My colleagues have offered good criticisms of the defense budget and strategy unveiled by President Obama and Secretary Panetta last week. Let me add to the chorus with two more points.

First, the defense strategy is an explicit and unfortunate rejection of parts of the Quadrennial Defense Review completed less than two years ago by former Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy. The QDR rightly, repeatedly, and explicitly argued that the United States needs to retain a large-scale stability operations capability. "The United States must retain the capability to conduct large-scale counterinsurgency, stability, and counterterrorism operations" (emphasis added). "DoD will continue to place special emphasis on stability operations," because stability missions will be a permanent requirement of the 21^st century environment. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges...Nor are these types of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape." That is why "U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations...Such operations include...conducting large-scale stability operations."

The new defense strategy, by contrast, openly admits that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations."

The abandonment of a decade's worth of investment and grinding experience in stability operations is a dangerous risk that willfully ignores the realities of the contemporary security environment. Weak and failing states, and the rogue actors who operate within them, represent a real threat to regional and global stability. In response, the  U.S. and UN have launched more than two dozen stabilization and reconstruction efforts between them since the Cold War -- averaging about one per year -- and there is no sign that demand for such operations is easing. We have gradually and painfully improved our ability to execute such missions, and they are a real contribution to U.S. national security. Cutting back on stability operations now will throw away our hard-fought gains and expose us to new risks from across the globalizing, fragile world.

My second criticism of the new defense strategy, and some responses to it, is that it is still captive to the decades-old debate about how many wars we need to fight simultaneously. Since World War II, U.S. military planners have argued that we need to fight two major theater wars at the same time. The two-war doctrine has become something like Holy Writ or an idée fixe. The idea was somewhat well-founded during the Cold War when we plausibly could have faced simultaneous crises in, for example, Germany and Korea, or Germany and Cuba.

However, holding onto this idea for the last twenty years has looked increasingly disconnected from reality. Obama's new strategy goes through contortions to claim that we will, sort of, maybe, continue to be able to almost fight and nearly win two wars at the same time. But it fails, like every defense strategy has for two decades, to explain why this precise formulation is worth defending.

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My colleague Kori Schake goes some way toward taking the administration to task for what it calls a new strategy. But she does not go far enough; her critique appears to postulate that the strategy is not new. On the contrary, in my view it is indeed a new strategy of sorts, and a very dangerous one at that.

This is, of course, a budget-driven strategy -- after all, the DoD's Strategic Guidance, which was released together with the president's announcement, specifically states that the strategy "supports the national security imperative of deficit reduction through a lower level of defense spending." Leaving aside for a moment the question of how a reduction of some $50 billion a year will enhance national security given an annual deficit that exceeds $1 trillion, such an assertion leaves little doubt regarding the reason for a new strategy.

It should be recalled that the administration's own Quadrennial Defense Review, written in the shadow of the president's pledge to depart from Iraq, was committed to "maintain ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors." Now, however, the administration proposes to plan for our forces to fight just one war, while being "capable of denying the objectives of - or imposing unacceptable costs on - an opportunistic aggressor in a second region" (emphasis in original document). What changed since the QDR appeared, other than the explosive growth of the national debt? What exactly does denying the objectives mean? Would we necessarily know what those objectives are? Where would we find the forces to deny those objectives if they were enmeshed in a major conflict elsewhere?

This budget driven strategy is a throwback to the discredited "win-hold-win" strategy that the Clinton administration proposed early in its first term. At that time, it quickly became clear that the strategy could not work. There was no way of knowing whether forces engaged in one combat theater could be freed to fight in another theater, and, even if they could be freed, whether they could arrive in a timely fashion to defeat the enemy.

The Obama administration does not even offer the pretense of "holding" an enemy. The troops fighting elsewhere will somehow miraculously arrive in time to fight a second war. But our forces are not the cavalry in a 1940s Western. With the cuts that are being proposed, there is no way that they can arrive in time to fight a second war, assuming there are enough of them to do so. As for our enemies, it is a virtual certainty that they would do all they could to ensure that our forces do not arrive in time and, indeed, would exploit American preoccupation in another theater to realize long held objectives of their own. North Korea and Iran both come to mind in this regard.

The new strategy asserts that "everything is on the table," meaning perhaps, that everything is subject to cuts. Given the administration's concomitant commitment to preserve benefits and avoid a hollow military, it is clear that, in addition to force structure (which must mean the land forces, since naval and air forces have been cut significantly over the past decade), the acquisition accounts will be the bill payers.

