https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...rategy/156068/

The National Defense Strategy (NDS) Is No Strategy
The author starts by attacking the National Security Strategy (NSS). Overall I agree, both the NSS and the NDS are hyper conventional based on outdated Clausewitzian influence that both McMasters and Mattis embraced to a fault.

Let us first dispense with the notion that there exists a White House National Security Strategy that describes an overall national-security approach in which the NDS plays a part. The 2017 NSS document, a modest, carefully navigated bow to conventional thinking perpetrated by National Security Council staffers under then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, was largely irrelevant from the start.
He points out that the NSA Bolton has dismissed the NSS.

Listening to the NSC staffers who produced the NSS leaves one with an impression of freshly minted international relations graduates whose grasp of statecraft is limited to buzzwords like ends, ways, and means; DIME; soft power; and such.
True, but unfortunately a lot of the authors were relatively senior.

Most importantly, it is the enduring, intellectually stultifying legacy of James Mattis’s reign as defense secretary, perpetuated and institutionalized (to a degree perhaps not seen since NSC-68) by true-believing disciples and acolytes.
We know where he stands on Mattis, who perhaps like any other person held in high esteem is a good person, but still overrated.

The following point I agree with. The strategy dismisses anything beyond the 2+3 threats (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and VEOs). Yet wishing these threats away doesn't make them disappear. On the other hand, our hyper focus and ineffective approach to counter VEOs did largely blind us the rise of both China and Russia as significant threats to our interests, and to compete and deter against these actors requires investing resources and time into different capabilities. Yet, not at the expense of other threats.

All else – e.g., failing states, climate change and environmental degradation, arms proliferation, sundry forms of illicit trafficking, pandemic disease – is ancillary and peripheral, unworthy of more than passing attention because such things don’t warrant legitimate military response.
Finally, many of us wrestle the with the tactical focus on increasing lethality, which sadly still the preferred way of war for America. Move a heavy force to the battle area to engage in direct force on force combat and devastate the adversary with our advanced weapons. The focus on lethality limits the focus on innovation to weapons systems, despite claims to the contrary. Great for the weapons industry, not so great for the nation seeking to advance its interests in the 21st Century.

Trumpeting lethality – deadliness, killing power; a term used some 13 times – is pure Mattis: tough-guy rhetoric one might expect from a Chesty Puller or a George Patton, good perhaps for motivating the troops and being “colorful,” but to others nothing short of arrogant, hyperbolic, inflammatory, and strategically counterproductive.

To suggest that lethality will sustain influence is less persuasive than the argument that it could diminish influence through disaffection with our bellicosity and militarism. To suggest that it will ensure favorable balances of power is to ignore the likelihood of provocation, insecurity, and reciprocal escalation.
We're unlikely to see a redo any time soon.