Posted on 01/29/2010 8:19:55 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
The Pentagon will lay out a long-term vision for U.S. national security on Monday that jettisons the military's decades-old belief that it needs to be prepared to fight two large-scale wars simultaneously, according to defense officials familiar with the matter.
The shift in strategy sets up potential conflicts with defense contractors and powerful lawmakers uneasy with the Pentagon's growing focus on smaller-scale, guerilla warfare.
The Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated report on U.S. military thinking presented by the administration every four years, will instead focus on developing the strategies and weapons needed to prevail in Afghanistan, Iraq and the broader war on terror in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, the officials said.
The review will be released on the same day as the administration's fiscal year 2011 budget request for the Pentagon, making it easier for the White House to ground the strategic thinking in nuts-and-bolts decisions about specific weapons systems.
Defense officials say the two documents will call for buying more unmanned drones and helicopters, both items sorely needed in Afghanistan. The QDR will also call for developing fuel-efficient armored vehicles and aircraft as part of a broad push to lower the Pentagon's energy bills and reduce the number of supply convoys that need to make dangerous journeys across the war zones, the officials said.
The QDR is meant to focus on the nation's strategic outlook over the next two decades, but the thinking behind the document was heavily influenced by today's military operations and the growing fiscal pressure on the U.S. government.
In particular, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has come to think that the Pentagon's traditional belief that it needed to be able to fight two major wars at the same time was outdated and overly focused on conventional warfare. The new
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Greening the military.
The Chinese were unavailable for comment...
“The Chinese were unavailable for comment...”
That’s cause they wrote the review and now are too busy building up their military.
Russia flying their stealth fighter version is also a concern. It doesn’t have to equal the F-22, it just has to be good and a lot more of them. Our president made sure our program was killed.
They never learn. Before WW2 We were in the same shape.
Here's the problem.
Well, that didn’t work.
It was supposed to be Chinese for “We have destroyed your ground forces, do not resist us further, or we will take the battle to your cities.”
He is not a clueless man. But, unfortunately, the winds have changed and so has he.
Yeah, Gates looks like a “visionary” now. Too bad the next war is never like current one. Its a lot easier for a big, robust military to fight a small war, than a small, specialized military to fight a large war.
Zactly.
The US military needs to be able to prevent a nuclear attack, project power wherever it has to on the globe and put down urban and rural guerrilla conflicts.
The F-35 JSF will be further delayed; perhaps even scrapped by 2011. Necessary upgrades to land warfare systems designed for conventional war will also see delays or scrapping. And, we will see significant cutbacks in our nuclear capability.
Well, we are cutting elements 1 and 2 in that statement...
Conflict trending in and of the past decade have been away from conventional to asymmetrical type warfare. While armed forces are and will continue to gear for conventional type warfare, many, nations, including the US, are going towards small units to deal with asymmetrical threats and confrontations. This type thinking has been also applied to the reasoning for the US’s continued efforts in bulding an effective global rapid reaction force.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/02-053.pdf
....yeah...one gun at a time...
I guess the world's largest citizen army is in the US....anyone know...?
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