There is nothing in the two regional contingency strategies that needs fixing. We have potential and real enemies in several theaters, and encountered difficulties conducting two wars in the same regional theater. What is needed is a focus on accounts that the administration shies away from: civilian personnel, staff augmentation contractors (which Robert Gates identified as a major budget concern) military retirement, and military entitlements. The latter have grown as much, if not more quickly, than civilian entitlements and both need to be ratcheted back.

The administration itself acknowledges that the world remains a dangerous place. It wants to maintain its commitments to Europe and NATO, and to the Middle East, and to our Asian allies and friends. It wants to do so with a strategy and budget priorities that belie its high flown pronouncements. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asserts that the new strategy accepts more risk. That is quite the understatement. This is not a strategy that merely invites risk, it is one that courts disaster. 

Iran's bellicose rhetoric and Gulf wargames in recent days have given rise to the question of whether Tehran could close the Strait of Hormuz. As many analysts have observed, the answer is no -- not for a meaningful period of time. Less frequently addressed, however, is whether Iran would even try. The answer to that question is also "no" -- even the attempt would have devastating strategic consequences for Iran.

The presumable target of an Iranian effort to close the Strait would be the United States. However, while we would of course be affected by any resulting rise in global oil prices, the U.S. gets little of our petroleum from the Gulf. The U.S. imports only about 49 percent of the petroleum we consume, and over half of those imports come from the Western Hemisphere. Less than 25 percent of U.S. imports came from all the Gulf countries combined in October 2011 -- far less than is available in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, were Gulf supplies to be interrupted.  

China, on the other hand, would find its oil supplies significantly threatened by an Iranian move against the Strait. China's most significant oil supplier is Saudi Arabia. China also happens, however, to be Iran's primary oil customer and perhaps its most important ally: Beijing provides Iran with its most sophisticated weaponry and with diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Thus a move to close the Strait would backfire strategically by harming the interests of -- and likely alienating -- Iran's most important patron and cutting off Iran's own economic lifeline, while doing little to imperil U.S. supplies of crude.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that China quickly dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun to Tehran in the wake of Iran's bellicose statements. In typically opaque fashion, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said only that "China hopes that peace and stability can be maintained in the Strait;" this is essentially diplo-speak for "Cool it."

Even if Iran ignored these considerations and proceeded with an effort to close the Strait, the U.S. and others would move to keep it open, and would be unlikely to stop there. As Iran has crept closer to a nuclear weapons capability, the possibility of military action against Iran has also become more imminent. President Obama has been reluctant to threaten Iran militarily, and any U.S. president would think long and hard before engaging in another armed conflict in the Middle East. 

An effort by Iran to shut down the oil trade in the Gulf, however, would make such a decision straightforward. The U.S. would react with force, and once engaged in hostilities with Iran, would likely take the opportunity to target Iran's nuclear facilities and other military targets. It is difficult to envision any scenario beginning with an Iranian effort to close the Strait of Hormuz that does not end in a serious strategic setback for the Iranian regime.

Recognizing that Iran is neither able nor likely to try to close the Strait, the U.S. could simply sit back, confident in our superior firepower. This would be a mistake. The real danger in the Gulf is lower-level activity by Iran to harass shipping and confront the U.S. Navy. Iranian commanders in the area are increasingly brazen. If not deterred, Iran's sense of impunity -- rather than its nuclear progress -- may be the spark that ignites a conflict in the region. 

Iran's navy -- especially the naval arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- has invested in vessels and armaments that are well-suited to asymmetric warfare, rather than the sort of ship-to-ship conflict which Iran would surely lose. Thus, they have purchased, with Chinese and Russian help, increasingly sophisticated mines, midget submarines, mobile anti-ship cruise missiles, and a fleet of small, fast boats. In addition, they have reportedly sought to develop a naval special warfare, or frogman, capability.

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Late last month, the front page of the Washington Post contained the kind of story that I, as a professional educator, like to see.  The piece discussed the work of Georgetown University's Asian Arms Control Project. Specifically, it chronicled the laborious effort of a couple dozen Georgetown graduate students to uncover, over the course of years, China's "underground great wall," a network of thousands of kilometers of underground tunnels constructed by the People's Liberation Army Second Artillery Corps - the same branch of the Chinese military that controls Beijing's nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles.  The students have amassed a lot of evidence, including some eye-catching pictures, of China's tunnel system.

The Georgetown project demonstrates the value of open-source basic research on the Chinese military.  Unlike the Soviet Union, which closely guarded even the most mundane bits of information, China publishes quite a lot on its military, including voluminous information on its underground tunneling program.  The problem is that, until the Georgetown students began to document the program, few in the United States paid much attention to the fact that China has poured massive amounts of resources into underground facilities over the course of decades.  Indeed, it was not until this year's edition of the Pentagon's Congressionally mandated report on Chinese military power that China's tunneling program received official acknowledgement.

