On October 27, 2022, the Department of Defense publicly released their unclassified National Defense Strategy (NDS), a Congressionally-mandated review. This strategy sets the strategic direction of the Department to support U.S. national security priorities and includes the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and the Missile Defense Review (MDR).
The Nuclear Posture Review is a legislatively-mandated review that describes U.S. nuclear strategy, policy, posture, and forces. The Missile Defense Review is a review conducted pursuant to guidance from the President and the Secretary of Defense, while also addressing the legislative requirement to assess U.S. missile defense policy and strategy.
Read the full National Defense Strategy (NDS) Defense Priorities PDF.
Together, these rapidly evolving features of the security environment threaten to erode the United States’ ability to deter aggression and to help maintain favorable balances of power in critical regions. The PRC presents the most consequential and systemic challenge, while Russia poses acute threats – both to vital U.S. national interests abroad and to the homeland. Other features of the security environment, including climate change and other transboundary threats, will increasingly place pressure on the Joint Force and the systems that support it. In this context, and in support of a stable and open international system and our defense commitments, the Department’s priorities are:
Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC; Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners; Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary – prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, then the Russia challenge in Europe, and; Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem.
Security Environment
Now and over the next two decades, we face strategic challenges stemming from complex interactions between a rapidly changing global balance of military capabilities; emerging technologies; competitor doctrines that pose new threats to the U.S. homeland and to strategic stability; an escalation of competitors’ coercive and malign activities in the “gray zone“; and transboundary challenges that impose new demands on the Joint Force and the defense enterprise.
Approaches
The Department will advance our priorities through integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages.
Alliances and Partnerships
We cannot meet these complex and interconnected challenges alone. Mutually-beneficial Alliances and partnerships are our greatest global strategic advantage – and they are a center of gravity for this strategy. We will strengthen major regional security architectures with our Allies and partners based on complementary contributions; combined, collaborative operations and force planning; increased intelligence and information sharing; new operational concepts; and our ability to draw on the Joint Force worldwide.
Force Planning
Sustaining and strengthening deterrence requires that the Department design, develop, and manage a combat-credible U.S. military fit for advancing our highest defense priorities. The Department’s force development and design program will integrate new operational concepts with the force attributes required to strengthen and sustain deterrence and to prevail in conflict if necessary. The Department will prioritize a future force that is:
- Lethal: Possesses anti-access/area-denial-insensitive strike capabilities that can penetrate adversary defenses at range.
- Sustainable: Securely and effectively provides logistics and sustainment to continue operations in a contested and degraded environment, despite adversary disruption.
- Resilient: Maintains information and decision advantage, preserves command, control, and communications systems, and ensures critical detection and targeting operations.
- Survivable: Continues generating combat power to support strike capabilities and enablers for logistics and sustainment, despite adversary attacks.
- Agile and Responsive: Rapidly mobilizes forces, generates combat power, and provides logistics and sustainment, even given adversary regional advantages and climate change impacts.
Risk Management
No strategy will perfectly anticipate the threats we may face, and we will doubtless confront challenges in execution. This strategy shifts focus and resources toward the Department’s highest priorities, which will inevitably affect risk profiles in other areas. An NDS that is clear-eyed about this reality will help ensure that the Department effectively implements the strategy and assesses its impact over time.
Conclusion
The United States is endowed with remarkable qualities that confer great advantages, including in the realm of national security. We are a free people devoted to democracy and the rule of law. Our combination of diversity, free minds, and free enterprise drives extraordinary innovation and adaptability. We are a member of an unparalleled and unprecedented network of alliances and partnerships. Together, we share many common values and a common interest in defending the stable and open international system, the basis for the most peaceful and prosperous epoch in modern history.
We must not lose sight of these qualities and advantages. Our generational challenge is to combine and integrate them, developing our capabilities together with those of our Allies and partners to sustain and strengthen an international system under threat.
This NDS has outlined the courses of action the Department of Defense will take to help meet this challenge. We are confident in success. Our country has faced and prevailed in multi-year competitions with major powers threatening or using force to subjugate others on more than one occasion in the past. Working in service of the American people, and in collaboration with our partners around the world, the men and women of our superbly capable Joint Force stand ready to do so again.
Statement from the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin
The President has stated that we are living in a “decisive decade,” one stamped by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment. The defense strategy that the United States pursues will set the Department’s course for decades to come. The Department of Defense owes it to our All-Volunteer Force and the American people to provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead—and we owe them a clear and rigorous strategy for advancing our defense and security goals.
The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) details the Department’s path forward into that decisive decade—from helping to protect the American people, to promoting global security, to seizing new strategic opportunities, and to realizing and defending our democratic values.
We live in turbulent times. Yet, I am confident that the Department, along with our counterparts throughout the U.S. Government and our Allies and partners around the world, is well positioned to meet the challenges of this decisive decade.