President Bush yesterday travelled to a Virginia naval base to watch a battle exercise by video link in a photo opportunity to promote his vision of a revamped US military armed with "lighter and more lethal weaponry".
This is "military week" for the new President - on Monday he announced a $5.7 billion pay and benefits rise for the services, fulfilling a pledge that he made during the election campaign. Today he goes to Charleston for another visit to an army base.
Yesterday Mr Bush referred to entering a "period of transition" for the military to meet evolving threats in which power would be "defined not by size but mobility".
But Mr Bush has surprised and somewhat wrong-footed the military by refusing to approve a request to Congress for a special appropriation to expand its 2002 non-pay budget. Instead he has ordered a root and branch review of military spending by the controversial head of the Pentagon's internal think tank, the 79-year-old veteran, Mr Andrew G. Marshall.
That is to include a review of the US stockpile of 7,500 nuclear weapons, the possibility of reducing which unilaterally, Mr Bush has suggested, may be a way of easing fears among NATO partners - the Russians and the Chinese - about the simultaneous deployment of the US's National Missile Defence (NMD) system.
He is known to believe that Russia may be tempted to look more favourably on a US repudiation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which would be necessary if NMD was to be deployed, if the US were prepared to offer a unilateral cut of say 2,000 missiles from its stocks.
Mr Marshall, known as the Pentagon's most radical thinker, has in the past warned that the US arsenal of aircraft, tanks and ships is a "millstone" around the necks of the military, preventing it from moving from the Industrial to the Information Age.
And he has focused recently on the changing strategic threat to the US in the post-Cold War world, particularly the rise of China.
"Most US military assets are in Europe where there are no foreseeable conflicts threatening vital US interests . . . The threats are in Asia," he warned in 1999.
What appears to be going on is thus less a retreat from Mr Bush's promise to boost the military than a step back to get a better run at a much more radical restructuring that may indeed cost a great deal. Bush advisers are understood to believe that to have increased the military budget without setting new strategic goals would have been simply to throw good money at bad.
Yesterday, Mr Bush spoke of the need for "new spending" but insisted that "before we make our full investment we must know our full priorities . . . Our defence vision will drive our defence budget."
Meanwhile, reports in US papers that European politicians have been warming to NMD, are being played down by EU diplomatic sources. They reflect signals from the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, on his recent visit here, and reports of speeches by the European Security supremo, Mr Javier Solana, and NATO's Secretary General, Lord Robertson, suggesting a growing view that the US aspirations to establish NMD have to be accepted.
But such impressions, diplomats say, reflect a difference in emphasis from majority European opinion of the NATO/British axis. The majority of European capitals remain as determinedly opposed to NMD as they have been but have been maintaining a silence on the issue.