China's tunneling program is of more than academic interest, however.  It raises legitimate questions about the ability of the United States to verify the scope of Chinese military modernization, including the size of China's missile force and its nuclear arsenal.

It is that inconvenient fact that has drawn the ire of the arms control community. Over the past month, arms controllers, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the blog Arms Control Wonk have launched a series of vitriolic attacks on the Georgetown students; their professor, Phillip Karber; and that staunch member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the Washington Post, which had the temerity to report on the students' efforts.  The Post's Ombudsman summarized the attacks - and stood by the paper's original story - yesterday.

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I wish I could agree with Kori that we can afford to cut the defense budget in years ahead. However, she premises her argument on this:

The world is much more conducive to American interests than it was when Defense spending as a proportion of GDP was much higher: we are militarily dominant, the threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the ascendancy.

If that were true, then I would agree with Kori's case to cut defense spending. However, with respect, I don't think it is true at all.

The threats to us are more numerous, not less. There are two major families of threats to U.S. national security today. First, at one end of the state spectrum, are the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers: Russia, China, soon Iran, North Korea as a junior partner, and Pakistan if it falls to jihadists. The latter three are (or will be) new to the nuclear club since the Cold War, and China is vastly more powerful today than it was in 1989. Second, at the other end, is the aggregate global consequences of state failure and anarchy across much of the world -- such as the rise of terrorist groups, organized crime, drug cartels, human traffickers, nuclear smugglers, pandemic disease, and piracy -- that will collectively erode global stability and raise the cost of U.S. leadership. State failure, with its effects magnified by globalization, is also a vastly greater threat that during the Cold War. These two families are the threats we face in the 21st Century. By contrast, we faced fewer threats and a simpler world at almost every point in our history before 1989.

The threats are equally apocalyptic. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was the gravest danger we ever faced, and we came perilously close to it in 1962. Nuclear war with Iran or North Korea would be almost equally dangerous, especially after they have acquired longer-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting U.S. allies and even the U.S. homeland. (Yes, the Soviet Union had thousands of warheads, but you only need a few nukes to cause more damage to us than all the wars we have fought in history, combined, and only a few dozen to effectively wipe out the United States. And if I were a new nuclear power, I wouldn't announce my capability until I already had a few dozen to make sure I could withstand an attack on my arsenal. Which means that North Korea and Iran (when it announces) will almost certainly be existential threats). The difference is that war with them or their proxies may be more likely to actually happen. The latter two countries may be less deterrable, less predictable, and more prone to transfer nuclear technology to proxies and non-state groups, given their history of erratic behavior, sponsoring terrorism, and proliferation. All told, the chances of a nuclear detonation in New York City are higher, not lower, today than twenty years ago. Unfortunately, we do not have a team of patriotic mutant superheroes to avert disaster this time.

Our allies are less capable, not more. Militarily, the Allies have underinvested in defense for decades-nothing new there. But the situation is actually getting worse, not better. The European allies spent 1.7 percent of GDP on defense in 2010 compared to 3.7 percent in 1985, according to NATO figures, a huge decline. As a result, the allies' performance in Libya and Afghanistan has not covered them with glory. And the alliance -- including us -- is still using mostly the same weapons systems and platforms that were developed in the late Cold War, just with a layer of IT, often glitchy and unreliable, grafted on in recent years (I agree with Tom's new post in this respect). Politically, the alliance has suffered tremendous strain from the double hammer-blows of disagreement over Iraq followed by unequal burden-sharing and nearly losing the war in Afghanistan. I am less confident in the alliance now than during the Cold War.

Our enemies and competitors are more capable, not less. Again, several states have acquired nuclear weapons since 1989. China has engaged in a massive conventional military buildup. Russia, after initially suffering a crippling loss of manpower, resources, and morale, has undertaken a long process of professionalizing and modernizing its military. Non-state actors have harnessed the tools of globalization and exploited the weakness of failed states to give them a global operating scope and comfortable safe haven.

Our values are not ascendant. The global financial crisis has (unfairly, I think) cast disrepute on the west in the eyes of many developing nations. China's rise has made state-managed and autocratic development attractive to many an aspiring power. Illiberal political Islam, with its hostility to women's rights and religious freedom, is at least competing aggressively with democracy and human rights across the Islamic world. Hindutva, largely content to compete peacefully through the Indian democratic system so far, may not always be so. Marxism of a sort is still alive, fashionable, and even resurgent in a few quarters like Venezuela and Bolivia. Democracy has indeed spread farther since 1989 than ever before in human history, but that is different from "ascendancy." Democratic gains since 1989, for example in Africa and Latin America, are new and might easily be reversed, especially given the competition.

