What’s Wrong With The QDR?

What’s Wrong With The Independent Panel?

“The QDR in Perspective: Meeting America’s National Security Needs in the 21st Century” is a curious document.

It declares itself to be not only “independent” but also critical of the Quadrennial Review process: “The natural tendency of bureaucracy is to plan short term, operate from the top down, think within existing parameters, and affirm the correctness of existing plans and programs of record.”

Bravo! Keep telling it like it is!

“This is exactly what happened to the QDR process. Instead of … long term analysis [that might] challenge preexisting thinking, the QDRs became … justifications of … established decisions and plans. The latest QDR continues the trend of the last 15 years. It is a wartime QDR … responding to the threats … and winning the wars in which America is now engaged.”

[In contrast we will] “assess the long term threats facing America, and produce recommendations … to meet these threats.”

Again: Bravo!

But with the right spade all official “independent” reports reveal their substrate. The surface things we worry over are not necessarily the real things, nor the important things, nor the thing itself.

“Meeting America's National Security Needs In the 21st Century” is not about what you read. It is not about fighter wings or carrier battle groups or brigade combat teams, or even rational identification of threats and missions.

It is about who we are — DOD and America both — and how we intend to keep the future ours.

The QDR Independent Panel is like Scrooge facing his ghosts. Like him its very words deny the Ghost of American National Security Past and even refuse to process the prophetic finger of our Ghost of American National Security Yet To Come as it points to what awaits us.

The Ghost of American National Security Past.

1. We always need more, or as the ghost says: “Long Past? No. Your past” — As in neuralgic-backward-looking to that former American Golden Age, The Cold War: “Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has routinely failed to match capabilities to commitments.” Really. So spending as much on defense as the rest of the world combined is simply not enough. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we know that “commitments” is really just another way of saying: Hey, we need to do this, and doing this means spending this. No more questions please! In fact the Independent Panel remonstrates the actual QDR: “The absence of a clear force-planning construct in the 2010 QDR represents a missed opportunity.” In independent panel eyes what is needed is a magical machine, so the Yahoos in Congress affirm exactly what we need.

2. Our abiding goal is control: “America does not have the option of abandoning a leadership role in support of its national interests. Those interests are vital to the security of the United States. Failure to anticipate and manage the conflicts that threaten those interests ...” And just what are those interests? “Since 1945 the United States has been the principal architect and remains the principal leader of a durable and desirable international system.” The global space of this system is described as the commons, and is unambiguous about who owns these commons: We do. “Securing these common domains is both a peacetime mission ... and a wartime imperative ... But the ultimate success of American strategy has been to secure favorable geopolitical conditions.” US grand strategy is ownership of the world we desire.

3. Ours is a world of threat: Of eternal bad guys everywhere. It is fascinating that “radical Islamist extremism and the threat of terrorism” is threat number one, over “the rise of new global great powers in Asia.” A near-one-trillion-dollar annual military outlay [total + hidden] is first justified by the threat of evil Frat boys: Decimated as they have been these past nine years. At least PRC pots and pans fanfares (from classical Chinese opera) are linked to unmistakable military build-up and a lusty declaration of world power status. Yet Arab Frat boys come first. And always, world security issues are ironclad threat. “An accelerating global competition for resources” = threat. Climate change and energy crunch are of interest only for their war potential. Instead of these possibly leading to a crisis of globalization, we are treated to “persistent problems from failed and failing states.” So too the consequences. “Contagious diseases, refugees, poverty, civil war, and transnational criminal networks” are rudely lumped as threat. There is no discussion of billions of humanity in potential extremis. An obsession with the wretched of the Earth as existential threat means treating them almost as a source of global contagion, where deviant, criminal failing states represent not a humanity in need of succor, but rather a bacterial danger.

4. The “future” = “trends” … Where trends whisper reaffirmation that drives us always toward “hard power” — “These trends are likely to place an increased demand on American hard power to preserve regional balances [read: US world control]. While diplomacy and development have important roles to play, the world's first-order problems will continue to be our security concerns.” But the future is not trends. Think about what “trends” means. A trend is a tendency, an inclination. If by official definition the future is simply trends, then tendencies and inclinations will remain forever “mere shadows of things that might be,” rather than “things that must be.” But like Scrooge we do not have the choice to indefinitely postpone the future as “mere shadows.” Things to come will fulfill the denied promise of trends and tear down many of the structures of life we take for granted — And “hard power” will be insufficient to stay their course. The future will overwhelm our forces, no matter how privileged and exalted we make them.

5. Moreover, future threats are “high-tech” — demanding a passionate, high-gloss mirrored high-tech response. True we face competition over space, cyberspace, “precision dominance,” and other domains. But the report misses the big point, posing naked before us these past nine years: We have been fighting a “primitive” who has high-tech weapons. Weapons we offered so generously — Internet and cell phone — have enabled sophisticated propaganda, a cell phone network enabling real-time C3I, and the world's finest precision weapon: the suicide bomber. But these are simply tools. What matters — and what we so obdurately refuse to see — is that the people who use these tools have immobilized the greatest military of all time. They may look primitive but we look stupid. Independent Panel: Stop saying how you are looking at the future! Start looking at what is happening today.

The Ghost of American National Security Yet to Come: This is the wrong Nightmare Before Christmas, because America has changed. An old ethic of altruism and collective security is gone. In its place is a fantasy more and more about what is good for us, and with it the narcissism that whatever is good for us is good for all. This change prefigures a very different American Ethos.

1. US world leadership is ultimately about self-interest: “America cannot abandon a leadership role in support of its national interests.” What is good for America is reflexively also good for you, humanity, whoever you are, because we are “the principal architect and leader of a durable and desirable international system.” Without any reference or even self-awareness of a changing humanity that might be headed in different directions, the report avers: “the United States needs to guide continued adaptation of existing international institutions and alliances.” But to what ends? Why, our ends.

