Free Republic

The big question for the Navy in advance of the QDR and the 2011 budget release was would DOD reconcile the growing gap between the Navy’s shipbuilding and funding plans? The answer is no. They didn’t even try. The QDR pretty much defers on the subject of tying future shipbuilding to strategy. There is some vague talk in the document about the need for the Navy and the Air Force to jointly develop an air-​​sea battle concept to ensure power projection, but it provides no further details. As for the Navy budget, the 2011 request increases funding for new ship...

Yesterday, the President issued his Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 defense budget request to Congress, and the Pentagon provided the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to Capitol Hill. The request builds upon last year's defense budget that began to chip away at core defense capabilities. These capabilities should be the mainstays of strategic planning, and include: strategic defense; control of the seas; air superiority; space control; projecting power to distant regions; and information dominance throughout cyberspace. The QDR is intended as a major defense strategy that looks forward 20 years and delineates how the U.S. will structure its armed forces. The QDR...

Review Seeks to Rebalance Military Toward Current Threats, Not Hypothetical Ones President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox. In its master planning document for the medium-term defense outlook, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon will announce cuts to some Navy and Air Force programs. The Pentagon will not purchase any more of the costly C-17 transport aircraft for the Air Force. It...

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...

Inside Defense got a leaked draft copy of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review. The national security planning document, being spearheaded by Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, shapes U.S. defense posture around the globe for the next several years. The draft dates from December 3. The QDR is expected to be released on Monday. The headline is that the forthcoming draft QDR scraps the 2-major war posture construct of the past decade. But it's hard to crisply explain what it moves to, except greater complexity. As Inside Defense's Jason Sherman notes (sub. only): The Defense Department is abandoning an explicit requirement...

Apropos of my story today about the consistently-ballooning defense budget, Defense News has a leak of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the PentagonÂ’s big planning document that, among other things, is supposed to shape the budget. This is just a leak of a draft, and not the final document. But the document is entering its absolute final phase, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be testifying about it and next yearÂ’s budget (theyÂ’re released simultaneously) before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. As I wrote today, Gates sent...

WASHINGTON, April 29, 2009 – People who are interested in learning more about the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review process can do so by just accessing the QDR fact sheet that was posted today on Defenselink, the Pentagon’s public-internet web page. To access the fact sheet, simply select the “press advisories” button located in the left column of the page, or click on the web link attached below. “The QDR takes a long-term, strategic view of the Department of Defense and will explore ways to balance achieving success in current conflicts with preparing for long-term challenges,” Deputy Defense Secretary...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is facing renewed criticism regarding his national security policies as he continues his campaign for his party's presidential nomination. In a YouTube video Obama made for a liberal pacifist organization last year, the senator called for major cuts in defense spending, slowing the development of future combat systems, and cutting investments in America's ballistic missile defense program. Some conservatives have expressed surprise at the degree of Obama's proposals on the video, and this past weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) campaign released an ad criticizing Obama's alleged national security inexperience and trumpeting her as the...

The U.S. government’s conventional approach to war and reliance on firepower and technology is counterproductive and rooted in a culture averse to counterinsurgencies such as the one embroiling Iraq, said a professor at the Air Force’s Air War College. The American defeat in Vietnam, embarrassing setbacks in Lebanon and Somalia and continuing difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq convey the limits of “America’s hard-won conventional military supremacy,” wrote Jeffrey Record in a Sept. 1 report, “The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency.” Record said the opposition of the Pentagon, not including the Marine Corps, to counterinsurgency stems back...

WASHINGTON, March 15, 2006 – As the 21st century progresses, the United States must be prepared to deal with threats posed by terrorists, corrupt regimes and emerging state powers, a top Pentagon leader said here yesterday. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review will go a long way toward helping the U.S. military meet these challenges, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told the House Armed Services Committee. "The QDR is a strategic document," he said. "It is based on the recognition that the Department of Defense, and our nation as a whole, face a global security climate of dynamic, complex threats,...

WASHINGTON, March 15, 2006 – The first Quadrennial Defense Review undertaken during a time of war provides the military more options and more capabilities, a senior defense official said here today. A large portion of those options and capabilities come in the form of special operations forces, Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told the audience assembled for the 17th Annual National Defense Industrial Association Special Operations/Low-intensity Conflict Symposium and Exhibition. "QDR, I think, represents not something new in a shift toward the emphasis of special operations, but a continued realization of how that has to be...