What worries me is that I am increasingly convinced that we do not have the capabilities to meet the various threats we face today. We don't need to be omnipotent, but we do need to be able to protect ourselves. Can we stave off state failure in Pakistan? Can we prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, or contain it afterwards? Could we prevent Russia from doing to Ukraine what it did to Georgia in 2008? Can we defeat the drug cartels wreaking havoc in Mexico and Columbia? Is al-Qaida really nearing "strategic defeat," as Panetta claims? Are we prepared to handle a collapse in North Korea -- possibly having to fight a sudden war with a desperate regime, contribute to a multilateral occupation and reconstruction afterwards, and handle the delicate diplomacy with the Chinese?

Until we can, this is no time to cut defense.

Amidst the many uncertainties about Libya's future post-Qaddafi, at least two things can be said. First, the Middle East and the world will be better off with the Qaddafi regime out of power. And second, virtually everyone was wrong in some way and at some point about the Libya operation. This includes the early naysayers who warned that Qaddafi would not be defeated, or that the war would result in a stalemate and divided Libya, or would be a folly of prohibitive costs. Yet also wrong were President Barack Obama's promises that the war would take "weeks, not months," or that it was merely a limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians and not a regime change operation, or that it was not even a "war" at all.

Part of the problem besetting the early Libya debates, as I wrote earlier in this article for the German Marshall Fund, came from a facile use of history in which various analogies -- whether Rwanda and Bosnia, or Iraq and Somalia -- were wielded as polemics in dire warnings that Libya would be the "next [fill in the blank]." In fact, Libya was none of those, but rather its own unique circumstance that soon enough will become an analogy of its own for future foreign policy debates.

This in turn points to the problem with some of the early, breathless pronouncements in the wake of Qaddafi's defeat that Libya amounts to a "new way to wage war" or a vindication of "leading from behind." As my Foreign Policy colleagues such as Dan Drezner, Peter Feaver, and Kori Schake have pointed out from various angles, this amounts to sound-bite triumphalism and overlooks the unique aspects of the Libya operation as well the remaining hard tasks.

The Obama administration still deserves commendation for the role it played in helping topple Qaddafi. Even if dilatory, President Obama made the right call in deciding to intervene, and his team showed fortitude in seeing the operation through to the Qaddafi regime's demise, while managing the complexities of coalition warfare. The administration knows well the challenges that lie ahead in finishing the war, winning the peace, and helping reconstruct a stable and free Libya.

Three challenges in particular stand out:

1. NATO's inadequacies. While the operation eventually succeeded, it does not speak well of NATO's political and operational health. NATO's largest member state not named "America" (Germany), didn't even participate, and the leading members who did -- France and Britain -- found themselves exhausting their munitions and stretching their militaries thin in trying to topple a two-bit North African dictator whose own people were in open revolt. All while announcing even further reductions in their defense budgets. As former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker points out, the operation should prompt hard introspection more than champagne toasts at NATO headquarters.

2. Post-conflict reconstruction. Countless gallons of pundit ink have already been spilled recounting the "lessons" of recent and ongoing episodes such as Iraq and Afghanistan for post-conflict reconstruction. No doubt the Obama administration has taken these into account, and one silver lining to the prolonged Libya conflict may have been the additional time to do post-conflict planning, which I trust the administration has availed itself of. More interesting is the larger strategic question, which is: Does the United States have a national interest in helping build a stable, peaceful, and free Libya? As my Strauss Center colleague Jeremi Suri describes in his excellent new book on the history of American nation-building interventions, the United States has long been committed to maintaining an international system comprised of functioning nation-states. The competence and consequences of our various interventions form a mixed record, but the fact remains that promoting a stable international order of nation-states is a core American interest. Libya offers an opportunity to put the lessons of past efforts into practice.

3. A new regional strategy. Libya's significance lies not only in the removal of a vile dictator and the prospects of a better future for the Libyan people, but also for its regional ramifications, especially the uncertain trajectory of the Arab Spring. A Qaddafi victory would almost certainly have forestalled the Arab Spring; whether a post-Qaddafi Libya heralds enduring region-wide consequences is hopeful but not foreordained. And as I have written previously, the administration still faces challenging questions in its efforts to develop a new American strategy for the region. Such as: What type of regional order will best constrain Iran's hegemonic intentions? How can a free Syria be created, and play a positive regional role? What place will the strategic-yet-neglected Iraq have in the emerging Middle East? How can Saudi Arabia be encouraged to reform while remaining a key American partner? How can the regional tumult induce Turkey to re-align itself with American interests? Will the emerging assertiveness by Gulf states such as Qatar and UAE be channeled in positive directions?

