Senior decision makers across five Administrations, Republican and Democrat, have been unable to avoid the reality that, in a world of continuing globalization and growing political and military uncertainty, the U.S. needs a military that is large enough and has a sufficient range of capabilities to cover multiple major military contingencies in overlapping time frames.
Worries about this arc of countries, largely cut off from economic globalization, increasingly are influencing how the military trains, what it buys and where it puts forces.