Na última edição
do 'New Statesman', Adam Tooze escreve sobre:
"on how the US military is planning another
century of global domination" e analisa o papel determinante nesse plano do ainda muito misterioso “Third
Offset”.
“THE
THIRD OFFSET”
(...) As a new history published by the Rand think tank reveals, in 2012
a clique of Pentagon officials began to discuss something they called, somewhat
mysteriously, the “third offset”. The idea of the offset was that through
technological superiority the US would maintain its decisive edge in a
challenging, increasingly multipolar world.
With the occupation of Iraq reduced to a bare minimum and the handover
in Afghanistan completed, in 2014 the military’s reorientation began. Vladimir
Putin’s incursions in Ukraine and mounting anxiety in Eastern Europe confirmed
the need to face new antagonists. But China was always envisioned as the true
great-power rival.
To counter China, US soldiers looked towards transformative technologies
– AI, robotics, cyber weapons and new space technology. For this the Pentagon
would need to refashion the military-industrial complex. The technology would
come from Silicon Valley, which was deeply enmeshed in global supply chains and
technological partnerships with China. Rather than remodelling Afghan villages,
US military planners now envisioned rewiring nothing less than the main engines
of globalisation.
Aligning the giant Pentagon machine with such abstract goals was a
struggle. But China’s rise was relentless and the idea of a fundamental
reorientation of US strategy carried across to Donald Trump’s time in office.
The National Defense Strategy of 2018 defined America’s future challenge as
great-power competition with peer or near-peer antagonists, not
counterterrorism. The main arena was not Central Asia or the Middle East, but
the Indo-Pacific. The Biden administration is doubling down on this strategic
blueprint.
The talk about the third offset mattered because it took place at the
heart of American power and bore directly on one of its mightiest instruments –
the enormous budgets of the Pentagon and the intelligence community. If the war
on terror was big business, once you get to the Pentagon budget proper, the
numbers are even more impressive. In 2001 the US defence budget stood at
$311bn. By 2010 driven by the war on terror it had more than doubled to $690bn.
Then, under the budget cap imposed by the deadlock between the Obama White
House and the Republican Congress, spending fell to $560bn in 2015. Trump
reversed that decline with a defence budget of above $700bn. Biden’s latest
proposal continues the increase, with $753bn requested for 2022. Military
expenditure accounts for roughly half of all discretionary spending (as opposed
to ongoing entitlements) by the federal government. Defining militarised
spending more generally to include Homeland Security, the share rises to two
thirds or more. What is so radical about proposals such as the Green New Deal,
or Biden’s infrastructure and welfare programmes, is that they propose civilian
spending on a scale that the Pentagon takes for granted.
Given the scale of this Moloch, military wonks cannot simply redirect it
towards their high-tech priorities. But a shift is happening. The Biden
administration has raised the budget for the Department of Defense’s cyber
command to $10.4bn, which is weighted towards offensive rather than defensive
capabilities. Overall US defence R&D is more than $100bn a year. The
intelligence community receives a further $85bn. About half of that goes into
electronic data-gathering.
This high-tech militarism pushes the capabilities of the human mind and
body, the potential of AI and the properties of matter to the limit. Powerful
algorithms parsing satellite data track incoming intercontinental ballistic
missiles. Hypersonic missiles defy enemy defences. Space Command may have goofy
logos, but since 2019, when it was carved out of the air force, its budget has
grown to $17.4bn. Far from withdrawing from the world, the US military aims to
encompass and encircle it from orbit. The new technologies still account for a
fraction of the total military budget. But if you examine the classic big-ticket
items of procurement you arrive at the same conclusion. Far from retreating,
the US military is aiming to increase its global dominance.
The F-35 fighter jet – the most expensive product development programme
in history – is not a weapon for fighting insurgents. Its job is to shoot down
the best fighters the Chinese and Russians can put in the air. Conceived in the
1990s, the bill for developing, supplying and maintaining the fighter jet is
currently $1.7trn over the planes’ projected 66-year life-cycle. To think of it
simply as an aircraft doesn’t do justice to this gigantic programme. It is an
entire industrial ecosystem, made up of almost 2,000 suppliers that directly
employ a quarter of a million workers. It will endure for more than half a century
and will be implanted in collaborations all over the world. Launching F-35s is
one of the main purposes of Britain’s new aircraft carriers.