2. We can do it all — Because it is all about us. The report never mentions the future of humanity, only the future of humanity as it sustains US leadership and helps meet US national interests. This is actually expressed rather neatly and without shame. It is called in the report “The Comprehensive Approach. “ This means declaring that DOD, incorporating “Whole of Government” solutions, with select and pliant coalition partners, can sustain our future national interests. Of course Whole of Government literally means that civilian agencies will be folded into a DOD “solution.” Yet its security challenges “of the future” are not in fact “long-range” but rather the dross of today. The report says global challenges are all about intervening in failing states. Are Iraq and Afghanistan necessarily our future? Is “guiding international institutions and alliances” really just selfish squeeze on “partners” to help us “work closely with the agencies of a foreign government” — meaning a country we have occupied and are administering? How can Afghanistan and Iraq be the future template of US grand strategy? But there it is. How eager our partners must be to support endless American “engagement.” The “comprehensive approach” is no more than the promise of invading (“engaging”) failing states, which the independent report describes as American destiny in the name of humanity. All we ask of the international order is: “Include selected allies/partners, select international organizations, and, when possible, [NGOs] as part of US Government efforts to define roles and missions for the Comprehensive Approach.” Why else does the supporting graphic intone: “post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction”? Is this really our future?

3. American Power is not global but regional. I have a friend who insightfully asks: “Is the US truly a global power, or is it simply the greatest Middle Eastern power?” I would go further. The report says: “The United States has sought to prevent a single power from dominating the greater Middle East.” That is code-language. What has really happened since 1973 is that America has become the real Caliphate: Reborn. Forget the pale and wan dreamscape of Al Qaeda. We are the Ottoman successor-state. We are Constantinople. We are the Sultan. Every state in the “Middle East” is an American client king. Our satrapies include Arabian princes and emirs as much as Egyptian Pharaohs, and clients as fractious as Israel and Iran are still wholly dependent on the United States: Because we are the bearers and anointers of state legitimacy. But the Independent Report insists that we are engaged in nothing more than banal balance-of-power statecraft.

4. “Global good” = disaster relief: “We have provided relief in the wake of natural disasters and alleviated human suffering in the face of genocide and starvation.” Herbert Hoover’s personal resume in 1924 looks better than US national commitment today. For a nation that redeemed the world in the wake of global war, that lifted Europe out of utter abnegation with the Marshall Plan, this looks not merely lame, but deliberately unfeeling. Bigger things are brewing on this planet, and for humanity.

5. “Global climate” ≠ global climate change. “America cannot abandon a leadership role in support of its national interests. To do so will simply lead to an increasingly unstable and unfriendly global climate …” Nowhere is there real discussion of the truly big threat facing humanity. There is a very real possibility that coming decades will bring a “crisis of globalization” — driven by climate change and its human consequences. The unfolding crisis could put at risk the world system itself, over-stressing the global networks on which civilization depends. Moreover the first symptoms of such a crisis are visible even now: Floods in Pakistan displacing 14 million, a piece of the Greenland ice sheet the size of Martha’s Vineyard breaking off … today’s litany in HO-scale prefigures future full-size human traumas yet to come.

Just as Secretary Gates makes fine and necessary virtue out of paring down the Pentagon, the Independent Panel Report has some really terrific ideas. Its authors have a superb take on reforming Professional Military Education (PME). Their recommendations on Personnel and Acquisition reform — and reigning in wayward and corrupt Defense contractors — are not too shabby either.

But even a clarion call for most earnest reform means little if it continues to nurture backward-looking, if not fatally misplaced, visions of the human future.

These comments collectively outline the terms of what should be a serious national debate. They also highlight its importance. Yet no such debate is occuring - in Congress, in the the Beltway's ambit, in the press. Do we still have a responsible political system or do we just have politics of a puerile kind?

I found the study to be thoughtful and certainly more interesting than the QDR. That said, many of its recommendations on fixing national security planning and the "whole of govt" approach to complex operations have been made by me, the Proj. on National Secty. Reform, and probably half the members of the National Journal's expert team. It is remarkable how much talk we have had about such "reforms" and how little has been done. If it were not for contractors, we would never fill the civilian billets in Iraq and Afghanistan. State and USAID are still budgetary midgets. The contribution of the rest of the Executive Branch depts. barely count for a bucket of warm spit in the nation building game.

Over here at NDU this week, we have had a huge gathering of interagency experts on the concept of developing the interagency National Security Professional, an idea first proposed in 2006, started up in DoD, mentioned in QDR 2006, Executive Order-ed in 2007, and handed over to OPM where it is, I was told, still being studied. Perhaps, we are not serious about this whole of govt business, and just maybe, that is connected with our ambivalence re. nation building.

All that said, we are entering a time when economics will call the shots in the Pentagon. We will have to limit overseas commitments, cut the size of the force, cut into nearly all major modernization programs, and somehow find the wherewithal to fix a force that has been ridden hard and put up wet for a decade. We will also have to favor the parts of our force that have shown themselves to be invaluable: ISR, drones, special forces direct action elements, and assets for security assistance. Yes, the report is correct, we will have to do more to balance China, but building more of a Navy like the one we have today will be an express ticket to the poor house, with a layover in the town of Wasteville.

Our choice for the future is really to grow increasingly smart or increasingly irrelevant. To execute an effective defense at a much lower cost, we will need cooperation on the Hill and from the metal eaters. The Congressional-Industrial-Think Tank complex can make or break defense and national security in the mid to long term. We can still be great, but we can no longer be wasteful.

I’ll speak up for Perry-Hadley, but caveat emptor: I work at the United States Institute of Peace, which not only uses your tax dollars (at the rate of well under $100 million per year) building peace but also facilitated the Perry-Hadley effort. I won’t attempt a broad defense, which would go well beyond my personal competence, but I think they got it right on state-building and the comprehensive approach, so I’ll say so. I also think they got it right in advocating a broader definition of national security that transcends current institutional boxes, so I’ll say a final word about that as well.

The critics would like state-building to go away. Too expensive, too far removed from vital U.S. interests. Ditto all the presidents since the fall of the Berlin Wall: Bush 41 wanted only to feed Somalis, Clinton hesitated 3.5 years before fulfilling his campaign promise to intervene in Bosnia, then promised not to do it again before taking on Kosovo, Bush 43 derided state-building and then got us into Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama wants to finish both efforts. I won’t even bother to mention all the UN, EU, AU and single-country efforts during the same twenty years.

