyone with better ideas for ensuring that the nation's military remains both affordable and the world's strongest should put them on the table.

Obama's strategic guidance is merely the template for change. Details matters, and those won't begin to come into focus until next month, when he presents his 2013 budget. At that point, tough questions should be asked, for instance to make sure military readiness isn't sacrificed to budget-cutting. And because future security threats are unpredictable, "reversibility" -- the flexibility to pivot quickly to meet unexpected challenges -- must be assured.

In addition, if the defense focus shifts from Europe to Asia, as Obama proposed, officials should consider closing some foreign bases. The war on terrorists has demonstrated that reliable intelligence, mobile special forces and technology, such as drone aircraft, are more important in projecting power around the world than outdated Cold War weapons, an overkill nuclear capability and a large standing army.

To remain the best, the military has to evolve.