Is the QDR ‘a PR stunt’ or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy?

by Charles Knight

Last fall I attended a seminar at MIT entitled “Analytical Tools for the Next Quadrennial Defense Review” given by senior analyst who had worked on several QDRs. The QDR is an every-four-years Pentagon study mandated by Congress and meant to review how closely the defense posture and its supporting budget fits with the national strategy. The seminar presenter spent an hour detailing the analytical methods of those who worked on the “force structuring” and policy studies that provide the basis for the QDR review process. That process is ongoing this year in preparation for the release of fourth QDR in early 2010.

After the presentation a former member of the National Security Council who happened to be seated to my right turned to me and said, “[The QDR] seems like a fraud.”

More recently Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, referred to the QDR as a “PR stunt” and a “PR exercise” (as reported by Marjorie Censer, Inside the Pentagon, 18 June 2009.) Rep. Abercrombie then went on to offer a less than precise elaboration, saying, “It’s all Thunderbird stuff, booms and all that.”

I can not be all that sure what the former National Security Council member or Rep. Abercrombie meant by their characterizations of the QDR. But, having followed all four QDRs fairly closely, I can make an educated guess at what they are getting at.

Congress has intended that through the QDR the Pentagon will make a serious attempt to reconcile the national defense strategy to the defense posture of the services and from that presumed point of congruence reconcile it to the defense budget. Policy analysts frequently complain that strategy, posture and budget are dangerously out of whack. If the QDR process addresses this problem and then does the analytical and policy work required for making real advances toward reconciliation then we can judge that it is meeting its stated purpose. If it results in a public document that uses rhetorical flourish in order to mask disjuncture of ends and means and to perpetuate prior posture and budget directions, then it is something like a ‘fraud’ or ‘PR exercise.’

The unfolding 2010 QDR process gives us a good opportunity to look for evidence of either real reconciliation or PR exercise. A few pieces of evidence:

There are dozens of high level policy professionals and planners in the Pentagon who have more than a cursory responsibility for aspects of the QDR. They work with hundreds of others, some inside the military and many civilian consultants and contractors. Models are built and simulations are run. Task forces and issue teams work the results. No doubt many of these people would be indignant if you told them their work was simply serving public relations and had little effect on the direction of policy.

On the other hand, modeling output and even the output of task forces are quite sensitive to starting assumptions and specifications. Senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon carefully review input parameters and seek to influence how the particulars of output is summed up and presented to those responsible for the next steps in the process of getting to the final report. “Startling findings” and their policy implications are unlikely to find their way into the document drafts unless senior leadership wants them there.

Consider also that Defense News has reported that the Pentagon is moving ahead with the FY’11 budget process before the budget work on the 2010 QDR is completed. This is at least suggestive of prior budget and posture decisions running the QDR output rather than the other way around.

[This site will take note of what other evidence emerges pertaining to the question of whether the QDR is ‘a fraud’, ‘a PR stunt’, or a sincere effort to reconcile posture and budget with strategy? I invite your comments and viewpoints on this important question.]

Media Conference Call: Stephen Biddle on U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

Presider: Gideon Rose, Managing Editor, Foreign Affairs, 30 July 2009.

Afghan Fight Needs COIN Plus: Cordesman

Greg Grant. DoD Buzz, 30 July 2009.

excerpt:

Reversing the downward slide in Afghanistan will require lots more U.S. troops and a “very substantial” increase in spending. The Afghan security forces must be doubled in size, corruption at all levels of the Afghan government must be addressed, somehow a way must be found to increase NATO participation and then there is the problem of Pakistan, for which nobody really seems to have any answers.

Air Guard Needs Newer Aircraft, Director Says

Jon Soucy. American Forces Press Service, 29 July 2009.

