Gopal Ratnam
Defense News
07 February 2005
Senior Pentagon officials this week will hammer out the framework — the Terms of Reference — that will guide the Quadrennial Defense Review in what is hoped will be a more collaborative process between civilian and militaryleaders.
The review, once widely expected to be a top-down process, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides setting the parameters and the uniformed military officers following them, is yielding to more collaboration.
Sources say that Rumsfeld, realizing the review could be bogged down
without the active support of the uniformed services, has offered them a seat at the table.
At a key Jan. 27 meeting among Rumsfeld, his aides and military
officers, service chiefs and combatant commanders were briefed on a draft Terms of Reference and were asked to submit their ideas and proposals by Feb. 4, said the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Mike Hagee.
The Terms of Reference will guide the QDR and once formally adopted
would mark the official start of the strategic review.
“Based on the discussion, the collaborative discussion that we had
between civilian leadership, the combatant commanders and the service chiefs, he [Rumsfeld] has asked us to personally get back to him with our thoughts on the current Terms of Reference,” Hagee said.
“The direction changed,” Hagee said, speaking about the scope of the
Terms of Reference, but he declined to say what the changes were.
A widely disseminated Pentagon chart that lays out four broad threats that U.S. military forces would have to address in the future has become a de facto template for the QDR.
The chart calls for U.S. forces to be prepared to handle irregular,
catastrophic, disruptive and traditional threats. Some refer to the
chart as the “four-way matrix.”
One Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Terms of Reference is a classified document, said the terms are being debated. Service officials want broader capabilities to take on the most complex threats, instead of focusing on specific potential conflicts.
“There are some who want to use the four-way matrix to drive services into corners, that the Army, Navy and Air Force would do certain things, but we live in a joint world, where puts and takes are not service specific, but cut across a wider waterfront,” the official said.
“This is very complicated because it’s not about one service and its
toys, it’s about putting everything together in the right way to get things done across a wider spectrum,” the official said.
The draft Terms of Reference mentioned specific countries as potential adversaries under each of the four threat categories, said Michèle Flournoy, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. Before joining the think-tank, Flournoy was a Pentagon official in charge of QDRs.
The Terms of Reference is classified secret in part because it names
specific adversaries.
The draft is also significant for what it left out, she said.
It did not address the post-conflict stability operations, which has
become a major, if unexpected, role for the U.S. military in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, said Flournoy.
Though many military officers prefer to see such roles included in the review, senior Pentagon officials prefer to deal with such
post-conflict stability operations separately, she said.
The Terms of Reference also addresses the Pentagon’s role vis-à-vis
other arms of the government, such as the State and Homeland Security Departments, the Central Intelligence Agency as well as non-governmental organizations.
The QDR is a congressionally mandated review of U.S. military strategy, force structure and budgets that happens every four years.
The current review will be completed by February 2006 and will shape
the defense budget for 2007 and beyond. Analysis and studies that flow from QDR recommendations could affect strategy and force structure for 20 years.
Of the four major threats being contemplated, the U.S. military is
“optimized” for traditional conflict or taking on an organized military of an enemy state, but not as well equipped in the three other areas, said Christopher “Ryan” Henry, the U.S. principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.
Henry, his deputy Jim Thomas and their boss Douglas Feith, the U.S.
undersecretary of defense for policy, are playing a key role in the QDR process.
At a Feb. 3 event organized by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Henry said the Pentagon would cooperate, not compete, with other federal agencies to handle non-traditional threats.
“We don’t see a turf battle between us and the Department of Homeland
Security,” Henry said. “There is a recognition that we have a common
problem that we have to address. We both have different areas of
responsibilities, and in some we cooperate.”
While the Pentagon is primarily in charge of securing America’s
airspace, it works with the Coast Guard — a DHS organization — to protect the sea approaches to the United States, Henry said.
He also laid out a possible plan for involving allies and partners in
enlarging the homeland security umbrella.
In the future, defense policy-makers might consider the “concept of
forward defense,” he said. Instead of focusing on defending just the U.S. homeland, “you could start to think about the defense of [multiple] homelands.”
Working with allies, partners and other foreign governments, “if we
could have the area of sovereignty be the same as the area of governance, we could do a lot to eliminate threats posed to this country,” he said. For example, in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, large parts of the country were in the hands of al-Qaida, not the Afghan government, he said.
By helping foreign governments extend their control over all parts of their territory through the concept of “defense of homelands, we can build partner capacity” and lower threats to the U.S. homeland, he said.
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Citation:
Gopal Ratnam, "QDR Process Expected To Be More Inclusive", Defense News, 07 February 2005.