The Defense Department identified “the re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition” by the two so-called revisionist powers as the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security, as Mattis unveiled the first National Defense Strategy under the administration of President Donald Trump. "We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great power competition -- not terrorism -- is now the primary focus of U.S. national security," Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in prepared remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia are from each other, nations that do seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models, pursuing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions,” Mattis said. Mattis said that Russia and China are “growing threats” for the United States, “nations that do seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models-pursuing veto authority over other nation’s economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.”

He also called out North Korea and Iran as “rogue regimes” that “persist in taking outlaw actions that threaten regional and even global stability.”

“In this time of change,” Mattis said, “our military is still strong, yet, our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare-air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace- and it is continuing to erode.”

Some of the reasons he highlighted for this were technological changes, the impact from years of combat, and the defense spending caps causing the military to operate for several years under a continuing resolution, which has “created an overstretched and under resourced military.”

The new strategy has three main points that will “restore our comparative military advantage,” he said. As hard as the last 16 years have been on our military, no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of the U.S. military than the combined impact of the Budget Control Act's defense spending cuts, worsened … by us operating, nine of the last 10 years, under continuing resolutions, wasting copious amounts of precious taxpayer dollars.”

The military continues to work tirelessly to accomplish the mission with now inadequate and misaligned resources, simply because the Congress cannot maintain regular order, Mattis said.
Presenting a new national defense strategy, the United States Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, says terrorism is no longer the focus of the national security of the United States. Now it is competition between great powers.