By Marina Malenic
The Pentagon leadership is “very consciously” moving to implement further programmatic changes in the fiscal year 2011 budget cycle using the latest round of a major weapons portfolio review conducted every four years, a top Defense Department official said yesterday.
Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) will have more practical ramifications for the Pentagon’s budget than QDRs of years past have had.
“This is not some separate process,” Flournoy told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington. “This is creating the strategic framework that will drive” FY ’11 budget priorities.
She added that the review “is going to continue the process of rebalancing” the weapons portfolio to reflect the increasing emphasis on irregular warfare and unconventional threats begun by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the administration’s FY ’10 budget proposal.
Flournoy noted that Gates will continue to drive the “rebalancing” process, which has been seen as the most dramatic shake-up in Pentagon spending priorities in decades.
“Some QDRs have been bottom up processes,” she explained. “This one is not. Secretary Gates is very engaged…This is a leader driven process.”
Flournoy attributed Gates’ more activist role to continuity–because President Obama chose to retain the secretary, there was a clear defense strategy in place from the get-go. Normally, she said, a new administration cannot begin the QDR process with well-defined priorities as quickly as Gates’ team was able to do.
The review will continue into the early part of next year when the FY ’11 budget is submitted to Congress, according to Flournoy. But Pentagon leaders want to have a list of major insights completed by the end of the summer to inform programmatic decisions.
Since the 1990s, the Pentagon has planned for the possibility of conducting two major combat operations simultaneously. Asked whether that assumption would endure in the department’s force sizing construct, Flournoy said it would be “on the table for discussion.”
“That will be one of the end products of the QDR,” she said.
Flournoy also depicted the Obama administration’s overall foreign policy outlook as “pragmatic” and said she sees a need to balance America’s strength with reliance on allies.
“We are uniquely positioned to play a leadership role,” she said. “At the same time, I do think the world is becoming a more multipolar place.”
She added that the very definition of military might is evolving.
“I do believe that our military needs to remain second to none,” she said. “But what that means is changing. This is why we’re conducting the QDR.”
Flournoy noted that America’s adversaries learned a profound lesson from Operation Desert Storm: If you try to take the United States military head-on in a conventional war, you are going to lose.
“So that’s driven others to invest in highly asymmetric approaches that undermine our strengths and exploit our weaknesses,” she explained. “That is the world we have to adapt to and that the military has to adapt to.”