The results of last night's election ensure that there will not be radical departures from recent discussions surrounding the size of the Defense Department's budget moving forward. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether some form of principled compromise can be reached before sequestration will kick in and remove another roughly $500 billion in defense spending over the next decade. (And right now any such compromise seems to be far from certain.) Regardless, serious thought and planning needs to go into preparing for current and future security threats, challenges, and opportunities because other state and nonstate actors internationally have designs and strategies that they are working to implement whether we like it or not, and we will have less resources to counter them.
Two recent articles by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's Andrew Krepinevich in Foreign Affairs and by the National War College's Michael Mazarr in The Washington Quarterly offer thoughtful discussions on this matter for planning strategy in a time of austerity. Krepinevich points out that we are where we are because:
For much of the last 20 years, a relatively stable international order and generous budgets have enabled the United States to avoid making difficult choices about defense and strategy. Decisions were often dominated by the domestic politics of defense policy, parochial bureaucratic interests, and sheer inertia rather than rigorous planning. When conflict came, too often strategy ended up meaning throwing ever-greater resources at a problem and hoping that the sheer weight of the effort would enable the United States to prevail. This approach did not succeed in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it is even less attractive now that the challenges to U.S. security are growing while the Pentagon's budgets are diminishing/.../