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Because of pressure to contain defense spending, the Marine Corps must return to its reputation that it can get “a great return on the investment dollar” to ensure that the service holds on to its procurement budget, said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The escalating costs of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, along with current problems with the Marines’ version of the F- 35 jet fighter, have “tarnished that reputation of an affordable service,” Wood said in a phone interview. “In the past, the Marine Corps has enjoyed the reputation of just asking for what it truly needed.”

“I think that there are going to be more and more examples like that,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Because the military in recent years invested in many new programs, which in lots of cases have not come to fruition, it did not spend as much on large-scale repair and modernization of older equipment, Harrison added. “As a result, we still have . . . this lagging need to recapitalize large parts of our force,” he said.

Unveiling his decisions yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates set new priorities for the US military in an age of austerity. His program and budget decisions will help close the strategy-funding gap and will better prepare the US military to face anti-access and other military challenges on the horizon. While the budget cuts Gates proposed are significant, they are judicious and signal his determination to avoid hollowing either the force or its modernization accounts.

Although finding a peaceful way to preclude Iran from getting nuclear weapons is obviously desirable, Washington will likely have to decide between two unattractive options: pursuing a military strike to prevent Iran from going nuclear or implementing a containment strategy to live with a nuclear Iran. The resort to force is always risky, and it would be particularly so in this case because a substantial number of U.S. troops are deployed near Iran. Whether force should be used will depend on the answers to three difficult questions: How close is Iran to achieving a nuclear weapons capability? Would an attack be effective? How might Iran retaliate, and what costs would the United States and its allies and partners suffer as a result? The risks of war must be weighed against the likelihood that containment could preserve regional stability and avert further proliferation, the demands of implementing and sustaining a containment strategy, and the inevitable reduction in the United States’ ability to defend vital interests elsewhere.

The newly released Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) is a welcome initiative by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to provide some strategic planning horizons for U.S. diplomats. That document correctly focuses on using the contributions of all U.S. agencies operating overseas and coordinating their efforts in-country.

The commission faces a Dec. 1 deadline for at least 14 of the 18 members to agree to send a report to Congress. Even then it is not clear if lawmakers would embrace the ideas. “If anyone needed a wake-up call that the growth in defense spending that we’ve experienced over the past decade is coming to an end, then this was it,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. Because of the approvals that would be necessary to put the proposals into action, “it’s highly unlikely that this would be adopted in its current form,” he added.