The Arab Spring further hastened the erosion of the old regional order; it will take shrewd, principled, and creative diplomacy to help craft a new one.

The debt ceiling bill making its way through Congress will cut broad defense spending  by $350 billion across ten years. The broad definition encompasses homeland security, veterans affairs, and nuclear programs, in addition to straight DOD spending. Those accounts totalled $881 billion in fiscal year 2012. Defense Department spending on its own was roughly $670 billion (that includes both the baseline budget and war operations). Even if DOD can offload some of the cuts onto other national security departments, it is likely to face a reduction of roughly four percent in its total spending.  

Scoring of the spending cuts counts as savings a significant amount not spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. This financial windfall is the result of the president's policies to curtail our military operations in the wars -- going to zero military personnel in Iraq by the end of 2011, and refusing commanders in Afghanistan the troops they asked for to achieve the president's objectives. With these figures folded in, DOD will probably be faced with a real reduction in spending of between two and three percent -- in a budget that has more than doubled in the past decade. DOD will need to husband its resources carefully, but the roof won't fall in.  

In fact, the deal Republicans in Congress were able to make reduces DOD less than the president proposed in his April budget speech. The president's proposal would have made no dent in the deficit, yet still would have cut defense by more than the legislation in its first phase.

But it is the second phase of debt reduction that has the potential to be extraordinarily damaging to defense. If the bipartisan commission cannot reach agreement, it will trigger automatic across the board cuts of $1.2 trillion beginning in 2013. It would appear likely the bipartisan commission will, in fact, deadlock, in which case a 50-50 domestic and defense split would require DOD to cut spending an additional $600 billion. It would mean a 14 percent cut overall to defense spending. This DOD could not do without a major reconfiguration of forces and capabilities, and a major reduction in our actual fighting power.

And the structure of the bargain gives Democrats more in defense cuts (and therefore protection of domestic programs) if they refuse to compromise on the second tranche of cuts. As President Obama himself said, "The nice thing about the defense budget is it's so big, it's so huge, that, you know, a one percent reduction is the equivalent of the education budget … it's so big that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of head room to fund things like basic research or student loans or things like that."

The date of the automatic spending cuts is crucial, however: a new president will have the latitude to submit a budget that makes executive choices about spending rather than accepting a system-wide legislated reduction. President Obama has led from behind in the budget crisis; the president in 2013 could make more responsible choices.

I know the U.S. is still recovering from the financial crisis.…Under such circumstances, it is still spending a lot of money on its military. Isn't that placing too much pressure on the taxpayers? If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a little and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people and doing more good things for the world -- wouldn't that be a better scenario?"

This was the Chinese People's Liberation Army Chief of General Staff Gen. Chen Bingde's suggestion to Americans during the visit of his counterpart Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen. Well, we are obliging the Chinese general -- at least in part. We are cutting defense. General Chen would be especially happy to know that in particular we are foregoing investment in the types of systems that help keep us "present" in Asia -- though Admiral Mullen assured Asian audiences that we will be there for the long haul. Whether we are cutting defense in order to improve the livelihood of the American people is a separate, hotly debated question. Color me skeptical.

But on the first part of General Chen's suggestion, here is how we are heeding his advice. We are not properly resourcing: a) the submarines the Navy says it needs, or, for that matter, the number of ships in its own shipbuilding plan; b) stealthy tactical aircraft (by the Air Force's own account, they will face an 800-fighter shortfall later this decade); and c) a long-range bomber, now called "the long-range strike family of systems," particularly by those who think this system is silver bullet for our Asia posture.  We were supposed to be deploying new bombers by 2018. Not a chance. The program is estimated to cost $40-50 billion in total, and respected aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia predicts that we will not see a new bomber until well into the next decade. Yes, that's right, a new bomber somewhere in the 2020s.

So General Chen, no need to worry about our defense spending -- we will not have enough submarines or tactical aircraft, and there is no new bomber on the horizon. All are supposed to play a role in the much vaunted AirSea Battle strategy that is our answer to China's growing military power.

But Mullen insists, as did Secretary Gates and other top U.S. leaders, we will still be there for our friends and our allies.  Given the numbers, the next time a leading U.S. official insists that we are going to be "present" in Asia, journalists have a duty to ask, "With what?"

Today marks Robert Gates' last day as secretary of defense. On a day that will feature its share of testimonials from others, let me offer my own. My view is no doubt colored by the fact that I served him for more than two years, but, then again, the experience of witnessing his leadership and decision-making up close and often behind closed doors clarified more than it distorted.