The arm chair pundits may pooh-pooh state-building, but skeptical presidents all found the need to embark on it. I see no sign that this pattern will change. Take a look for example at RAND’s recent counterinsurgency studies: government legitimacy (especially if at least partly democratic) and competence (in providing services and infrastructure) are key “good practices.” Is there anyone willing to suggest that the next ten years will not see an insurgency (or two or three) that threaten vital U.S. interests?

And if not, consider this: what will North Korea need after the regime disappears? What will be needed when Southern Sudan votes for independence early next year? What do we need to do to ensure that Zimbabwe does not implode, or DRC or Liberia (again)? Not to mention Haiti, where the consequences of state failure can show up literally on our shores.

I do not mean to suggest that any of these state-building enterprises will require the U.S. to take on primary responsibility, but if we want to avoid the kind of chaos that really will require U.S. troops we’ll need to ensure that these largely civilian jobs get done: by the UN, by the EU, by China and South Korea, by the AU, by someone. And we’ll need to be in a position to contribute U.S. civilian capabilities, even if we are not in the lead. This Hadley-Perry got right, and it is something we should not throw out with the bath water.

I also think they got right the need for a more holistic approach to national security. We are in the proverbial position of owning only a hammer and therefore seeing everything as a nail. It is time to broaden our national security vision and bring some more tools into the toolbox, in particular a civilian “whole of government” expeditionary capability and a more comprehensive approach to meet the requirements we know future presidents will want to meet, even if they sometimes (or even all the time) deny the intention.

While there are some suggestions that make sense in the report of the independent panel that was established to evaluate the QDR, the panel failed in what should have been its biggest task, namely, how to bring the escalating baseline defense budget under control, and thus enable the defense budget to contribute its fair share to reducing our nearly $1.5 trillion budget deficit. Rather the panel proposed establishing another outside group to examine the issue of rapidly growing personnel costs and then recommended increasing the size of the overall budget to counter growing Chinese influence.

Where would the U.S. get this extra money? Most probably we’d borrow it from China, to whom we already owe at least $1 trillion. Anyone really concerned about countering Chinese influence knows that the best course of action is to get our fiscal house in order, not build more ships.

Will reducing defense spending by itself relieve our deficit? No. But it can and must play a part. After entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, defense spending is the biggest source of government spending. Moreover, after 13 straight years of increasing the baseline defense budget in real terms, the U.S. now spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined and, in real terms, total defense spending is now higher than at any time since World War II.

Had such a distinguished group pointed out that our national security depends on our economic well being, as President (General) Eisenhower first noted, it would have helped the deficit commission, which does not have such a group of distinguished defense experts, reduce defense spending as part of its overall deficit reduction. But maybe that was the problem with this panel. There were no Eisenhower republicans in the group.

There is a request for some kind words about Perry-Hadley. Having been highly critical of the report, which I am, it does re-enforce the need for greater attention to two subjects.

One subject - "whole of government" - it gets wrong in my view. But the topic is important. What Perry-Hadley get wrong is the assumption that "whole of government" means a juvenile soccer scrum on DOD's definition of the mission - global counter-insurgency and stabilization. That is a dangerous course on which America should not set, but it is the dominant vision at DOD and even has advocates at State. It is the wrong lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, which we are still learning, sadly. Our ability to "build" nations, "reconstruct" economies, and "win" hearts and minds is demonstrably small and ineffective, though it is soaking up immense resources.

We should not be organizing the entire government around such an enterprise, especially not linking such a capability to US military deployments. It is unclear when we will next undertake a regime changing, rebuilding mission like Iraq and Afghanistan. So we should not be fighting the last "post-war."

What is needed is a serious strengthening of our civilian foreign policy institutions, especially in the areas of conflict prevention and resolution and the programmatic activities focused on "governance." Fragile states are a problem for their people, for their region, and, in some cases, for global security. It is in our interest to have a civilian capability to do what we can do, in coalition with others (allies, regional organizations, NGOs) to strengthen governance in fragile states. that is a civilian capability, not a military capability. If the military has a role in the security sector part of that effort, it should be executed under civilian leadership - the Secretary of State and the President.

The other subject on which Perry-Hadley makes a contribution is the problem of military pay, benefits, retirement, and the costs of military health care. Together, these issues have become a major problem for DOD budgeting. They need to be brought under control. The politics of doing so are difficult, occasionally even vicious, which is why Congress regularly chooses more expensive options. But, as with the economy and federal policy more broadly, the military pay-benefits-health care issues need to be tackled. The report does not offer a great deal new on the subject - the Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation has proposed some of these options several times, to no avail. But the report does reenforce growing public attention to these inexorably rising costs; they will need more attention in the future.

So far, our bloggers are running eight-to-one against the Hadley-Perry report. Only Daniel Gouré defends the panel's recommended program as both affordable and necessary, while our other contributors argue it is neither. Gordon Adams, Michael Brenner, Christopher Preble, Paul Sullivan, and Winslow T. Wheeler point out the mismatch between expensively "imperial" ambitions, the relatively few genuine threats, and economic circumstances strained by recession in the near term and entitlement spending in the long term. Three other contributors sketch alternative and more affordable strategies:

- Richard Hart Sinnreich says we should invest our national security dollars in our troubled neighbor Mexico, not distant Afghanistan, and in overhauling the Navy, not in garisoning wealthy allies well able to defend themselves, like South Korea.

- Loren Thompson argues we need to move aggressively against states like Iran and North Korea, which he sees as real threats, and deemphasize global policing and nationbuilding, which he sees as costly lost causes.

- Retired military intelligence Col. W. Patrick Lang offers the most detailed program: sharply reduce Army and Marine Corps ground forces, reinvest in and restructure the Air Force and Navy, pull out of non-essential overseas commitments, and consolidate a host of headquarters.

In the time left to this week’s discussion, I’d be very curious to see if any of our other experts would like to outline alternative strategies of this kind – and if any one at all has a kind word to say about Hadley-Perry.

Loot Social Security – The Answer?

