Mutual security cooperation and building partner capacity and capability are part of the U.S. military strategy as it refocuses toward the Asia Pacific region from 11 years of effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday offered his thoughts and discussed the change at a National Guard Symposium in Washington D.C.
Gen. Martin Dempsey said rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific region is a matter of “three mores:” “more attention…more engagement…and more quality.”
That means paying more attention to the Asia-Pacific region, expending more intellectual bandwidth, and applying human capital. It also means working with partners more, but not with enduring forces, but rotational forces on exercises, training and other efforts, to include state partnership programs as the National Guard conducts. The rebalancing also means putting “more of our best equipment” into the Asia Pacific region that previously has been largely committed to the Middle East.
However, Dempsey said partnering takes work, and in the increasingly competitive environment nation states no longer have a monopoly on top end technology for lethal force, which increases risk.
The National Guard has a two decade state partnership program that works with some 65 nations to forge closer ties with partner nations. Dempsey said the National Guard has an advantage over the active force in the sense that it can build long term relationships as members meet at one rank and then continue working with each other as they move up.
Dempsey also said there’s also a security paradox, a source of constant discussion. On the one hand, human violence is at an evolutionary low, while the capability to dispense violence is at an evolutionary high.
There is the idea that major powers that used to able to do more or less anything they thought they wanted to do more or less by themselves increasingly find they now need partners—“they literally need to forge partnerships so that nations are able to confront these decentralized networks, syndicated technologically capable foes” on their terms, so they are not doing it by themselves, he said.
Finding points of agreement and then building on that and partnering is “probably really what our new strategy calls for,” Dempsey said. Outreach and a foundation of trust have been built with European allies over time and the same must now be done elsewhere.