In one of my more whimsical moods, I imagine that there is a room somewhere deep beneath the pentagon in which are imprisoned about a dozen lieutenant colonels from the various armed services. They are not allowed to read newspapers, watch television news, or surf the internet, so their perspective on events will be completely untainted by reality. Their sole task is to write the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Every time they write a simple declarative sentence devoid of defense-speak buzzwords, they receive an electric shock.

The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a Congressionally-mandated public statement of defense policy. Ideally, it will give some indication of overall defense spending goals for the following four years and, unless it is a complete exercise in pointless paperwork generation, it provides an insight into the thinking of the current administration on strategic goals.

The most recent QDR was released last Monday. It is a public document, so here’s a Link to it. Parts of it made interesting reading, but the more I read, the less encouraged I became.

The buzz on the street is that the QDR cuts us loose from our traditional commitment to fighting and winning two conventional wars at the same time, freeing us to concentrate on counterinsurgency capability. I think that’s a pretty charitable reading of the document. Here’s what it says, in part:

“In the mid- to long term, U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations that may occur in multiple theaters in overlapping time frames. This includes maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors, (emphasis mine) but we must take seriously the need to plan for the broadest possible range of operations–from homeland defense and defense support to civil authorities, to deterrence and preparedness missions–occurring in multiple and unpredictable combinations.”

Now, unless my ability to read and understand English has deteriorated significantly in the past few days, that means we still need to keep the ability to fight and win two major conventional wars plus expand our ability to deal with every other possible form of conflict we can think of.

Secretary Gates has made public statements which suggest our policy these days I to fight and win the wars we’re in, rather than throwing money at wars we imagine we may be in later, but it’s not clear the QDR is in step with that notion. It says:

“Operations over the past eight years have stressed the ground forces disproportionately, but the future operational landscape could also portend significant long-duration air and maritime campaigns for which the U.S. Armed Forces must be prepared.”

In other words, that stuff we’ve been doing for eight years is all well and good; now for something completely different.

There is ambiguity in the document, and some of that is unavoidable in something intended to cover as broad and speculative a subject as our defense needs and defense policy for the next four years. But to make sure there is no ambiguity in my words I will spell this out as clearly as I know how.

If the QDR honestly represents our current defense policy, we are screwed, because the QDR says we have no defense policy.

We are in a position where the fiscal foundation on which defense is built is shaky at best. We are probably facing a need to make major cuts in defense spending over the next several years. The irony is that we can make those cuts without suffering any real loss of security provided we have a clear policy in mind and tailor our force structure and acquisitions to meet that policy.

For starters, we need to take a hard look at our conventional ground “legacy” forces, the parts of the force structure set up to re-fight Desert Storm against a large-scale conventional opponent. We need to look hard at replacement of a significant chunk of our manned aircraft fleet with unmanned aircraft. We need to look at a next generation of surface combatants which are more maintenance-friendly and have significantly smaller crew requirements.

And we need to re-think the necessity of being able to project overwhelming conventional power to any spot on the globe – we need to reconsider the necessity, and perhaps even the desirability, of being able to get whatever we want, wherever we want it, whenever we want it, by force.

We must, in short, do as a nation what almost every family in America has been forced to do over the last eighteen months: we must do some hard thinking about the difference between what we need and what we want.

This QDR doesn’t show evidence of a single tough decision. Let’s fight the two insurgencies we are involved in to a successful conclusion. Let’s keep the ability to fight two conventional wars. Let’s beef up our intelligence-gather capability at every level. Let’s strengthen out ability to deal with domestic threats from foreign and home-grown terrorist organizations. Let’s strengthen our ability to deal with natural disasters. Let’s have more ability to project naval power, more ability to project aero-space power, more, more, more.

Policy requires the setting of priorities. “Let’s do everything we are currently doing, and everything we can possibly think of doing,” is not a policy – it is the absence of policy.

Here’s the thing. We already outspend every other country on the planet combined, and most of the big-spending countries are our allies. If that’s not enough to make us secure, then what the hell is our problem?

About the Author: The major landmarks in Frank's historical interests range from ancient Persia through the Crimean War, World War II, and the modern U.S. Armed Forces, with a lot of stops in between. Frank is fascinated by the unusual, the overlooked, and the surprising. He is the New York Times number one best-selling author of the Desert Shield Fact Book (1991) and he is currently writing an historical novel on Alexander's conquest of Persia – from the Persian point of view.

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