Gates came to the Pentagon with a mandate to focus on Iraq. Many at the time, aware of his involvement in the Iraq Study Group, feared that he had been hired to liquidate the United States' investment in Iraq. We soon realized that Gates did indeed want to end the war in Iraq, but in victory rather than defeat. Turning the war around is likely to be seen as the signal achievement of his tenure as secretary of defense. If victory in Iraq is to be squandered, it will be left to his successors to do so.

Gates also deserves great credit for enforcing high standards of accountability within the Defense Department, rewarding those whose performance warranted it, and removing those whose actions demanded it. He also strengthened civilian leadership of the department, often in ways that were subtle and out of the limelight. In 2008, for example, he signed the National Defense Strategy over the objections of the civilian and military leaders of the services. Gates believed the Defense Department needed to make tradeoffs and accept additional risk; the service chiefs and secretaries were unwilling to do so. Similarly, Gates took an important step to build up much-needed expertise for national security by inaugurating the Minerva Initiative, which provides grants to universities to build much-needed intellectual capital in the social sciences to help national defense. It is an initiative that deserves to be supported and expanded.

In other areas, his legacy is at best uncertain. How he will be judged on Afghanistan is very much bound up with the outcome of the war. However, to the extent that the Obama administration has made poor choices in Afghanistan, history will likely judge that things would have been worse without Gates' advocacy and advice. The same is true on the areas of missile defense and nuclear arms control: Things likely would have been worse without Gates' moderating influence.

Gates leaves other tasks incomplete. For years, but particularly over the last year and a half, he has spoken at length about the need to reform the Defense Department's institutions and structure, but much action needs to accompany those words. Leon Panetta would be well advised to follow through with the transformation agenda.

It is hazardous to predict the verdict of history. In time, the cheers of adulation fade, and the jeers give way to empathy, understanding, and sometimes respect. It is a safe bet, however, that Robert Gates will be judged among the nation's best secretaries of defense. The nation owes him a debt of gratitude, for it is better off for his service.

President Obama was sharply critical of the Bush administration for under-resourcing the war in Afghanistan; with his rapid drawdown of forces and funding announced last night, President Obama now deserves the same criticism.

President Obama has ordered a reduction of 10,000 troops by the end of this year and another 23,000 by the end of 2012, and they will "continue coming home at a steady pace" through 2014, when "the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security." He argued success on the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere allow us to fight in a new way -- a new way from 18 months ago, which was the last time he changed direction -- and to focus on nation building at home instead of abroad.

Make no mistake: the president's choices went against the advice of both the war's military leadership and Secretary Gates' recommendations. Understanding the deference the American public has for our military's judgment on the wars, the White House is aggressively trying to spin the president's policy as supporting our military commanders and as a gradual reduction in the force. Neither of those are true.

President Obama's drawdown announced tonight is more than six times the reduction recommended by our military leaders and endorsed by Secretary Gates. The military leadership advocated withdrawing only 3,000-5,000 staff and support troops before 2013, so that front line fighting forces would be able to consolidate gains in the south and take the fight to the last of the Taliban strongholds in the east.

Drawing down troop levels before the objectives are met will increase strain on the forces fighting in Afghanistan. It will increase the risk they run by stretching them thinner across the demands, and it will likely increase the time it takes them to achieve the objectives, putting the president's 2014 conclusion of the war in doubt. It will put diplomats and development experts operating in Afghanistan at greater risk, too. And it will reignite concern by governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that we are more concerned about the exit than the strategy.

It was the president's political advisors that advocated withdrawals of 15,000-30,000 troops -- and the president decided on the highest number of their high numbers. They see high levels of public dissatisfaction with the duration of the war and have suddenly realized the war is expensive (although the costs have not increased over projections from 18 months ago, when the president approved this policy). Given how little this president has invested in shaping public attitudes about the war, what is remarkable is that more Americans aren't opposed. He has been leading from behind again.

As Secretary Gates said last Sunday in rebuffing calls for a reduction larger than 5,000 troops, "we can do anything the president tells us to do, the question is whether it is wise." The president's decision to withdraw 30,000 troops from Afghanistan before 2013 is unwise; it increases the risk of achieving his objectives, the risk to our military forces and diplomats operating in Afghanistan, and the risk of ending this war in 2014.

The crucial question President Obama did not answer in his speech is why he is sending soldiers and Marines to fight in Afghanistan if he is unwilling to commit the resources to consolidate the gains they risked their lives to achieve. This is worse than strategic incoherence. It is morally wrong.

