Inside Pentagon. A key Pentagon team developing alternative proposals for the Quadrennial Defense Review is scheduled to hold its last meeting next week and will likely produce a final report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates by Labor Day, sources tell Inside the Pentagon.
Thus far, the Red Team has provided Gates progress reports, but it has “quite a bit more” to say in its final report, a source said, noting the work addresses the Pentagon’s force-planning construct and country-specific scenarios among other matters. The source declined to discuss the specifics of the classified work.
The meeting on Monday (Aug. 17) will likely be chaired by team leaders Andrew Marshall, the head of the Pentagon’s net assessment office, and Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Joint Forces Command. It is the panel’s last scheduled session, though another source said there had been talk of possibly meeting again.
The session comes on the heels of classified Pentagon guidance that features a new “hypothesis” for how to best size the military. ITP reported last week that an update to the Guidance for the Development of the Force (GDF) approved July 30 by Gates sets forth a force-sizing hypothesis that the department will test and refine through the fall. The overall framework in the signed GDF is to prevail in ongoing conflicts; prevent and deter; prepare for contingencies; and preserve and enhance the force, an official told ITP.
The Defense Department’s policy directorate will provide analytic benchmarks for force assessment in the “August time frame,” said DOD spokeswoman Lt. Col. Almarah Belk. The new approach would for the first time move beyond the two-major-combat-operations construct and outline specifics about a number of contingencies, abroad and at home, for which U.S. forces must be properly sized and shaped, ITP reported. But DOD is expected to maintain the capability to concurrently fight two wars or handle multiple engagements. And major changes to the force structure -- the numbers, size, and composition of the units that comprise U.S. forces -- are considered unlikely.
But now the Red Team is gearing up to have its final say on force planning and a broad range of topics covered by its terms of reference. No issues raised by participants have been deemed off limits by Marshall and Mattis, a source said, noting the Red Team’s raison d’etre is to provide Gates with “substantial” recommendations that can also be implemented. At press time (Aug. 12), the Pentagon declined to comment on the Red Team’s work.
The Red Team’s work on “Track II” war games has helped the QDR, another source said. But it is difficult even for DOD insiders to know the Red Team’s impact on the QDR so far because by design the work of the Red Team and the policy shop’s QDR team has converged only at Gates’ desk, a Pentagon official said. Only the defense secretary has had great visibility into the Red Team’s work, the official added. Marshall and Mattis have reported directly to Gates on the group’s progress, sources said.
At a May 13 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Gates promised lawmakers the Red Team would provide an independent take on the QDR.
“I’ve actually got them red teaming both the scenarios and the QDR itself so that we’re not prisoners of bureaucratic group-think of people who have done this work forever,” Gates said.
Mattis called for the outside review of the classified, country-specific defense planning scenarios in a March 11 memo to Gates that proposed “anchor points” for institutionalizing irregular warfare. Gates’ spokesman has credited Andrew Krepinevich’s book “7 Deadly Scenarios” as an inspiration for the Red Team, InsideDefense.com reported.
The book mulls a range of global nightmares: the collapse of Pakistan; extremists detonating nuclear weapons on American soil; a pandemic; an assault on Israel; a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; coordinated attacks on energy, trade and communication assets vital to the global economy; and retreat in Iraq.
The Pentagon’s policy directorate has kept its distance from the Red Team, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development David Ochmanek, who led the drafting of Gates’ July 30 classified guidance. In an interview with ITP in May, he said his boss, Kathleen Hicks, deputy under secretary of defense for strategy, plans and forces, had directed QDR officials not to influence the Red Team and to avoid even the appearance of doing so. But Ochmanek did brief the Red Team last month, as he said at a July 28 breakfast with reporters. Belk explained the Red Team has unfettered access to QDR information and can arrange such briefings.
At the breakfast with reporters, Ochmanek shared an anecdote from the meeting that could foreshadow the kinds of concerns in the Red Team’s final report. Describing the panel as “wise,” he recalled being pressed by the Red Team to identify new concepts for operating against high-end, anti-access adversaries eyed in the QDR.
“I had to plead guilty that those concepts are as yet a work in progress,” Ochmanek told reporters.
“The QDR isn’t going to develop a brand new set of concepts for power projection in the six months it has to run, so our challenge is to identify some vectors that we want to move along for modernizing and enhancing capabilities that we’re confident are going to play important roles in that new concept as it emerges over the next few years,” he added. “That would be the way I’d characterize a lot of our thinking and analysis with regard to high-end challenges.”
But in a July 7 speech related to his book, Krepinevich noted he is on the Red Team and underscored the need to develop novel, detailed concepts of operations to address disruptive challenges, stressing revisions to Cold War approaches will not suffice. U.S. officials must focus on how to counter China’s anti-access capabilities; how to counter guided rockets, artillery and missiles when forces such as Hezbollah obtain such weapons; how to respond when developing countries get access to nuclear weapons, how to operate the day after a nuclear explosion and how to handle the threat of loose nuclear weapons, he said.
Krepinevich did not propose an alternative force-sizing metric, but cautioned in some cases the steady state posture may be more demanding than the surge posture. He also cited Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey’s critique of the two-war metric earlier this year at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. Further, he noted each armed service has a different idea of what the most demanding contingencies are.
“The Air Force and Navy might well say it’s China and defending the global commons,” he said. “The Army might say it’s the wars we’re engaged in and it’s keeping a lid on everything else and it’s hedging against a conventional attack, points unknown.” Those are two very different problem sets, he said. DOD must move away from the old approach of dividing resources evenly between the three military departments and focusing on “last war-itis” or traditional warfare, he argued. He pitched the idea of shifting from one force-sizing and shaping construct to multiple service-oriented, sizing-and-shaping constructs.
But Marshall and Mattis’ Red Team will have no monopoly on examining the QDR. The ripening of the Red Team’s work also coincides with DOD plans to appoint a separate, independent panel charged with assessing the QDR that was required by the Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Act (ITP, Aug. 6, p3). Belk confirmed DOD intends to appoint the panel this month.
“The panel will be composed of a bipartisan mix of approximately 12 civilian defense experts and retired general/flag officers,” she said. “We do not anticipate overlap between Red Team members and the Independent Panel.” The new panel would submit a report to Congress by May 2010, Belk said.
House and Senate authorizers are weighing competing proposals that could impact the FY-07 requirement, but that might not be resolved in until October. In the meantime, DOD will heed current law by establishing the panel and will also comply with any changes to the requirement in the final version of the FY-10 defense authorization bill, Belk said. -- Christopher J. Castelli
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