Amid arguments over whether the Defense Department met its legal requirement in answering key questions in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), some House Armed Services Committee members wondered aloud during a hearing whether it was even worth requiring a QDR at all.

The QDR is meant to be a 20-year look at the security environment, what force structure the military may need, what technologies to invest in, what industrial base capabilities it will need to protect and more. It is meant to be strategy-driven, not budget-driven, and it is supposed to put forth a plan that would keep the military in the low- to mid-level of risk. But in an era of sequestration, DoD’s attempts to do that have found criticism on all sides for both proposing a level of spending in the short-term above sequestration and for being resource-constrained.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee

So during an April 3 hearing on the QDR, when it was HASC Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry’s (R-Texas) turn to question the witnesses, he bluntly said he had been around for all the QDRs and “I’ve become increasingly skeptical that there’s any value in this exercise. If we were to have a provision that repeals the statutory requirement for a QDR, what would your advice be about whether that would be a good or bad thing?”

Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded jokingly that “honestly, it would create a lot less work in the department.” But he added that “this is a valuable process for the department. It’s valuable for the new administration to go through, it’s a good forcing function for us as a department to have to congeal our thinking, our intellectual power into one place, so I would not want to suggest that you just repeal the need for a QDR. It’s a very useful document.”

Winnefeld noted the military saying, “it’s not the plan, it’s the planning,” and said that while he would be happy to work with Congress to improve the QDR process and statutory requirements, he would not want to see the QDR eliminated altogether.

At the end of the hearing, though, HASC Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) suggested Congress may consider whether the QDR as it exists today is worth the time and manpower costs.

“I know that there’s nobody that does more planning than the military. I know you have plans for every contingency on contingency,” McKeon said. “This is just my way of thinking, after going through this process and seeing it now for a number of years–we’ve had more discussion about the process…than what we’ve actually talked about as to what you’re recommendations or things were and how it’s different from the budget. So it’s something we’ re going to have to look at going forward, if this is one of the things we do in setting up bureaucracy…instead of putting that time into actually getting something done that we’d probably get more benefit out of.”