Editor’s comment: The Project on Defense Alternatives has recommended that the USAF reduce its tactical combat fleet by two wing equivalents. This reduction would allow for a considerable number of tactical aircraft to move over the the Air National Guard thus improving its fleet age composition. If the Air Guard still needs to replace old F-16s in the period 2015-2025 it should do so by a staged buy of the latest block F-16 C/D. Transition to the Joint Strike Fighter could begin in the 2020s.

Odds Against Nuclear Disarmament

Charles V. Peña. antiwar.com, 29 July 2009.
http://original.antiwar.com/pena/2009/07/28/nuclear-disarmament/

Excerpt:

…a country can be a party to the NPT but decide that abiding by the treaty is no longer in its best interests and withdraw, which is exactly what North Korea chose to do in January 2003, claiming, “A dangerous situation where our nation’s sovereignty and our state’s security are being seriously violated is prevailing on the Korean Peninsula due to the U.S. vicious hostile policy towards the DPRK.” Given that North Korea had been named a member of the axis of evil a year earlier and the United States was on the verge of invading Iraq (a non-nuclear power), it’s perfectly understandable that the regime in Pyongyang might believe it was in the DPRK’s “supreme interests” to no longer formally agree to be a nonnuclear power, i.e., a pushover for regime change.

The NPT is not a universal treaty. There are 193 countries in the world, but not all of them are signatories to the NPT. The result is the so-called “D3 problem,” or the de facto nuclear states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. These countries were never part of the NPT regime and were thus able to develop nuclear weapons, because they are under no obligation to abide by the NPT. And it’s not lost on the rest of the world – particularly the Muslim world – that the United States doesn’t hold Israel to the same standard as Iran. Indeed, like previous presidents, Obama refuses to even acknowledge that Israel is a nuclear power.

…the NPT does not exist in a vacuum. It’s impossible to ignore U.S. foreign policy, particularly a proclivity for military intervention supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. Since the end of the Cold War marked by the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States has engaged in nine major military operations, but only one of those – Operation Enduring Freedom – was unambiguously in response to a direct threat to the United States. This is a powerful incentive for countries such as Iran and North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons as the only reliable deterrent against U.S. invasion. As long as the United States continues to have an interventionist foreign policy (and the Obama administration has not overseen a sea change in U.S. foreign policy), it will be next to impossible to prevent proliferation.

What Are Nuclear Weapons For?

Daryl G. Kimball. Remarks at the First Annual Strategic Deterrence Symposium, U.S. Strategic Command, 29 July 2010.
http://www.armscontrol.org/events/STRATCOMRemarks

Excerpt:

Without significant reductions in the role and number of U.S. (and Russian) nuclear weapons, and without U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, our ability to harness the international support necessary to prevent nuclear terrorism and prevent new nuclear weapon states will be greatly diminished.

Without these reductions and the test ban, many non-nuclear-weapon states will become less willing to agree to more effective IAEA safeguards, tighter constraints on the spread of sensitive nuclear fuel cycle technologies, tougher sanctions against violators, and improved interdiction efforts, among other steps.

In recent years, a growing number of national security experts and leaders, including President Barack Obama, have come to recognize the importance of dramatically changing the roles and missions of U.S. nuclear weapons in ways that:

* minimize the salience and number of nuclear weapons;
* advance concrete nuclear risk reduction steps consistent with the United States nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) disarmament obligations; and
* reinforce our commitment to eventually achieve a world without of nuclear weapons.

We can and should limit the role of our nuclear weapons to a core deterrence mission: maintaining a sufficient, survivable nuclear force for the sole purpose of deterring the use of nuclear weapons by another country against the United States or its allies. With secure forces, deterring a nuclear strike requires far fewer nuclear warheads and delivery systems than the current counterforce-oriented nuclear arsenal.

Thus, if the United States were to adopt a policy that explicitly limits the purpose of nuclear weapons to preventing their use by others, then it could drastically reduce its nuclear inventory to a total of no more than 1,000 weapons of all types—strategic, non-strategic, deployed, and nondeployed—within the next few years.