Last week, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan gave a foreign-policy speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, D.C. (full disclosure: I am the advisor to the Duke University chapter of the Hamilton Society). I think the speech foreshadows one of the main foreign-policy questions that will haunt the 2012 presidential campaign: Can the U.S. afford to be the global leader?

As I have already argued, the 2012 foreign-policy debate will not be the same as 2008. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that Republicans are uncharacteristically divided on foreign policy. Ron Paul was something of a gadfly in 2008, and he still represents only a small fraction of the Republican Party, but his isolationist arguments resonate among fiscal hawks today in a way that they didn't only four years ago. War weariness and perhaps even a broader "global-leadership weariness" is no longer the exclusive province of Democrats. Candidates will be debating just how much the U.S. taxpayer should be willing to pay to secure success in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere -- but the debate may be as lively within the parties as between them.

Ryan's speech is an important marker in that debate. He has impeccable credentials as a deficit hawk, having offered the most serious and comprehensive fiscal plan of any political leader. It is a bold plan, so bold that it may ask for sacrifices that the voters are unwilling to make. No one can accuse Ryan of taking spending lightly.

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India has decided not to buy American F-16's or F/A-18's for the biggest defense tender in its history -- a pending $10 billion-plus contract for 126 multi-role combat aircraft. Following field trials, it has instead shortlisted the Rafale, made by France's Dassault, and the Typhoon, produced by a European consortium. Skeptics of Indo-U.S. strategic partnership view this as yet another Indian snub to the United States, arguing that the promise of Indo-American entente that was to follow from the historic civilian-nuclear agreement of 2008 has proven hollow.

The charge is that American proponents of closer cooperation with India have oversold India's willingness or ability to partner with the United States. India is unreliable, they argue -- just look at its failure to enact liability legislation that would bring the 2008 civilian-nuclear agreement into force. For the skeptics, Indian foreign policy, rather than tilting in a more pro-American direction, remains guided by non-alignment and an abiding concern for strategic autonomy -- if not an outright hostility to the West, as in the bad old days of the Cold War.

While India's decision is certainly disappointing, this analysis is flawed.

First, the United States has a national interest in Indian strategic autonomy, because one important consequence of India's geopolitical ascent is the ballast it provides to an Asian order not subject to China's tutelage. From an American national interest perspective, it is vital that India retain strategic autonomy by growing its internal capabilities and building external partnerships with a range of important powers, including not just America but also Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, and European states.

The civilian-nuclear deal, advanced U.S. defense sales to India, technology-sharing, and other American initiatives have been designed to build Indian strength and promote Indian development. The mercantilistic idea that the ultimate goal of American policy towards India is creating a lucrative new market for American defense companies is not credible.

Second, India is not non-aligned, whatever the results of one defense sale. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh submitted his government to a no-confidence vote in 2008 over the nuclear deal with the United States -- risking the leadership of his coalition over the future of relations with the United States. India's military exercises more with America's armed forces than with any other, and the United States has emerged as a leading arms supplier to India, successfully selling it reconnaissance aircraft, transport aircraft, naval vessels, and other advanced platforms. Beyond the United States, India's growing set of partnerships are almost entirely with states along the Indo-Pacific littoral that fear the consequences of overweening Chinese power and seek to balance it.

India's double-digit annual defense budget increases, and India's emergence as the biggest arms importer in the world, aren't directed at the United States, or Europe, or Japan. They are undertaken with an eye on China first and Pakistan second. Yes, India's prime minister recently attended a BRICS summit -- though an Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman made clear beforehand that India vests more importance in the IBSA grouping (India, Brazil, South Africa) of developing democracies -- because they share common values. The BRICS, of course, do not.

Third, it's worth considering the perspective from New Delhi on the aircraft sale. Despite considerable progress in recent years, the United States historically has not been what Indians would call a reliable supplier of military hardware. To the contrary: It has sanctioned India repeatedly, cutting off sales of military platforms, technologies, and spare parts over several different periods. The United States has also provided advanced weaponry to India's key rivals (Pakistan since 1954, China during the 1980s).

Politically, an Indian government under frequent attack for moving closer to Washington stands to benefit from insulating itself against yet more charges of favoritism towards America by buying U.S. fighters. Another core political objective in this context is to avoid the kind of corruption scandals that have marred previous Indian defense purchases (most notably the Bofors scandal of the 1980s, which brought down an Indian government).  The possibility for a potential scandal over the role of American political pressure should India buy American is a charge the country's political masters are keen to avoid, and are now immune from.