The US has since the Second World War been unrivalled when it comes to
carriers. The latest generation are the colossal nuclear-powered CVN-21
Ford-class. They each cost around $12.4bn. But, worried about their cost and
vulnerability to Chinese missiles, the US navy would probably prefer fewer of
them – nine rather than 11. But so deeply entrenched is the military-industrial
complex in Congress that naval planners don’t get to decide. Having reached a
low point in 2015 of only 271 active surface vessels, Congress has mandated
that the navy should expand its fleet to a strength of at least 355 vessels. In
its final days the Trump administration went one better. In December 2020 it
declared that the US should have more than 400 vessels. The final target will
be somewhere between 320 and 390 ships. Whatever the number, it will be by far
the most powerful fleet the world has ever seen.
Since large surface vessels are vulnerable to attack, one answer – in
keeping with the high-tech third offset – is to make them unmanned. Another
solution is to go underwater. The super-advanced Next-Generation Attack
Submarine, which begins procurement in ten years’ time, will refocus the
undersea fleet away from supporting land wars – by firing cruise missiles into
places such as Iraq – in favour of fighting the Chinese fleet both above and
below the waves.
But the US navy’s top priority is the procurement of a new fleet of
giant Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The ultimate weapons of mass
destruction, designed to deliver a world-destroying second strike in the event
that the US is subject to nuclear attack, the Columbia-class ICBM submarines
were first projected in 2013. Procurement of the first in class began in 2021
and the navy hopes to build 12 at a cost of $109bn. The submarine-based
missiles are one part of the US’s triad of nuclear weapons – alongside heavy
bombers from the air and the land-based ICBMs – which began to be modernised
under Obama. Analysts put the projected costs of the 30-year programme at
$1.5trn. Russia is the only power with anything like the US’s nuclear strength,
but the recent detection of new Chinese missile silos has set Washington abuzz.
The Pentagon’s spending programmes are notorious for their cost overruns
and dubious results. In the 2000s the army’s effort to develop a generation of
robotic vehicles was a $32bn bust. But whether high-tech or old-fashioned, none
of the US’s military spending betokens retreat. It is a blueprint for
solidifying the nation’s role as the hyper-power of the 21st century.
This spending is also tied to a militarisation of US economic policy of
a kind not seen even during the Cold War. To counter China, the US national
security establishment has embraced a novel ambition to reshape the global
economy. Chinese components are to be removed from the supply chain and Chinese
investment purged from Silicon Valley. CIA- and Pentagon-backed venture
capitalists are offering seed-funding for promising high-tech recruits to the
military-industrial complex.
The White House, meanwhile, requires every major corporation in the US
to raise its cyber defences. In a digital world, the real measure of the US’s
sway is not the desperate scenes in Kabul, but the humbling of China’s 5G
champion Huawei or the suasion exercised on the Dutch firm ASML in order to
ensure it only delivers its highly specialised chip-making equipment to customers
that are approved of by the US government. For American strategic planners it
is easier to imagine reorganising the global high-tech economy than it is to
contemplate the US losing its status as undisputed hegemon.
(...)
When intellectual reformers in the Pentagon began pushing their campaign
for high-tech global war in 2012, they chose the mysterious moniker of the
third offset to evoke the folk history within the American military of two
earlier moments of rebirth, each following a great, shuddering shock.
The first technological great leap forward came after the Korean War in
the 1950s, when America adopted a complex array of tactical nuclear weapons.
The second was after Vietnam, when the US embarked on the transformation that
led to the revivified army of the 1980s, equipped with a new generation of
weapons, a more sophisticated doctrine of warfare and concepts such as AirLand
Battle, which emphasised Blitzkrieg-style coordination between land and air
forces.
(...)
The third offset was launched in 2014 to re-energise American
militarism, to redirect it from the quagmire of counter-insurgency and to focus
its awesome power on more significant historical objectives. Since then that
reorientation has become ever more purposeful. The coincidence of the Taliban
victory in Afghanistan with the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is painful, but it
does nothing to put in question this shift. Far from exiting the world, the US
security establishment is committing staggering resources to confronting what
it takes to be its principal 21st-century antagonist: China.
(...) "
https://www.newstatesman.com/long-read/2021/09/the-new-age-of-american-power
