DoD Will Lean on QDR During Missions Review

By MARCUS WEISGERBER Published: 21 Apr 2011 18:17

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking to start with combat scenarios developed during last year's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to help make the budget cuts ordered by the White House for the next decade.

"I want to frame this so that options and consequences and risks are taken into account as budget decisions are made first by the president and then by the Congress," Gates said during a briefing at the Pentagon April 21.

"What I hope to do is frame this in a way that says, if you want to cut this number of dollars, here are the consequences for force structure. Here are your choices in terms of capabilities that would be reduced or investments that are not made and here are the consequences of this."

Gates called for a "process driven by analysis" when conducting the review, which he said could use war-fighting scenarios used in the 2010 QDR.

The QDR included a requirement for two simultaneous major wars, but added that all U.S. forces must be prepared for a much wider set of threats and missions.

"It will start, probably, with the QDR and in the terms of the scenarios, and then try to translate that into what are the programmatic implications as you begin to reduce the mission sets," Gates said.

But he added that the review "won't be a mini-QDR."

Last week, President Obama called for a review of missions and capabilities in an attempt to cut $400 billion in national security spending by 2023. Gates said that the Pentagon has not been informed what portion of that will come specifically from the defense budget, although he called the $400 billion figure a target.

Gates has had one meeting on the subject to discuss how to structure the review.

"The worst of all possible worlds, in my view, is to give the entire Department of Defense a haircut, it basically says: 'Everybody is going to cut X percent,' " he said. "That's the way we got the hollow military in the 1970s and in the 1990s."

Despite the pending budget cuts, he said, the Pentagon must continue to spend on several big weapon programs, specifically noting the U.S. Air Force's KC-46A tanker and replacements for warships that will reach the end of their usable lives in the next 12 years.

"The question of how many is one of the questions that has to be answered," he said. "All elements of the [nuclear] triad need to be modernized. You may have to make some choices there.

"I want to frame this so it's not a math exercise, but so people understand the strategic and national security consequences of the decisions that they're making," he said.

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