US President Donald Trump signed the annual US defense authorization into law on Monday, a step toward shifting the Pentagon’s focus away from the decadeslong Middle East war on terrorism to great power conflicts against China and Russia.
As Trump put his signature on the $716 billion legislation, named after intraparty rival John McCain, that puts the United States on a long course to build a 355-ship Navy and significantly cuts the post-9/11 warfighting fund, the new law faces a bureaucratic fight within the Defense Department as the massive agency tries to determine how to rebalance its forces.
US troops, ships and air assets have begun rotating out of the Middle East in the past few months. In February, the Associated Press reported that contractors in Iraq had begun shifting out of the country, and most elements of the 10th Mountain Division left US staging areas for Afghanistan and other deployments in May. Less than 100 of those troops remain. Al-Monitor reported in July that the Pentagon will also shift explosive ordnance disposal units out of the country.
US Special Operations chief Gen. Tony Thomas told a West Point crowd in March, soon after the release of the bill, that the Tampa-based command started indexing “the living laboratory of consistent combat in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya” for post-9/11 lessons of the counterterrorism fight that can be applied against China and Russia.
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