Several commentators have properly stressed the dire financial implications of following either the QDR plan or its Hadley/Perry cousin. As someone or other said, “a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

However, it is necessary to correct one assumption built into budgetary projections. Entitlement programs are not the culprit. Social Security especially has been the target of the most intense disinformation campaign in modern American history. The simple fact is that the Social Security Trust Fund is solvent until al least the year 2040 – according to every reasonable estimate. Its viability could be extended well beyond that date by the straightforward expediency of raising the income ceiling for withholdings. Today, it falls disproportionately on salaried workers alone – up to about the $110,000 threshold.

The harsh truth is that the Social Security Trust Fund has been systematically looted for more than 40 years. That is to say, since the introduction of the consolidated budget in the 1960s. In effect, moneys have been regularly diverted to pay for other budgetary outlays, with I.O.U.s put in the Fund as place-holders. The assault on Social Security is driven, therefore, by two considerations. One, is a rekindled doctrinal opposition to this landmark New Deal achievement that brought the United States in line with every other developed country (at much lower levels of retirement benefits). Two, the plot not to honor those I.O.U.s is a crude device to bring into congruence the expenditures and revenues of the Federal government.

The Social Security Trust Fund has been the fiduciary responsibility of successive Presidents and Congresses. Elsewhere in our system of law and government, looting of this sort would result in the perpetrators spending long years behind bars. To deny the culpability of all those who have committed this deed in our name, is to strike at the foundations of our social contract and system of accountable democracy. It does not complement us a people to be passive accessories to such massive malfeasance.

Medicare is a somewhat different matter. It’s financial outlook is of more concern. I suggest that a good part of the answer there would be a serious reworking of our incredibly wasteful, for-profit health care non- system – none of whose structural features are altered by the Obama virtual ‘reform.’

This obviously carries us a long way from our discussion of defense spending. But to leave this reality unsaid is to mask the full implications of our compounded fiscal recklessness.

The United States is facing down the barrel of a cannon of financial stress and not just because of the recent financial crisis. That barrel of the recent financial crisis has already fired and could fire again, but this is short term, and we should worry more about the long term. The much bigger financial stress will come about due to the expected explosion of entitlements spending, especially on Medicare, but also on social security and Medicaid, in the coming decades.

The defense budget is quite a bit smaller than the entitlement budget. Please see http://www.concordcoalition.org/files/uploaded_for_nodes/WebSiteTalk032010.pdf for some interesting charts on the overall budgetary proportions and priorities of the federal government. You will see in chart #3 how mandatory expenditures, such interest on the debt and entitlements, have been becoming a much larger part of the overall expenditures of the federal government. If you look at chart #6 you will see that defense expenditures over time have not been the huge proportion of overall expenditures that many think. As a percentage of GDP we are spending about one half of what we spent during the height of the Vietnam War expenditures. But one should also look at how defense spending has taken a much bigger part of the discretionary expenditure pie: http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges-charts/page/15/

This should put the present defense expenditures in perspective with past expenditures and relate them to mandatory expenditures, which will be ballooning in the coming years.

You might want to look at chart #17-21 in the pdf set above. Please also see: http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges-charts/page/31/

Also, the foreign affairs budget outside of defense has grown in recent years, especially with the talk of nation building and a "full government approach" that we think we are applying, but this foreign affairs budget is mostly "palm dust" compared to what is really needed. The budget stresses have hit this important part of our overall national security strategy more than defense has been hit.

There could be opportunities within defense and other parts of the government to do more with less and to work smarter and make better decisions on how to use our scarce resources. This is not an infinite state and resource costs have meaning.

The massive, looming building entitlements mountain will be the largest constraint on the US being a world power in the future. That and, of course, the ability of the US taxpayer to pay for the ballooning budgets and, if all remains the same, and the willingness and ability of foreign lenders to continue to fund its debt binge.

If all remains the same with regard to entitlements, the unwillingness of our political leaders to deal with this issue and the unwillingness of our leaders to deal with our obvious and quite depressing need to increase taxes, then the US will truly sleepwalk into a future of drowning debt and seriously constrained domestic and international policies. The mandatory entitlements will force out the discretionary expenditures, the largest being defense.

Defense is paid for year to year by Congress, even if some programs are multiyear. Yes, defense is discretionary. These fiscal pressures could effect education, energy, the environment, transport, critical infrastructure and other vital aspects of the US economy that the federal government tends to get involved with. Veterans' benefits and public pensions could also be a great risk. The potentially alpine amounts of debt and its related interest payment could squeeze out both private and other needed public investments.

All of this is curable if we tackle the entitlements issues and if we start to gradually pare down our debt and deficits.

The choice of going to war or not going to war also has been oddly divorced in the short term from the financial aspects of war. These wars are paid for in part by tax revenues, but also massively by borrowing from abroad and from our own people in the form of treasury bills and other debt instruments. It is astonishing how we have sleepwalked into this.

If taxes are increased to reflect the true costs of these wars then the public will begin to feel the pain in a more general way. Then it may behoove our leaders to make more careful decisions when it comes to going to war.

Given the dysfunctional nature of our political process at the moment the present day costs are being kicked down the road to the future. These costs are growing. Our children and grandchildren could pay a very high price in reduced incomes and wealth and increased taxes due to our profligacy and lack of courage to make the tough decisions. Indeed these are tough decisions. We want to take care of our aging population, be involved in multiple wars, get involved more so internationally, grow our economy, invent and innovate, improve our educational system, improve our energy and water systems, protect and improve our environment, maintain and protect critical infrastructure and more.

Yet we do not seem to be able to release ourselves of our collective cognitive disconnect regarding paying for all of this.

We need to be more careful with deciding on what our national goals and objectives will be. We need to be more careful with the stewardship of the taxes paid by our people. We need to be far more thoughtful about what we get involved with and what we don't get involved with. We also need to face the tough realities of the tyrannies of the ledgers of the government and get to the tough thinking on what needs to be done.

All of this will require sublime leadership skills mixed with street smarts, as well as a lot of luck. We also need more coalition building both domestically and internationally, as well as more reasoned and, indeed, more systematic calculated approaches to our national security policies overall before it is too late and we find ourselves poorer, less secure and at the risk of being a second rate power. This country deserves the best decisions possible. We are not getting them at many levels.

The financial cannon is pointed at us. It is up to us to disarm it with better economic, financial, national security and other policies. If not, it will fire, and possibly many times, and it is hard to tell what the damage will be, but it could be quite large. And we still have threats and opportunities out there. We need the flexibility, courage, leadership, energy, and funding to react more properly to those threats and challenges.

