Sebastian Sprenger
Inside Defense, 21 April 2011
A group of internal advisers to the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review warned Pentagon leaders in the fall of 2009 that the Obama administration's major examination of national defense requirements was based on too-rosy economic assumptions, according to Defense Department sources.
Members of a "red team" presented the critique to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a September 2009 report. Gates assembled the red team, led by then-U.S. Joint Forces Command chief Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis and Andrew Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment, in the spring of 2009. The QDR report was made public in February 2010. Officials never released the red team's report.
The accounts of what one official called a "lack of fiscal reality" in the key defense review comes as President Obama mandated yet another self-examination of national security matters. "We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but we're going to have to conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world," Obama said in an April 13 speech in Washington. "I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it's complete."
Over the past years, Gates has fought with lawmakers over moves to save money throughout DOD, mainly aimed at improving efficiency throughout the defense bureaucracy. In his speech, Obama noted these recent efforts would yield savings of $400 billion in current and future defense spending, although some defense officials have privately questioned the figure.
The notion that DOD should contribute more budget cuts to tackle the galloping national debt significantly raises the bar for future cuts, hinting at a potential enormity that sources said was not considered in the QDR. "The issue was raised whether the future security environment was, in fact, bad enough," an official told InsideDefense.com. "The language of the [red team] report suggests that the economic downturn would be more prolonged and with a higher magnitude than presupposed within previous assumptions, and that this could impact tighter limits on defense spending in the future," the official added.
"What does it say about the QDR that we need a new review," said another official. "What does it say about strategic planning that we have all kinds of scenarios but not one for no fiscal growth?"
The ratings agency Standard & Poor's this week said the U.S. debt level could threaten Washington's top-notch credit rating. "Because the U.S. has, relative to its 'AAA' peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable," S&P said in an April 18 statement.