The superpower does some sums

Yet Congress felt it necessary to impose this short deadline in order to ensure that next year’s Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR), was consistent with larger security policy — it made no sense to make fundamental decisions about the US military establishment without broad strategic guidance.

A second hurdle facing the new administration will be the QDR itself, to be completed by September 30, 2001. The first QDR done in 1997, proved unsatisfactory largely because it left unresolved what proved to be a large and growing gap between US security and defence strategy and military resources; a mismatch between ends and means that has left US forces constantly attempting “to do more with less”, as Rep Floyd Spence, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, put it. In mandating a new defence review, Congress tried to force the Pentagon to resolve this mismatch by directing that the 2001 QDR should “determine a defence strategy designed to protect the full range of US national security interests and to identify the forces sufficient to do so at as low a risk as possible.” A successful review, concluded the report on the law, “should be driven first by the demands of strategy, not by any presupposition about the size of the defence budget.”

With this clear mandate, the Department of Defence (DoD) has, for the past year, prepared an extensive analytical framework for next year’s defence review. This `pre-QDR working group’ at the National Defence University has been reviewing a variety of issues under the direction of Michele Flournoy, a senior analyst who helped shape the 1997 QDR. Remarkably, considering Flournoy’s credentials as a long serving participant in the Clinton administration defence strategy-making, the working group’s recently released report began by acknowledging “the responsibility to address mismatch between strategy and resources estimated at $ 30-50 billion per year”. The report stated that this mismatch had “damaging consequences: serious tempo and readiness strains chronic inability to meet modernisation objectives, deterioration of morale and quality of life, and recruiting and retention shortfalls.”

Although the Flournoy report was intended merely to provide a way to approach the problems facing the US defence establishment in a way that might allow for a closer alignment of US strategy with US forces, and not to provide specific policy recommendations, a close study of the report does reveal the Pentagon’s preferences. And it is animated by a sense of urgency, now keenly felt within the MoD, that the strategy-resource mismatch can no longer be simply ignored. Noting that there were at least five major US defence strategy reviews during the 1990s, the Flournoy report observes that “the strategy-resources gap has persisted and, in recent years, widened….Given the narrowness of the presidential election, Flournoy may be asking a new administration to show a level of will and leadership it cannot summon. During the presidential campaign, neither candidate made a case for increasing overall defence spending by the amounts suggested by the Flournoy report: Gore advocated an average annual increase of $10 billion, Bush merely $4.5 billion….