February 12, 2014 House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee Chairman Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) has written a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel criticizing the trajectory of past Quadrennial Defense Reviews just as the Pentagon is finishing up its latest iteration.
The letter urges the Pentagon to break out of what Forbes perceives to be an unjustified budget equality among the services. "It is hard to believe that despite our shifting global commitments from deterring a crisis in places like Iraq and North Korea in the 1990s, to counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2000s, and now to a more air and maritime focus along the littorals of the Indo-Pacific, our defense investments have somehow remained remarkably similar across the services," Forbes wrote.
"I would expect that a true strategic assessment of our force-modernization plans in this coming QDR would step back and consider the individual contributions each service can make to our national defense strategy in the coming twenty years and then proceed to build a budget from there," Forbes wrote.
The argument touches on a point that QDR purists in Congress have made in every review year -- namely, that the strategic evaluation should be largely independent from the budget. The counterargument is that crafting a new strategy without consideration of available resources is so divorced from reality that it does more harm than good.
Forbes' letter also criticizes the previous Obama administration's QDR for capping a "slow abandonment" of the two-conflict, force-planning construct that has long underpinned U.S. military strategy. The 2010 QDR was based on a force-planning construct more akin to a matrix of eventualities, rather than a shorthand formula. Defense officials at the time defended their thinking, arguing that setting too strict a construct was incompatible with ever-changing security threats.
Meanwhile, defense analysts from across the political spectrum dampened expectations that much would come from the 2014 QDR. But some also acknowledged that Pentagon leaders have little room or reason to maneuver into new territory, given that the defense budget downturn is managed from Capitol Hill and given that the main tenets of the Obama administration's national security strategy were already articulated in the January 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance.
Mark Gunzinger, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former Pentagon official who participated in previous QDRs, said the 2014 report comes at a crucial time and should re-examine fundamental questions related to service priorities, roles and missions, and risk. "This QDR is really an opportunity to define the capabilities mix needed by the joint force, perhaps more so than previous QDRs," Gunzinger told Inside the Pentagon.
A Pentagon spokeswoman did not return repeated requests for information about when defense officials plan to release the 2014 QDR report. Some sources outside DOD said an unveiling likely would take place around the time of the budget release, which is scheduled for March 4.