A related political factor is the what my Indian colleague Dhruva Jaishankar describes as "the general drift" in U.S.-India relations, which "has only increased both countries' resolve to drive harder bargains. This period of drift was initiated by the Obama administration's early missteps on China and Afghanistan and has persisted despite the president's visit to India last November as a consequence of political developments in both capitals." The underperformance of the bilateral relationship over the past two years is manifested in this week's decision on the aircraft tender.

Fourth, India's decision not to shortlist the American combat aircraft was a technical determination. India's existing fleet of Russian and French aircraft, and the ground-based support infrastructure for air operations, are not closely compatible with American combat aircraft. Some argue that European fighter aircraft are more advanced than older models of U.S. combat aircraft; it is reported that several performed better in flight trials over Indian territory than their U.S. competitors. The American planes are certainly more expensive, which matters in a country with more poor people than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Indian cabinet will make the ultimate political decision on the tender.

This is no defense of India's decision. The great benefit of a U.S. company securing the contract for 126 multi-role combat aircraft wasn't the immediate benefit of a lucrative defense sale. It was the establishment of a long-term supply and training relationship between the air forces of the world's biggest democracies, great powers with the capability to fundamentally shape security order in Asia over the coming century.

India will do fine with its Rafales or Typhoons. But it's a shame longer-range, strategic considerations didn't seem to drive this decision. Leaders in Beijing and Islamabad are probably smiling, even as those of us in Washington are not.

On Wednesday, in response to Rep. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity," President Obama announced sweeping cuts to the budget to pay down the deficit, including significant defense cuts. In contrast, Paul Ryan's budget proposed last week did not significantly decrease defense spending, indeed it matched President Obama's FY12 request submitted in February.

House Republicans seem to realize that defense is different. President Obama appears to believe that defense is a large part of the problem.

His proposals would cut $400 billion in security spending from the budget by 2023. Two months ago, the president submitted a budget to Congress that already included cuts to defense. The president now seems to think that those were not significant enough.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that during the run-up to the administration's FY12 request, Secretary Gates made clear that the $178 billion in cuts forced upon the Pentagon by the White House during the budget process left "the minimum level of defense spending that is necessary, given the complex and unpredictable array of security challenges the United States faces around the globe: global terrorist networks, rising military powers, nuclear-armed rogue states, and much, much more." Gates went on to say that proposals for major reductions in defense spending would be "risky at best, and potentially calamitous."

Instead of listening to Gates, Obama now is following the lead of Deficit Commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. They, at least, were honest about their goals. Their proposals released last December included "Keep America safe, while rethinking our 21st century global role."

Ongoing unrest in the Middle East and U.S. involvement in an unexpected war in Libya, extensive humanitarian operations in Japan, and continued threats from rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, should remind us that "rethinking our 21st century global role" is not possible. Just addressing current challenges, let alone preparing for the threats of tomorrow, will be difficult at current funding levels.

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I've been in Taiwan this week with a small delegation sponsored by the estimable Project 2049. Our visit comes at what would appear to be an auspicious time in cross-strait relations, as Taiwan and mainland China have made concrete steps over the past two years to reduce tensions and improve their economic and transportation ties, along with increasing political dialogue through multiple channels. But complacency is not in order. I have heard numerous concerns expressed this week about the fragility of the current equilibrium. In particular, both Taiwan and China face political transition points next year that could also exacerbate cross-strait tensions. And many Taiwanese feel uncertain of the White House's commitment to Taiwan's security -- an uncertainty that could possibly undermine their confidence in continuing to improve their relationship with China. Maintaining a security equilibrium takes regular tending and frequent calibration. The Obama administration should consider taking steps now to preserve the current stability, as well as preparing contingency plans for possible disruptions in the next year.

Early next year (the precise date is not yet set) Taiwan will hold a presidential election. The current president, Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT party, has thus far enjoyed a more agreeable posture from China, in part because Beijing finds President Ma vastly preferable to his reckless predecessor Chen Shui-bian of the more independence-minded DPP. If Ma wins reelection to a second term next year, however, Beijing might be tempted to up the ante and demand more concessions from the lame-duck president. Conversely, if the DPP nominee (who is yet to be determined) defeats Ma, Beijing might throw a brush-back pitch to test the new president -- even though the leading DPP contenders all appear to be more responsible and sober-minded than the comparatively erratic Chen. As a further complication, China will undergo its own leadership transition later in 2012, as the next Communist Party Congress appears on track to select Xi Jinping as the successor to Hu Jintao. Reading the tea leaves from Beijing is as murky as the Kremlinology of yore. But it is not unlikely that factions within the Chinese government -- such as the growingly assertive People's Liberation Army -- might use the leadership transition as a time to assert their own power through increased provocations toward Taiwan.

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