By Marina Malenic
As the Pentagon continues its in-depth examination of programs and strategy known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), several U.S. agencies are conducting parallel reviews of their own organizations that will all feed into a reformulation of national security strategy, a top Defense Department official said yesterday.
“This QDR is highly inclusive in nature more so than any of the predecessor QDRs,” Amanda Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, told Defense Daily yesterday. “It’s definitely a big-tent approach in terms of all the components who have an interest in an issue area.”
Dory said there was a much greater attempt in this year’s QDR to bring officials from other U.S. agencies into the process.
In fact, several of those agencies, including the State Department, are this year conducting their own version of a quadrennial review for the first time, in concert with the QDR. For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was inspired to introduce the State Department review as a result of seeing the usefulness of the QDR from her vantage point on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to Dory. Clinton appreciated “the way the [Defense] Department was able to present its strategic approach and then support the investments they wanted to make in particular capabilities,” Dory explained.
Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies have just completed their own review, according to Dory, and the Homeland Security Department has one under way.
She said conducting all the reviews in tandem allows for better coordination of national strategy.
“I think the benefit right now is, as the National Security Council and the White House are working on their strategic articulation and priorities that we are engaging with them in that process and we have that information informing our process,” she explained. “And that’s happening across all these other reviews at the same time.”
Last week, another top official involved in the QDR said the military would be expected to trim between $50 billion and $60 billion from its current programs over five years to pay for new initiatives emerging from the review. David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group meeting that the Pentagon had already identified some capability gaps, while continuing to assume that there would be no overall budget growth.
“It’s now up to the components to figure out how best to make real those new capabilities and capacities and to find offsets within an assumption of zero real growth,” Ochmanek said, referring to the military services. “So they’re now busily looking for those bill-payers.”
However, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ office yesterday issued a statement saying that that number was a high-end estimate.
“Mr. Ochmanek’s reference to $50 million-$60 million was an upper-bound estimate developed through early analysis of potential capability changes,” the statement reads.
“Resourcing realities will be explored during the upcoming phase of the QDR,” it adds. “The Secretary has asked services to provide their proposed approaches to meeting QDR needs. We will spend the fall assessing their cost estimates and associated programs to determine where resources will be invested.”