Furthermore...

As I said, force structure and size should be based on national policy. I didn't say that? Well, I am doing so now. Our present "I love freedom"/"Drain the Swamp" foreign policy drives the size and character of our forces. A different policy would require different forces.

Policy: Let's mind our own business and give up the "city on a hill" fantasy. Withdraw our forces from all overseas commitments that do not serve AMERICAN interests. Keep a few locations that do so.

Such a re-emphasis on the reality of our interests, and the real threats to the USA and our bad economy would allow the kinds of cuts and changes that I earlier suggested.

In the context of such a change in policy a shrinkage of the multiplicity of headquarters now in the Unified Command Plan would be appropriate. Headquarters like JFCOM, Africom, SOCOM (as an operational headquarters), Northcom, all the European headquarters. These are just jobs programs for flag officers that attract contractor and consultant (like me) interest. All the planning and ops control done in these headquarters can be done in surviving headquarters.

Then, in the context of a CONUS based strategy, roles and missions can be re-aligned. Why do we have two armies, the US Army and the US Marine Corps. One has 1.1 million people and the other, what, 200,00 counting reserves? From such a merger large savings can be realized. There is much duplication in schools structures, procurement, etc. A CONUS based unified ground force can be structured into first tier forces made up of what was the Marine Corps and Army units like the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 1st Cavalry Division and second or third tier forces mainly n the reserves. SOF would be retained in its entirety. In this structure, a return to some form of national service (draft) might be possible for CONUS based reserves.

I have earlier indicated that the Navy and Air Force must be our principal defense and should be treated differently.

My seminar at the Army War College in 1985 suggested such a re-organization to the JCS. I marvel at their prescience.

I offer such suggestions, not in the expectation of their adoption, but as a basis for debate outside the inherently corrupt and self-serving world of the Pentagon and the beltway bandit companies.

The model of a successful independent review process was the 1997 report of the National Defense Panel, which offered a very different take on future security needs from the one found in that year's Quadrennial Defense Review. Not only did the National Defense Panel provide prescient insights on global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, networked warfare and urban operations, but its recommendations were well-timed for the political moment in which they were released. They appeared in the midst of the dot.com boom, when the nation's power and prosperity were growing fast and the popular imagination was receptive to a different concept of future security needs.

Today, we live in a very different time. Eight years of incompetent leadership have left the nation in a poorer and more pessimistic state. We have squandered literally trillions of dollars, directly and indirectly, on combating modest threats exaggerated by our fears. Meanwhile, our economy has declined steadily to a point where it may not longer be able to support our previous superpower status. Against this backdrop, the findings of the independent panel assessing the QDR seem ill-timed and wrong-headed.

Like evey other constituency in Washington -- except maybe the Concord Coalition -- the independent panel calls for a deeply indebted government to spend even more money on favored activities. The fact that America already generates nearly half of all global military spending with five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's output doesn't seem to phase these advocates of a robust security posture. They see an endless array of future roles for our military, as if there weren't a dozen other major industrial powers capable of taking on new security missions.

At some point, we Americans need to face up to the reality of our economic circumstances. We can't afford to keep policing a world in which many of our trading partners are growing faster and our military methods are contributing to national bankruptcy. We need to be more direct and decisive in the use of force against truly dangerous countries like Iran and North Korea because we can't afford the luxury any more of tolerating their excesses. And we need to accept that there are deep-seated reasons why Somalia and Afghanistan are failed states that we are powerless to change. What America doesn't need is a concept of its role in the world that is beyond the capacity of our economy and our political system to sustain, purchased with borrowed dollars that will make the emergence of new peer competitors more likely.

Dan Goure says that U.S. military preeminence is not unaffordable. That is probably correct. Even though we spend in excess of $800 billion annually on national security (including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs) we could choose to spend as much, or more, for a while longer. We could choose to shift money out of other government programs; we could raise taxes; or we could continue to finance the whole thing on debt, and stick our children and grandchildren with the bill.

But what is the point? Why do Americans spend so much more on our military than does any other country, or any other combination of countries?

Goure and the Hadley-Perry commissioners who produced the alternate QDR argue that the purpose of American military power is to provide global public goods, to defend other countries so that they don't have to defend themselves, and otherwise shape the international order to suit our ends. In other words, the same justifications offered for American military dominance since the end of the Cold War.

Most in Washington still embraces the notion that America is, and forever will be, the world's indispensable nation. Some scholars, however, questioned the logic of hegemonic stability theory from the very beginning. A number continue to do so today. They advance arguments diametrically at odds with the primacist consensus. Trade routes need not be policed by a single dominant power; the international economy is complex and resilient. Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs of mitigating their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose -- or gain -- the most. Islamic extremists are scary, but hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we spend more today to fight Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. Many factors have contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of wars between nation-states; it is unrealistic to expect that a new spasm of global conflict would erupt if the United States were to modestly refocus its efforts, draw down its military power, and call on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense, and in the security of their respective regions.

But while there are credible alternatives to the United States serving in its current dual role as world policeman / armed social worker, the foreign policy establishment in Washington has no interest in exploring them. The people here have grown accustomed to living at the center of the earth, and indeed, of the universe. The tangible benefits of all this military spending flow disproportionately to this tiny corner of the United States while the schlubs in fly-over country pick up the tab.

In short, we shouldn't have expected that a group of Washington insiders would seek to overturn the judgments of another group of Washington insiders. A genuinely independent assessment of U.S. military spending, and of the strategy the military is designed to implement, must come from other quarters.

Our readers and contributors alike might be interested in the interview just posted with Hadley-Perry commission member John Lehman, former Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan, now online here.

The miscreant uncle crashed the family Lexus and was charged with reckless driving. His response to the judge when told he needed to learn self-control? “I want a Ferrari.”

The analogy can go on (the family couldn’t afford the Lexus; it was in bad need of a complete overhaul, etc.), but the point should be obvious. Having participated avidly in driving our military forces into the ground, the members of the recently released “Final Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel” have proposed that more of the same is inadequate; they want much more of the same.

