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
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