Speaking right now at the Citadel, Jeb Bush is outlining a defense policy that emphasizes American hard power, and calls for a stop to the current bleeding in defense spending. His proposals—like those issued by some other candidates for the Republican nomination—give some hope that we might one day see the end of epic national security mismanagement at the hands of Barack Obama, who appears to have conducted a comprehensive review of the works of Sun-Tzu, Caesar, Jomini, Clausewitz, Mahan, Corbett, and Boyd, distilled them all down to their common essence, and then done the opposite.
In terms of strategy, Bush emphasizes alliance building in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific--but alliances led by American military power, including an intriguing proposal to return a U.S. Army Special Forces group to Europe, which would then focus on aiding the Baltic states in their preparations to resist a Russian invasion. (I ask anyone who thinks that sentence is hysteria-laced to replace "the Baltic states" with "Crimea" and imagine they are reading it in 2012.) Other plans have called for the return of an entire Army Corps headquarters to the region. Bush's proposal doesn't forestall further increases in the future.
Bush takes a similarly muscular approach to the Pacific, and in the Middle East calls for defeating the Islamic State—it's depressing to know for certain that this will still be a live issue in 2017—without falling into the trap of allying with Iran or Assad. On Iran, the plan calls for a "comprehensive strategy not merely to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, but also to confront Iranian aggression, terrorism, and malign activities." That's all fine, but just preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a tall (and important) order. The implications of that requirement are weighty, and it would be good to hear assurances that this is indeed what the candidate intends.
On defense spending, Bush says he would return the Army and the Marine Corps to roughly the scope of their pre-9/11 strength, with the Army to be maintained at 490,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps at 186,000. He would increase the size of the Navy's fleet (though the plan does not specify an end-strength) and build two Virginia-class submarines a year. The Air Force would get a minimum of 100 bombers, and the nuclear force would be modernized.
Combine all this with calls for taking a scythe to the Pentagon's civilian workforce (there are currently about as many civilian DOD employees as there are members of the Army and Marine Corps combined) and to the number of bloated headquarters establishments, and a call for defense acquisition reform, and there's plenty here to like. We have a long year ahead of us that is certain to involve widespread instability and violence as a result of the president's insistence on pulling America back from the world. Voters should respond well to proposals for restoring a sense of security and global order, especially if they are persuaded that the candidate means it.