14 June 2001

Defense Department Report: Quadrennial Defense Review

A senior Defense Department official says the most important objective of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, to be completed this September, will be "to assure friends and allies" about U.S. commitments in Europe and Asia.

During a June 14 Pentagon briefing the official, who declined to be identified, said the other three overriding defense strategy objectives will be to dissuade future adversaries, deter threats and counter coercion, and defeat adversaries should deterrence fail.

Although the formal results of the QDR are not legislatively mandated until the end of the current fiscal year on September 30, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wants to provide strategy guidance to the military services within about six to eight weeks so that the services can begin incorporating it into the fiscal year 2003 budget process that must begin this summer.

Defense Department and military officials are in the unique position now of working on three budgets at the same time: the FY '01 defense supplemental, the FY '02 amended defense budget, and the FY '03 budget. The senior official said specific weapons programs or decisions must be guided by an overarching defense strategy. The number of aircraft needed depends on the force structure, he said, while the type of aircraft you need to buy "depends on how you define your strategic objectives."

In May, the Defense Department completed "a range of studies on key defense topics including morale, transformation, conventional forces, nuclear forces, (and) missile defense," the official said, "and these studies provide important inputs for developing a new strategic approach to inform our defense planning." He also said that U.S. military requirements for Europe and Asia are different, but both "are absolutely critical regions of the world for the United States."

The QDR will tackle such questions as how the U.S. military should be sized and shaped, what risks it must be ready to tackle, how the risks should be handled, and at what rate the military should be transformed.

The official also said that the QDR is grappling with the need to implement a defense strategy capable of dealing with unanticipated and unbudgeted regional contingencies such as enforcing the No-Fly Zones over northern and southern Iraq.

The QDR is also trying to address what the official described as the "risk of inefficiency" whereby resources are mismanaged or inefficiencies are inflicted from legislative directions or other sources. He said the analysts and strategists working on the review have been directed "to measure risk in a more multi-dimensional way...."

This is the second QDR; the first debuted in 1997 under Defense Secretary William Cohen.

When a reporter asked if military readiness to respond to two, nearly simultaneous, regional contingencies will drive the second QDR, the answer was: "It's definitely an issue that's on the table...I don't think we've decided even whether to discard it, or certainly what the replacement would be. But it is a central issue."

Asked about some of the assumptions underlying this QDR, the official said information warfare is the one "that everybody agrees is important." He also said ballistic missiles are being sought by U.S. adversaries not only to potentially attack U.S. cities, but also U.S. military forces. Another piece of the grand strategy will be how to promote joint training and fully utilize advanced technology to train better and more effectively.

Secretary Rumsfeld is expected to provide more insight about the QDR process when he appears before various congressional committees this month.

A complete transcript of the background briefing is available on the Web at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2001/t06142001_t614bckg.html