Most of the members of this panel have been reported to have some conflicts of interest (find a USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2010-03-01-1Apentagon01_ST_U.htm?csp=34#_jmp0). That, in itself, is more of the same for a panel appointed by the Pentagon and Congress to report on their own handiwork.

Billed as a critique of the Defense Department’s own QDR, it is no such thing. The only complaint from the “independent panel” is that the Department was too shy: it didn’t pump up the conventional wisdom threats enough; it didn’t demand more money as stridently as it should, and it was too restrained in attempting to raid other parts of the defense budget to sustain the unsustainable acquisition budget.

The most obvious similarity of this report with the original DOD QDR is its meticulous avoidance of identifying the fundamental problems we face: namely, a post World War II largest ever defense budget that has bought us the smallest ever defense forces with the oldest ever equipment inventory in that time frame. While the report makes opportunistic references to this “train wreck,” it fails to even mention how we got there – under their leadership in large part.

Integral to the decades long decay has been the studious refusal of DOD leadership to permit itself to be informed on the past, present, and future consequences of its own decisions. Doing so would require a system that accurately and comprehensively tracks how money is spent in the Pentagon and managers who heed that information when it is provided. Two blandly worded but substantively devastating GAO reports, just out, remind us that DOD continues to not know the cost of what it buys and the cost to support what it buys. (Find them at http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-695 and http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-717.)

The “independent panel” makes some interesting points about changing DOD’s unaffordable pay and benefits system but then goes on to imply these savings should help float the hardware buying they crave. Nowhere is it suggested that the existing hardware path is every bit as unaffordable as the existing manpower path, nor that more money could possibly result in what it has bought up to now: shrinking, aging forces.

Of course, the panel makes recommendations to “reform” everything, but most of their suggestions talk platitudes without a hint of real change. A good example is the vapid recommendations in their “legislative reform package.” I could not help but laugh when I read the prescription for fixing Capitol Hill, where I worked for three decades: reorganize the appropriations subcommittees to embrace all national security bills in one place and “coordinate” the authorization process. Like the QDR and the “independent” review itself, this neither identifies nor addresses the problems.

Finally, the “independent panel” is startling in its aspirations for US behavior in the external world. It clearly believes the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute models for our future interaction with the world and should probably be extended as a mindset and behavior directed at countries and areas where there are functional governments and regional powers. It does so in a manner that seems to consider that path unremarkable and consistent with our behavior historically.

Of course, like minded advocates of business as usual in Congress and think tanks are swooning over this thicket of bathwater. Can the attempted water-boarding of the taxpayer using this swill be far off?

Have we not learned enough from recent history to recognize this report as an effort to change nothing?

The QDR is a farce for all the reasons that colleagues have here stated. The QDR is a negotiated document as are nearly all DoD instruments of exalted brooding. What can one expect of a document negotiated among the competing interests of the armed services and under the influence of contractors large and small? Such documents necessarily call for spending that protects those interests.

In the days when the war colleges were something other than second rate graduate schools, they used to teach a hierarchy of importance in national planning. Perhaps they still do. In that hierarchy, force structure and size were determined by national interest and strategy in the light of the best estimates available of real threats rather than threat estimates dished up by "tame" analysts belonging to the various interested parties. Such analysts produce work in the knowledge of "where their bread is buttered."

The study under discussion here seems little different in its essence than the QDR drill. High level chairmen, hordes of well paid consultants and panelists, service politicking for more, MORE, MORE. And buried in this process the assumption that the US is the world's hegemon, duty-bound to be prepared to fight everyone everywhere if imperial interest requires it. How can responsible, grown up people who understand our economic position think that such "planning'"has anything to do with reality?

I suggest that reaching a realistic view of our defense needs does not require gigantism in experimentation and commission building. Common sense points to something like the following.

1- Where are the threats? Jihadism, a few thousand medieval fanatics? China? Russia? Does anyone seriously think we would ever fight these countries in a conventional war in Europe or Asia? Nuclear proliferation? A challenge at sea that threatens American possessions and commercial sea lanes? Take your pick.

2 - Structure and size the force on the basis of our means and the threats, not on the basis of negotiations and interested bargaining.

3- Therefore, cut the conventional Army at least in half (including the Guard) Downstream manpower costs are enormous, especially in the context of a career force. Cut the Marine Corps back to one division equivalent and relieve them of the SOF mission that they don't want anyway. Go through these two armies with a fine toothed comb looking for things we no longer need. The service academic educational establishments are a good place to start. Civilian schooling would be mush cheaper and probable better. Keep all the cost-effective and useful bits; SOF, intelligence, area specialist training, etc.

4- Make the USAF smaller and more lethal. Push the development of unmanned combat and reconnaissance aircraft, more personnel savings await there. Look for overhead savings in the air force as well. Maintain the ability to "reach out and touch" those who could really does us harm.

5. Structure the Navy to protect the sea lanes, our shores and overseas territories. Power projection at sea seems an inevitable policy for a country flanked by the deep blue seas. At the same time we must guard against a sentimental attachment to old technology. Who can now see what the future of aircraft carriers may be?

The United State desperately needs to save money. Entitlement reform, expiration of unreasonable tax cuts, these are good places to find money for a healthy future prosperous America, but the defense establishment must be reduced on a rational basis to contribute to that future.

We sometimes attempt classical analogies here, a risky business. Nevertheless, It seems to me that America's situation today is somewhat like that of the Eastern Roman Empire in the time of Justinian. A declining economy, insufficient forces for the mission of re-conquest of Africa and other lost lands, a persistence in pursuing unrealistic goals, these these factors contributed to the long term decline of the Byzantine state.

Let us not follow that example.

U.S.military preeminence is not unaffordable. Indeed, at around 4.5 percent of GDP and less than 20 percent of federal spending it is a relatively cheap investment in international stability, the security of the free world, the safety of U.S. interests, the peace of the global commons and the suppress of extremism. The reality is that what is unaffordable is the welfare state. Just look at the cost growth projections for Social Security and Medicare/Medicare. Whining about the costs of national security is one way of avoiding the need to address the politically difficult problem of entitlements.

