WASHINGTON — Leading Republican senators are expressing serious concerns about what they consider the isolationist bent of President Donald Trump’s emerging Pentagon team.
Elbridge Colby, whom Trump has tapped to be the Pentagon’s policy chief, believes the U.S. military needs to focus on China and substantially reduce its forces in Europe and the Middle East.
Several others in Trump’s orbit, some of whom are already working as deputy assistant secretaries of Defense, largely think the same. And Trump himself has articulated at least some of these same views.
One top Defense Department official has argued the Army should sacrifice nearly $14 billion from its annual budget to bankroll the Air Force and Navy.
More traditional GOP senators who oversee the Pentagon, and a large portion of Democrats, support deterring China but are wary of wholesale withdrawals of U.S. forces from areas of the world where tensions are rife or active wars continue to rage.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R- Ky., who chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, has been openly and fiercely critical in the last several weeks of the views of some of the new Pentagon officials, just as he has publicly rebutted in the last two years those in his party who are unwilling to support Ukraine.
Now Sen. Roger Wicker, R- Miss., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, said in brief interviews this week that the views of Colby and his aides are concerning to a number of senators and will be a focus of both Colby’s as-yet-unscheduled confirmation hearing and the broader defense debate ahead.
Wicker said he has met with Colby and that senators will be asking the nominee about these issues when he appears before the panel soon.
“It is a concern to a number of senators,” Wicker said on Tuesday.
Reed, for his part, agreed that the questions about the new slate of Pentagon officials will be a focus in Colby’s hearing and beyond.
“We’re going to take a look at that in the context of the hearing,” Reed said Wednesday. “Those are very fair questions about policy direction.”
Intraparty conflict
This tension in GOP ranks between self-styled “restrainers,” on the one hand, and what some might call “neoconservatives,” on the other, has been simmering in the wake of America’s mixed results in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But now, with Republicans in control of Washington, their party’s leaders say their internal rift will play out more saliently and with higher stakes in the form of policies, budgets and troop movements.
The president and his national security advisers, along with the secretary of State, more than any Defense Department officials, will set U.S. national security policies.
It remains unclear how some of these decisions will go — or, in some cases, whether today’s decisions will survive into tomorrow or will be contradicted by other moves.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have argued for making Europeans pay more and do more to defend themselves. And they have questioned the wisdom of America providing security assistance to Ukraine. They support U.S. economic and military aid for its wealthy Mideast ally, Israel, but they have suggested U.S. troops should play a smaller role in the region.
But Trump is unpredictable and inconsistent, traits that were on full display Tuesday evening, when the president announced that America should “own” Gaza after first clearing it of ordnance — and its 2 million or so residents — and then building something “magnificent.”
Trump, usually a critic of so-called nation-building led by Americans overseas and of “forever wars,” did not rule out sending in U.S. troops to perform the job in Gaza.
Reed said Trump’s unexpected announcement will add a new wrinkle to the Colby hearing and the debate over America’s global posture.
“Given the president’s discussions about Gaza, that probably puts in an element that didn’t exist before,” Reed said.
Hard on the heels of Tuesday’s Gaza news, with its unclear implications for U.S. troops, it emerged that Trump is pushing to bring American forces home from another Mideast country.
The Pentagon, at Trump’s behest, is drawing up plans to bring home some 2,000 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, NBC News reported.
The ‘restrainers’
Colby served for part of Trump’s first term as deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development at the Pentagon, where he was a lead author of the 2018 national defense strategy.
That document put a greater Defense Department focus than before on the threat from China, a position with bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. To move the military in that direction, though, Colby has called for retrenchment of the U.S. troop presence in Europe and the Middle East — and that is where differences have arisen.
As Colby has made the rounds in Senate offices in the last week to garner support for his nomination, several deputy assistant secretaries of Defense with views that largely mirror Colby’s have already been installed — and in some cases go further toward what might be called isolationism.
As multiple news organizations have reported in recent weeks, several of the appointees have ties to libertarian think tanks, such as Defense Priorities, that want to reduce U.S. troop presence abroad.
Michael DiMino, who will be in charge of Mideast policy, said in a webcast last year that U.S. interests in the Middle East are “minimal to nonexistent.”
Austin Dahmer, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for strategy, has said that, to ensure America’s military can redeploy forces to deter China, the U.S. Army’s annual budget should be cut by more than $68 billion over five years to fund the lion’s share of an $83 billion-plus boost over that time frame to the combined budgets of the Air Force and Navy.
The Army, he has argued, should lose four Stryker brigades, six infantry brigades and two aviation brigades, plus other vehicles and aircraft, and he has called for a 5 percent cut to “civilian/contractor personnel” — unless the Pentagon gets a 10 percent budget increase.
Ukraine plan due soon
Another serving Defense official whose views put them in this camp is Alexander Velez-Green, an adviser to the undersecretary for policy, which is the position for which Colby has been nominated. Velez-Green is currently performing the undersecretary’s duties.
Also in the “restrainer” group is Dan Caldwell, who led the Trump transition team for Pentagon staffing. Caldwell is reportedly under consideration to become deputy to Keith Kellogg, the retired general who is Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia.
Kellogg is scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference later this month, and press reports indicate he may unveil at the event Trump’s plan for ending the war in Ukraine.
Newly installed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and former Fox News host who has no experience in defense strategy, may come to rely on the views of his undersecretaries and their top aides. His own positions on U.S. support for Ukraine or American troop deployments in the Middle East have not always been clear or consistent.
Regardless, Trump’s Pentagon leadership will not set U.S. strategy by themselves.
The president will lead the way. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Michael Waltz are widely known as China hawks, but neither has issued the kind of robust calls for military withdrawal from other theaters that have come from the Colby camp.
‘Alarming’ positions
Regardless, traditionalists on Capitol Hill are worried.
“President Trump has committed to restoring peace through strength and standing with Israel, but the folks staffing up his Pentagon operation don’t appear to have read the memo,” McConnell told Jewish Insider on Jan. 23. “It’s alarming that people can clear vetting after claiming U.S. interests in the Middle East are ‘minimal to nonexistent,’ suggesting that America should ‘militarily retrench’ from the region, or claiming that providing Israel even defensive assistance against Iran-backed terrorists is escalatory.”
Leaders of the Republican Jewish Coalition wrote Wicker on Jan. 30 to urge him to swiftly confirm Colby, who they said would be “an asset to President Trump’s solidly pro- Israel national security team.”
The fact that the group felt the need to send the letter at all suggests the extent of Senate Republicans’ heartburn over the pattern of Trump’s Pentagon nominees.
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