Pentagon official at center of weapons pause on Ukraine wants US to focus on China

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a day ago

WASHINGTON
:
Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's top policy official, wants to refocus the U.S. military on countering China. That has put him at the center of the Trump administration's abrupt moves on providing weapons to Ukraine.
It was Colby, a 45-year-old grandson of a former Central Intelligence Agency director, who wrote a memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early June outlining how Ukraine's requests for U.S. weapons could further stretch already depleted Pentagon stockpiles.
The memo didn't have a recommendation and was described by a defense official as a tool for assessing how arms deliveries would affect U.S. stockpiles. But some officials in the administration and in Congress say it figured in the Pentagon's decision to suspend some arms shipments to Kyiv, a move President Trump later reversed.
The incident exemplifies Colby's push to make good on years of U.S. vows to boost its military position in the Western Pacific, his supporters say. But it also highlights the contrary pressures on an administration that, in its first months in office, has already launched major military operations against Iran and the Houthis in the Middle East while continuing military deliveries to Ukraine.
Colby 'has been thinking very deeply about how the United States can best defend itself in an era of constrained resources," said Dan Caldwell, a former adviser to Hegseth. 'A lot of policymakers have refused to accept that reality."
Colby has turned down interview requests about his views on helping Ukraine and in urging U.S. partners in Asia and Europe to step up their defense efforts. But in a social-media message Saturday, he said that he would continue to press allies to boost their military spending, even if some 'might not welcome frank discussions."
Some of those frank discussions have included pressing Japan and Australia to make clear what military steps they are prepared to take in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the exchanges. Colby's efforts have surprised some officials in the region because the U.S.'s longstanding policy of 'strategic ambiguity" has avoided an explicit statement about what actions Washington might take if Chinese forces moved against Taiwan, and even Trump hasn't spelled out what he would do. Colby's discussions were earlier reported by the Financial Times.
In arguing for doubling down on China, Colby is known as a 'prioritizer" who favors limiting U.S. obligations outside Asia to free up resources to counter Beijing. In so doing, he has differentiated himself from 'restrainers" who have urged that the U.S. pull back from overseas commitments, as well as traditional Republican hawks.
Though presidents from both parties, starting with Barack Obama, have called for focusing U.S. national security strategy on China, putting the idea into practice has proven difficult, partly due to new threats that have emerged outside Asia and partly due to the Pentagon's longstanding commitments in Europe and the Middle East.
Colby's calls to de-emphasize demands on U.S. forces other than in Asia have left him out of step with some Republicans.
'For many years, GOP 'prioritizers' have argued that the United States should not strike Iran or aid Ukraine because it must husband its resources for a possible war with China," said Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, who was a national security adviser to the 2012 Mitt Romney and 2016 Marco Rubio presidential campaigns. 'President Trump, in contrast, believes 'America First' requires continued U.S. involvement in multiple regions of the world."
When Trump nominated Colby to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy in December, the fissures among Republicans over national security came to the fore. Colby received a hearty endorsement at his March confirmation hearing from Vice President JD Vance, who has long been a skeptical voice on providing billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine and has called Colby a friend.
Colby was grilled by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) about his past statement that it was feasible to contain a nuclear-armed Iran. Colby amended his stance in that confirmation hearing, saying that Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and that he would provide the president with military options to stop it from doing so.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the only Republican to vote against Colby's confirmation, lambasted him for promoting policies that could lead to 'geostrategic self-harm."
Colby has deep family connections to the foreign policy establishment through his grandfather, former CIA Director William Colby. 'Bridge," as he is known in Washington, attended school in Japan, where his father worked for an investment bank, before graduating from Harvard University.
At Yale Law School he was a housemate of Jon Finer, the former deputy national security adviser to President Joe Biden. Even then, Colby's contrarian foreign policy priorities were evident: He was a rare Republican who opposed the war in Iraq.
Colby has written that the 2003 Iraq war and the lengthy U.S. occupation was a 'historic error" that squandered vast resources. He argued in a 2012 article against striking Iran's nuclear facilities, saying it would provide Tehran 'every incentive to reboot the program with greater vigor."
As a deputy assistant secretary of defense during Trump's first term, he played a major role in the drafting of the 2018 national defense strategy, which urged a shift from a focus on counterterrorism that the Pentagon adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to countering China and Russia.
Colby's role wasn't without turbulence. Trump's defense secretary at the time, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, was frustrated with Colby's emphasis on defending Taiwan, participants recall.
'I think Bridge did a really good job in managing the strategy formulation process," said Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine colonel who was brought in by Mattis to help draft the strategy document. 'But in making Taiwan the hinge point of our military competition with China, he had a narrower focus than Secretary Mattis on what the strategy needed to do."
Colby elaborated on his views in his 2021 book, 'The Strategy of Denial," in which he argued that the defense of Taiwan was vital because of its proximity to China, along with Japan and the Philippines, forming what Pentagon strategists refer to as the first island chain in the Western Pacific.
His focus on China, he noted in the book, included arguing that Russia could be a 'potential collaborator" with the U.S. in an anti-Beijing coalition. And he warned against including Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because the country was 'highly exposed" to a Russia attack 'while offering no meaningful advantage to the alliance that is remotely comparable to the costs and risk that their defense would impose on it."
But Colby's call for reprioritizing Pentagon strategy was tested after Russia invaded Ukraine the following year and turned to Beijing for help in expanding the Russian defense industry. Instead of dealing with China in isolation, Washington has faced the prospect of simultaneously deterring two geographically disparate adversaries that have been cooperating.
Colby is playing a pivotal role in policy debate and the crafting of a new defense strategy that will set spending and force deployment goals for years to come.
Some current and former officials who share Colby's goal of boosting American capabilities in the Pacific say he may be better at standing on principle than bringing allies along. Colby has irked Tokyo by urging that it commit to boosting military spending to 3.5% of its gross domestic product, they say. With policy disagreements over military spending and tariffs, Japan put off high-level talks with the U.S. that had been expected in July.
A review Colby is conducting of a 2021 agreement—known as Aukus, under which Australia will get nuclear-powered attack submarines from the U.S. while contributing several billion dollars to the U.S. defense-industrial base—has concerned Australian officials.
In an interview with Australian television last year, Colby said it would be 'crazy" for the U.S. to provide attack submarines to Australia unless the Pentagon can be assured it would have enough for itself, adding that the U.S. would be 'lucky" to get to the 2030s without a conflict with China.
But it was the classified memo that preceded the pause in arms deliveries to Ukraine that especially spotlighted Colby's views. It tallied the numbers of weapons sought by Ukraine along with how many the U.S. has in its stocks for training and warfighting around the world. Trump later told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wasn't responsible for the pause in shipments that followed, which he has since lifted.
Wess Mitchell, a former senior State Department official who once started a policy organization with Colby called the Marathon Initiative, said the Pentagon official's focus on making tough decisions to deter China is driven by concern that the U.S. is overstretched.
'Bridge has put his finger on the real problem and said 'Let's give priority to the main threat even if that means we have to accept trade-offs in the other regions,' " Mitchell said. 'People may disagree with his approach, but it is driven by a legitimate concern, which is we don't currently have the resources for a three-front war."
Write to Michael R. Gordon at [e-mail] and Lara Seligman at [e-mail]