A panel of former Pentagon officials on Tuesday proposed major overhauls to the Defense Department’s major strategy document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, including classifying at least a portion of it.
Congress in 1996 mandated that the Pentagon release a study that describes near-term threats, the budget outlook and modernization and force structure plans. However, the resulting Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which is published every four years, has become a toothless, uncontroversial document that is too broad to help the defense secretary weigh priorities, former officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
When the department creates unclassified strategy documents such as the QDR, they tend to be “a lovely coffee table book that’s a list of everything that’s important” instead of a strategy that delineates clear priorities—which helps guide the allocation of funding—and areas where the Pentagon is willing to accept risk, said Michèle Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense for policy.
“I would encourage you to fundamentally reset the process and ask the secretary to produce a top-down, leader driven strategy document that has a classified form and an unclassified form,” she said. Classifying all or some of the QDR could produce a more concrete, actionable strategy and help “get rid of the bottom-up, everybody comes to the table type of process” that has become the norm.
Michael Vickers, former under secretary of defense for intelligence, agreed that aspects of U.S. strategy need to be developed in secret to be effective. Detailing how the department plans to deal with risks becomes problematic when adversaries can read it in a public document.
“Good strategy really has to be unexpected in some ways if you’re going to exploit your strengths against your opponent’s weaknesses and create new strengths,” he said.
However, classifying the QDR would not guarantee that the document weighs risks effectively and empowers leaders to make difficult choices, said Jeffrey Eggers, a former special assistant to the president for national security affairs and retired Navy SEAL.
Lawmakers need to target the strategy-making process, not simply classify all strategy documents, he added. Some may need to be classified, but declassification can sometimes be an asset to national security.
“A document that is open to the scrutiny, the debate of outside experts that won’t have access to the classified document, could be a valuable effect,” he said. Classifying the QDR or other strategy documents could limit diverse points of view from coming forward and informing future Pentagon thinking.
The department is currently dominated by a “tyranny of consensus” in which the goal is agreement between organizations such as the office of secretary of defense, Joint Staff and combatant commands, Flournoy said.
In his opening statement, SASC Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested that reforms made as a result of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which reorganized the Pentagon’s chain of command, may have prompted the Pentagon’s “excessive pursuit of concurrence.”
Flournoy replied that Congress could make changes to the strategy development process without having to make major modifications to the Goldwater-Nichols Act.
She recommended making changes to Pentagon’s organizational structure that would thin out its many duplicative, bureaucratic layers, such as giving the defense secretary additional authorities to consolidate the civilian workforce. Congress could also direct the department to commission an outside firm well-versed in private sector management practices to make recommendations on how to best streamline overlapping functional staffs within the Defense Department.
Vickers proposed transforming the Joint Staff into a “joint general staff” of military officers that have strategic, instead of operational, expertise.