This being said, there is no question that DoD is an extremely inefficient organization. It has been very slow to adopt modern business practices, supply chain management methods of even enterprise resource planning systems. Some in DoD still tend to treat its private contractors as opponents rather than as, in effect, a coequal branch. Without the private sector, not only would DoD not have the platforms and weapon systems it needs but it could not even support its forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Defense Business Board, more than 300, 000 uniformed personnel perform commercial functions that should be done by defense civilians or, even better, private contractors. The private sector has repeatedly demonstrated that it can deliver improved outcomes or lower costs (sometimes even both) compared to reliance on government-based solutions. This is as true for the Post Office as it is for DoD.

Critics of the argument that the U.S. should maintain a position of global leadership and consequently of military preeminence must either make the case that the world is a relatively peaceful place or will become so in the next several decades or that the U.S. can safely give up its position of leadership. To argue the former is simply silly. According to recent press reports, NATO has begun once again to plan for the defense of its members against potential Russian aggression. North Korea sinks a South Korean patrol boat simply to garner attention.Iran threatens its neighbors and warns that it could close the Straits of Hormuz. China lays claim to the South China Sea. Al Qaeda is expanding operations into Somalia, Yemen and North Africa.

So, can the critics make the case that U.S leadership is not necessary, given the rising levels of danger? In its National Security Strategy and Quadrennial Defense Review the Obama Administration made a strong case both for U.S. global leadership and for military preeminence. Upon whom shall the U.S rely for maintaining international stability or regional security? When Great Britain withdrew from its commitments east of Suez in 1972, the U.S. was there to take up the burden. Whom would the critics nominate now? No one in their respective regions trusts Russia, China or Iran as regional hegemons. However, with strong U.S. presence and backing, local powers can establish effective and stable regional balances with those nations. As the QDR Independent Panel co-chaired by Stephen Hadley and William Perry concluded, "America cannot abandon a leadership role in support of its national interests. To do so will simply lead to an increasingly unstable and unfriendly global climate and eventually to conflicts America cannot ignore, which we must then prosecute with limited choices under unfavorable circumstances -- and with stakes that are higher than anyone would like."

Some critics would argue that if our friends and allies are not willing to spend what is necessary in their own defense we should not give them a free ride. This does not obviate the reality that should Europe, the Persian Gulf or East Asia fall under the sway of any regional hegemon the implications for the United States would be dire indeed. The reason we have significant forces deployed in Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region is not to serve the interests of others but rather to protect our own. It is much easier to deter threats to those interests and simultaneously protect friends and allies if we operate with them. If those countries reduce their defense expenditures and military capabilities the U.S may have to consider new ways of supporting collaborative defense efforts.

So, if the U.S. must display global leadership and for this to be successful must maintain military preeminence, the only remaining issue is can this preeminence be achieved at lower cost? Perhaps by restricting the kinds of missions which the military will be sent to perform. Or by changing the cost structure of the military including relying more on private contractors for logistics and sustainment, reducing personnel costs and even considering a mixed volunteer-draft system.

What we cannot do is reduce our qualitative advantages over prospective adversaries. The U.S. must continue to invest in cutting edge capabilities in air dominance, precision strike, ISR, ASW, missile defenses, cyber security and large-scale land warfare. So long as nuclear forces exist, we must ensure a deterrent force that is safe, security and credible. Critical supporting capabilities including aerial refueling, air and sea lift, intelligence and communications must also be maintained.

Another sterile exercise in military planning is about the last thing our impoverished national security debate needs. This latest plea for yet larger forces has the effect of making the QDR seem reasonable by comparison. Hadley/Perry is a Team A' challenge to Team A. Yes, it makes the usual noises about paying for the proposed expansion by cutting out waste and inefficiencies. Good luck! This specious line of reasoning has fallen flat for 50 years.

There is no Team B in the ring. For good reason. A meaningful alternative approach would have to contest the core assumptions about American security that are taken as fixed by of these two exhaustive yet strategically vapid exercises. Almost nobody in the mainstream of the foreign affairs community is doing that, despite some recent frittering around the edges of the once universal consensus on the criticality of victory in Afghanistan. So what we get are variations on the overarching theme of how best to prepare the country’s military for an open ended commitment to global American hegemony. Open ended in both time and space.

This is not strategic analysis; it is studied justification for projecting the status quo into the far future. To pretend otherwise is a disservice to the country’s political class– and, frankly, is less than honest. It is an approach that displays woeful ignorance of what actually is happening in the world and what is happening to the United States at home. It displays, too, a woeful inability to learn from experience – even when that experience is personal and recent.

We no longer can afford such indulgences.

Although there's much to approve in the Hadley-Perry report from a programmatic standpoint, it's regrettably as devoid of strategic logic as the QDR it critiques. In effect, it ends by arguing for more of everything, at a time when both economic and political constraints are pushing in precisely the opposite direction. That wouldn't be so bad if the report offered a convincing strategic rationale for increasing the level of national security investment despite those constraints. Unfortunately, apart from noting that the world remains a dangerous place and repeating the tired argument that it can't survive without American leadership, the report offers none.

Strategy is about making choices, which implies a willingness to refrain from investing where the aims don't justify the required commitment or simply are unlikely to be achievable at any reasonable level of commitment. As a debtor nation with an exploding deficit and little hope in the near term of correcting either condition, we have a special need to reconcile our ambitions with our resources. As I've pointed out elsewhere, during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, Great Britain reacted to analogous strategic circumstances by reconciling with traditional great power adversaries, abandoning maritime supremacy in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific to the U.S. and Japan respectively, and reorienting the British army from imperial policing to the threat of a continental war against a major modern adversary. She made those changes gradually, and in many cases grudgingly. But had she not so successfully reconciled her strategic commitments with her resources, today's Britons probably would be speaking German.

We're not Edwardian Britons. But we suffer from comparable strategic over-extension. I don't suggest that we abandon old friends or ignore new enemies. I do believe that it's past time to prioritize both. Personally, I find it incomprehensible that we're more willing to invest billions in South-central Asia than in Mexico, more willing to maintain U.S. ground forces in a South Korea perfectly capable of defending itself than to spend the same money to refurbish and expand dangerously declining naval capabilities, and more willing to expand our military presence abroad than to find alternative ways of managing a terrorist threat that I consider to be overblown in any case.

