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After the last Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) failed to prioritize capabilities or missions, defense observers are not confident this new review will be any different/.../Todd Harrison, a senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, suggested an independent board be appointed to perform the review, lest each service fight to preserve its own turf and force structure. As an example, he pointed to President Dwight Eisenhower’s competitive Solarium Project of 1953, where three independent teams crafted separate security policy options. Their work eventually led to Eisenhower’s New Look policy, which tried to balance military capabilities with the country’s financial resources in the 1955 budget.

In a Wednesday speech outlining his plan to rein in ballooning deficits, Mr. Obama proposed cutting $400 billion in projected security spending by 2023/.../ Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said reaching the president's budget targets would require that the Pentagon "go beyond efficiencies" and seek more substantial cuts to both troop strength and weapons programs."What they've cut so far was essentially low-hanging fruit—programs that were troubled or weapons systems that we simply didn't need any more," he said. The Obama plan would force Washington, he added, to make "hard choices" about which spending to jettison."If it's not done right … and everyone has to take a haircut, the risk is you end up with a military that is just smaller and less capable in all areas, rather than fully capable in the most important areas," he said.

The U.S. Defense Department will begin a “comprehensive review” to find $400 billion in spending cuts as part of President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce the federal deficit/.../Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies defense expenditures and national security strategy, said reaching that level of savings will require “more than just efficiencies.”“It will require making hard choices about force structure, pay, benefits and modernization programs,” Harrison said. “There are no magic bullets.”

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The early skirmishes on the long-term budget debate have been about trimming entitlement programs, like Medicare and Social Security. More quietly, but just as importantly, some Republicans have broached cutting defense/.../"There is a growing divide between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks (among Republicans), and it is a matter of prioritization,'' said Todd Harrison, a senior defense budget fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Which do you think is a higher priority right now? Getting our budget in balance or funding defense?''Harrison said that "any real, serious plan to reduce the deficit is going to have to spread the cuts across all the big programs in the federal government, and look at the revenue side.''

Since World War II, America’s network of European and Asian alliances has underwritten security and prosperity around the globe. While these alliances have been a source of strategic and political advantage for the better part of the past sixty years, they have not always been militarily essential. That is rapidly changing. The United States is confronted by revisionist powers across Eurasia (Russia, Iran and China), as well as the continuing threats posed by Islamic extremism, the almost certainly protracted aftershocks of the Jasmine Revolutions, and the potential for unrest in nuclear-armed states like North Korea and Pakistan. Furthermore, all of this comes at a time of enormous fiscal constraint at home. What used to be a U.S. preference for working in concert with others is fast becoming an imperative.