Mark Gunzinger, a retired Air Force colonel and now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the Pentagon no longer has the luxury of indulging in institutional inertia as generals and admirals seek to preserve their programs.
The Defense Department’s strategic reviews that Congress mandates every four years mostly have preserved the status quo. There is a “reluctance to address controversial roles and missions issues, Gunzinger said last week during a presentation on Capitol Hill.
This year, the Pentagon will conduct yet another Quadrennial Defense Review that is expected to produce guidance for how the military should size and shape its future forces. “Much of this debate has been focused on the ‘how many wars’ question,” he said, such as whether the United States ought to be prepared to fight two major regional contingencies.
Gunzinger said a fresh thinking is needed this time. “Almost 60 years ago, Samuel P. Huntington warned that services lacking compelling strategic concepts risk losing their purpose and may end up wallowing about amid a variety of conflicting and confusing goals,” he said. A novel approach to the QDR, he said, “would provide the services with opportunities to assess where they have excessive overlap in forces and capabilities [and make decisions that] will shape the U.S. military for the future, rather than for the past.”
The Air Force, for example, “could create a new strategic concept that explains how it intends to … strike the full range of fixed, mobile, hardened, or deeply buried targets in the increasingly contested airspace of the Western Pacific,” Gunzinger wrote in a CSBA study. “Together, the Navy and Air Force might flesh out how they could act as a global swing force capable of rapidly deploying across overseas theaters of operation.”