Even before the Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), lawmakers had already threatened to reject it–and they followed through on their threats as soon as the report was release with the budget on March 4.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) announced on March 4 that QDRs have become less compliant over time and, as a result, he would introduce legislation to require the department to rewrite and resubmit the report to Congress.
“A rigorous analysis and debate that takes place every four years as the review is put together should be immensely valuable to planners and senior commanders,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the product the process produced this time has more to do with politics than policy and is of little value to decision makers. For that reason, I will require the Department to re-write and re-submit a compliant report. In defiance of the law, this QDR provides no insight into what a moderate-to-low risk strategy would be, is clearly budget driven, and is shortsighted. It allows the president to duck the consequences of the deep defense cuts he has advocated and leaves us all wondering what the true future costs of those cuts will be.”
McKeon’s statement added that the QDR should have identified what resources were needed for a low-risk strategy, not the resources asked for in the 5-year Future Years Defense Program; should have looked at threats and needs for a 20-year period, not five; and accepts more risk than the “low-to-moderate” level required by law.
In his opening statement two days later, Defense Secretary Hagel told McKeon and HASC members that the QDR is “not budget-driven, nor is it budget-blind.”
Unprompted, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey told McKeon during the hearing that the joint chiefs, in drafting both the QDR and then the QDR-reflective budget request, looked at their requirements and suggested a spending plan that rises $115 billion over the sequestration spending caps currently imposed on the department by law.
Surpassing those spending caps, he argued, “is a reflection that it’s not resource-constrained. It’s certainly resource-informed…And so the QDR force that we’ve described is literally unconstrained by resources in the sense that we’ve given our best advice on what we think we need to meet the security needs of the nation.”
On the Senate side, in a March 5 hearing, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) asked both Hagel and Dempsey about the QDR and whether it properly looked out over a 20-year period and met the low-to-moderate risk requirement.
“Like a number of other folks, I’m really concerned that the latest QDR is largely, significantly budget-driven, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be,” he said to start off his time to question the witnesses. “Now, I can see a budget submission being budget-driven. That’s part of the definition. I think the QDR is supposed to be fundamentally different. Why was, for instance, this QDR only designed to look out five years? Isn’t the mandated norm 20 years?”
Hagel, retorting that a 20-year projection is “pretty hard to do,” told Vitter that “we have done that, but we didn’t do it in the same specificity that we did in a five-year look, simply because–I don’t know–I don’t know if anybody knows what the world is going to look like. What we’ve tried to do, first of all, is comply with the law. And it was not budget-driven. It was budget-informed.”
Hagel added the QDR is “not blind to the budget” but rather was informed by the budget, since “the reality is that a strategy is only as good as the resources to implement.”
Still, Vitter requested that Hagel submit for the record additional material outlining how the QDR fulfills the mandate of looking out 20 years.
Vitter also questioned Dempsey about the risk level assumed in the QDR.
“As I said in my assessment, Senator, if we achieve the promises that are extant in the QDR, with institutional reform and all of the things that come with that, then we can lower the risk over the QDR period with the force structure we have to moderate risk. But it’s going to take some heavy lifting,” Dempsey said.
But Vitter noted that the military hadn’t achieved those things yet and therefore was assuming more than moderate risk. He then asked about Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno’s statements that 450,000 soldiers would be the lowest level he could maintain to manage risk in the Army. Dempsey said he agreed with that assessment.
“So to compound the last two questions, do you think going below that floor would impose greater than moderate risk on us?” Vitter then asked.
“In certain mission areas,” Dempsey responded. “You know, it wouldn’t affect our responsiveness and our defense in space and cyber and the air and the maritime domain, but it would increase risk in the land domain, sure.”