Christopher J. Castelli
Inside Defense, 21 April 2011
The upcoming Pentagon assessment aimed at cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in defense spending will likely start with the same threat scenarios that informed the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, but will use a different process to reconsider the need for longstanding missions, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today.
The department's classified depictions of threats to international security -- called defense-planning scenarios -- each include a corresponding mission for U.S. military forces and a strategic-level concept of operation for carrying out that mission. The Pentagon will likely use the scenarios as a starting point for examining options for eliminating missions, Gates told reporters.
"So it will start, probably, with the QDR in terms of the scenarios and then try to translate that into what are the programmatic implications as you begin to reduce the mission sets," he said.
The department could revisit its commitment to being able to fight two major conflicts at the same time, Vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright said at the same Pentagon briefing.
"There's another element to this on the strategy side of it and that is, what is it you want to be able to do and how much of it do you want to be able to do, which gets to quantities and capabilities," Cartwright said. "And so starting with this strategy and understanding that historically the department has been a two-major-theater-war construct, etc. -- where do we want to be on that and then what are the implications of any changes in that, I think, are important questions you ask up front."
Whereas the QDR is a review of DOD strategy and priorities mandated by Congress, the new assessment, announced last week by President Obama, is aimed squarely at gleaning savings to reduce the federal deficit.
Giving the entire department "a haircut" by declaring "everybody is going to cut X percent" would be the "worst" approach, Gates said. "That's the way we got the hollow military in the 1970s and in the 1990s. And so I want to frame this so that options and consequences and risks are taken into account . . . as budget decisions are made, first by the president and then by the Congress." The new assessment will not be a compressed QDR, he noted.
"It won't be a mini-QDR," Gates said, "because I think what we have to do in structuring these options -- I mean, one approach that we talked about, and I haven't settled on which approach we're going to take, but one approach would be to take the scenarios in the QDR and translate those into forces: exactly what forces would be required to perform that range of missions."
That way, DOD could consider the implications of eliminating particular missions, he noted. "And then if you begin cutting off missions, if you begin saying OK, what if you didn't do this, what if you weren't able, what if you decided you didn't need to be able to fight two regional conflicts at the same time, then what are the implications of that for the force?" Gates said.
The White House has said it wants to slash security spending by $400 billion by fiscal year 2023, but Gates said it remains unclear exactly how much of those cuts DOD would shoulder.
"We don't know at this point," Gates said. "My cabinet colleagues are looking at me very suspiciously," he joked. "But no . . . that hasn't been worked out yet." DOD's planning for its review remains in the early stages, he noted.
"We have just gotten started on this," Gates said. "I've had one meeting to begin thinking about how we structure this." Gleaning substantial savings will be challenging for the department, the defense secretary stressed.
"There are those that argue if you funded the department at roughly inflation for the next 12 years that you would find this money," he said. "That may well be true. But some of our big-ticket items are items that don't fall within that category: healthcare, fuel costs and there are others like that. We have some investments that we have to make."
The necessary investments include the Air Force's new tanker program, as well as the coming need to replacing aging Navy warships that were built during the Reagan administration and are slated to retire in the coming years, Gates said, noting it remains unclear how many of these surface ships the department can afford to replace.
"All elements of the [nuclear] triad need to be modernized. You may have to make some choices there," he added. "I want to frame this so it's not a math exercise, but so people understand the strategic and national security consequences of the decisions that they're making. And it's up to us to do that, I think, in stark terms."