Those who would frame the issue as a contest between continued overseas engagement and irresponsible withdrawal trivialize the problem. Neither our prosperity nor our sense of responsibility would allow us to withdraw altogether from overseas involvement, including military involvement. But we have the right as well as the obligation to define for ourselves the terms of that engagement, and to restrict it -- and the military capabilities it underwrites -- to commitments that our resources are able to support.

The Perry-Hadley report, for all its detail, is a great disappointment. It betrays the continuing "suspension of disbelief" already painfully evident in the report the panel was created to critique: the Quadrennial Defense Review. Instead of bringing realism and discipline to defense planning, the report simply "doubles down" on the QDR, calling for even more forces and more spending. The report willfully avoids three pressing national security realities.

The first is our looming fiscal crisis, which JCS Chairman Mike Mullen has called "our biggest national security threat." The report simply waives this issue aside; DOD planning, it seems to argue, must be done outside this context, as if budgets and the need for restraint did not exist.

Second, the Perry-Hadley report, like the QDR, assumes that all military missions are a priority, all are urgent, and the forces must grow to perform all of them. From counter-insurgency/stabilization/occupation/nation-building on the one hand, to a massive expansion of the forces for conventional war/deterrence/allied reassurance on the other, the report calls for more mission expansion, and, by implication, for even more funding than the unprecedented level of defense spending we already have today. There is, here, no realistic assessment of the likelihood of challenges, no prioritization of missions, and no discrimination about US choices and interests.

Third, the report, like too many of our national security documents, assumes that US strategy should be driven by a Manichean world view, where threats around the globe are ever more present, dangerous, and challenging. While it pleads for a "whole of government" approach to our security, the focus of that "whole of government" is intended to pull all the US civilian architecture into the dark hole of perceived growing global violence and threat, to support military planning and deployment, focusing our civilian institutions on the way DOD should see the world.

The report is wrong on all three counts. The fiscal crisis is real, it poses serious, long-term threats to American well-being and our global position. The only solution, as already experienced from 1985 to 1998 (when we hit a surplus) is for all parts of federal spending and revenues to be on the table, including defense. Defense budgets are now as large as any of the means-tested entitlement programs, and more than 55% of discretionary spending. DOD budget planning has been undisciplined for more than ten years, leading to massive growth in defense overhead, a uniformed work force nearly half of which has never been deployed, many of whom are doing commercial functions, as the recent Defense Business Board interim report made clear. Hardware program costs are out of control, with most being well above or significantly above projections, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It is time for budgetary restraint and discipline. Even Secretary Gates recognizes this reality, though the very small savings he seeks through management, structural, and overhead reforms are too easy to achieve and unlikely to reform an undisciplined institution. Defense budget reductions would provide such discipline and focus to DOD that it badly needs. And outside realities - the deficit reduction focus and the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan - are making such reductions necessary, even inevitable.

Second, the commission seemed swayed by headline writers but not by reality. Conflict makes good headlines, but the reality is that the US has never been more secure or less vulnerable to existential threats. Its military is second to none, vastly superior in capability and technology relative to any global power, including China. Global conflict, moreover, for all the battle reports from Iraq, is down, not up, as are terrorist attacks. Outside of insurgents fighting the US military in Afghanistan, the world simply does not seem full of the insurgencies COIN doctrine was invented to fight.

Oddly, the high level of US security has stopped neither the QDR nor Perry-Hadley from arguing that we simply must expand the military to be the cutting edge of US global engagement, deterring threats, fixing fragile states, fighting insurgents, countering terrorists, building states, restoring economies and all of this on a global basis. There is no discrimination here; every threat seems equal, every challenge is an American problem.

Historically, only imperial statecraft has assumed that all threats and challenges are the same and that the most powerful state has responsibility for all of them. But for the United States, clearly, not all terrorists are alike; not all insurgents matter to us, and not all weak states need an American intrusion to fix them. A more normal, discriminating statecraft would make those distinctions and lay out some choices. Neither the QDR nor the Perry-Hadley report is discriminating; neither of them make the choices that are clearly open to us. The end result is a set of missions and forces that constitute little less than an open raid on the Treasury and the taxpayer, for no sum of money would ever be enough to meet the open-ended needs they describe.

Third, the report, like the QDR, betrays, sadly, an all-to-common reality of US strategic planning. It is all done from a military perspective, and has been since the Nitze containment analysis of the late 1940's. The challenges we face are all described as military challenges, and the missions of the military now continually expand to meet new challenges - from nation-building to public diplomacy to foreign assistance to advice on how to govern to solving the energy crisis to climate change. There seems to be no end of the mission list and no end to the role of the military. This is what Adm. Mullen was worried about when he warned of "the militarization of US foreign policy."

The Perry-Hadley report continues this tradition. It certainly endorses a strengthened civilian national security architecture, but it calls for this, in the very first instance, in order to deploy civilians alongside the military. This is the "Iraq-Afghanistan" fallacy, which now permeates US strategic planning - all future wars will look like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is important to be clear: in Iraq and Afghanistan the US intentionally invaded another country, in one case with a very large force, with the intent of taking down a regime. It then inherited the occupation of those countries, with minimal allied support, and found itself unready to be an occupying power. Unless the plan is to reproduce such invasions, take down other regimes, and inherit an occupation, the "whole of government" approach advocated by Perry-Hadley makes little sense. It is not clear where such invasions are likely, not clear any other country would welcome them (especially given the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences), and not clear the American people are prepared to support the continuation of such a policy.

Creating a civilian capability to execute such a policy, side-by-side with the US military, is a mistaken enterprise, both expensive and unnecessary. Instead, the strengthening of our civilian institutions should be focused on the broader problems of development and governance, which are civilian issues demanding civilian-led solutions. The military should only play a secondary, not a leading role, in such efforts, and only when needed, invited, and welcomed.

This issue is one that needs to be urgently addressed by State and USAID in the context of the forthcoming Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It involves strengthening the civilian institutions, while disciplining the defense institution to focus on its core missions and only the supporting role it ought to be offering civilian statecraft.

Perry-Hadley does not move the agenda forward; it is a step back from budget realities, from the urgent need for defense discipline, and from the real need for a civilian strategy for US engagement.