The Defense Department will submit its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress either with the budget request on March 4 or shortly thereafter, though the report will not quite meet its requirement of being budget-blind.
Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox said Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute that the QDR is “supposed to be fiscally unconstrained, it’s the strategic aspirations of the department–and we didn’t do it, that’s just the bottom line. We made a choice to make this QDR fiscally constrained. I think of this QDR as the QDR that looks to achieve the Defense Strategic Guidance—slightly refreshed–but in a sort of resource-informed, more austere way.”
DoD Comptroller Robert Hale said Tuesday at the Credit Suisse/McAleese FY2015 Defense Programs Conference that the QDR and fiscal year 2015 budget request were crafted during the same time period and both incorporated the same priorities, assumptions and budget realities.
“I think it will be quite consistent with and will have guided the fiscal ’15 budget,” he said of the relationship between the two documents, adding they were both in their final stages of preparation and the QDR would “come out with the budget or very close to it.”
There has been some debate among lawmakers over the role budget environments should play in the QDR. Some, like House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), want access to the full list of threats the United States faces, and therefore what capabilities the military needs to address those threats.
“What I told them this time is, what we need to know is, what are the risks?” he said at a Feb. 27 Defense Writers Group breakfast. “They’re supposed to go out five, 10, 20 years. And then let us worry about trying to come up with the money. Don’t say, we’ve only got this much money so this is what we’re going to do. That’s basically worthless then.”
But at a DWG breakfast on Feb. 6, HASC Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) argued the opposite.
“I’m hoping to see a strategic vision based on what the realistic budget is,” he said of the QDR. He said Congress and the Pentagon need to work together to “build a force based on the budget we have.” He decried the logic of creating a strategy that couldn’t be implemented for budgetary reasons, saying “I never understand that argument, it makes literally no sense to me because what you want to do is, you want to look at it and say, here’s everything we’d like to do as a starting point, here’s how much money we have, so what are the right choices? How do we go forward?”