President Barack Obama will join Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to roll out the new American Defense strategy--entitled "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense"--in an unusual appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday.
Obama is due to speak at 11 AM. You can watch the briefing live here (and above).
The new strategy--available here-- reflects Panetta's assessment that the Army "has to shrink even below current targets, dropping to 490,000 soldiers over the next decade, but that the United States should not cut any of its 11 aircraft carriers," the New York Times' Thom Shanker and Elizabeth Bumiller reported Thursday.
It also reflects the Obama administration's recently announced plans to tilt the focus of American national security towards Asia while somewhat reducing its heavy footprint in the Middle East.
"Looking beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," the new defense posture outlined in the strategy will phase out "outdated Cold War era systems," Obama said, while strengthening unique American military capabilities in the areas of "intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance; counter-terrorism; countering weapons of mass destruction."
"The world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with forces that are agile, flexible and ready for a whole range of contingencies and threats," Obama said.
Prior to Obama's appearance today, no American President has previously briefed reporters at the Pentagon, Bumiller and Shanker wrote.
Military analysts said the anticipated proposal to cut the overall size of the Army is unsurprising in the current budget environment. But some conservatives were critical of the cuts.
"The budget math is pretty unforgiving," Tom Donnelly, military analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Yahoo News Wednesday by email. "But strategically speaking, it's as though we learned nothing from what's happened since 9/11; it's one thing to have made the mistake the first time, quite another and more serious to make it a second time."
In response to the suggestion that the new shift in spending and strategy reflects the view expressed by Defense Secretary Bob Gates last year that the United States would be crazy to launch any more large land invasions of choice, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Donnelly was skeptical.
"You can pretend that the world will behave the way you want it to, or you can look at reality square in the face," Donnelly said. "Or you can run from it, which is what this administration is doing--in Iraq, soon enough in Afghanistan, and, with these cuts, running from the future." VIDEO
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