The Post's Feb. 13 editorial "Mr. Rumsfeld's Flawed Vision" managed to miss the major achievements of a remarkable Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This was the most thorough and systematically managed review in Pentagon history. The review board, co-chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, spent half a year forcing changes in a complex bureaucratic system famous for its ability to hide and wait for the current civilian leadership to disappear so it can continue its old, comfortable ways. Only by sheer force of will has the senior leadership, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld...

Joint Chiefs of Staff planners have produced a 27-page briefing on the war on terror that seeks to explain how to win the "long war" and says Islamic extremists may be supported by 12 million Muslims worldwide. Military planners worry that al Qaeda could win if "traditional allies prefer accommodation." Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the document states, "is absolutely committed to his cause. His religious ideology successfully attracts recruits. He has sufficient population base from which to protract the conflict. ... Even support of 1 percent of the Muslim population would equate to over 12 million 'enemies.' "

US Navy Capt. Ralph Alderson, program director of the Joint-Unmanned Combat Aerial System (J-UCAS) program, said right at the start that he would address the elephant in the room. The FY07 defense budget provides zero funding for the J-UCAS, and the newly released 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) calls for the program's "restructuring," as many of the attendees at the Association of Unmanned Systems International's Unmanned Systems Program Review 2006 conference in Washington, DC, on Feb. 8 perhaps already knew, Capt. Alderson said. "Restructuring" would appear to be a euphemism for "canceled," but despite standing at the podium with a...

WARNING: The page you have accessed is dependent on JAVASCRIPT which is not supported by your browser. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. A Strategy for Heroes What's wrong with the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.by Frederick W. Kagan 02/20/2006, Volume 011, Issue 22 THE PENTAGON RELEASED ITS QUADRENNIAL Defense Review on February 6. The latest installment of the congressionally mandated report on the state of the military declares, "manifestly, this document is not a 'new beginning.'" Indeed it is not. The new QDR reflects a concerted effort by the Pentagon to return to...

A military expert in China complained to the Chinese government-controlled news service that Pentagon documents released on February 3, 2006, alleging that China is America's greatest future threat, reflects the United States' "hostility and high measure of vigilance against China's development." A military scholar at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, Wang Xinjun, claims that US military documents reveal the Bush Administration’s true military objectives that could very possibly jeopardize US relations with China. The Pentagon documents to which Xinjun refers is the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which was submitted to the Congressional Armed Services Committee. In particular, one document...

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is speeding up the development of new weapons designed to knock out targets anywhere in the world in short order. The Defense Department said on Friday it wants to develop a new “land-based, penetrating strike capability” for fielding by 2018 while modernising the current bomber force of B-1s, B-2s and B-52s. The terms “long-range strike” and “bombers” were once synonymous. But such 21st-century systems could be manned or unmanned and could involve a mix of missiles, rockets, lasers and other munitions, defense experts said. The move was formally unveiled in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR,...

WASHINGTON - No one has been more contemptuous of Cold War thinking and planning in our military than Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his band of transformers and reformers, and yet when it came time to fish or cut bait this week, they just sat in the boat doing nothing. The Defense Department thinkers have had four years to write the document that is to guide and inform our military strategy, tactics, arms acquisition and manpower for the next 20 years, the Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress. For months the Rumsfeld lieutenants have floated trial balloons warning...

    Today the Quadrennial Defense Review hits the Beltway. While I don't agree with some of the provisions in the document, I was impressed with the commitment of the Defense Department to preserve substantively intact modernization of the ground services. This is a historical departure from the past when the Army and Marine Corps always arrived at the dispensing of materiel largess with hands out and expectations low.     The second most expensive program within the DoD is the Army's Future Combat System. FCS is in fact a collection of many smaller systems, ranging from light armored vehicles to aerial drones and...

Last Friday the Department of Defense released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This report, which the department is required by law to pre­pare every four years, reviews the department’s forces, resources, and programs. It outlines a strategy for addressing critical issues like budget and acquisition priorities, emerging threats, and required capabilities. One issue that the QDR probably does not adequately address is the need to increase defense spending in the years ahead to prevent the military from becoming hollow. How Much is Enough? America’s national security is in peril when it has a military that looks good on paper but...