Pentagon Review Stresses Long-Term Strategy To Defeat Terror
07 February 2006
Quadrennial Review also addresses engagement with China, India, Russia
By Vince Crawley
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The Pentagon has released a four-year security strategy that focuses on new global capabilities, adapting the military to the information age and being prepared to wage a long-term fight against terrorist networks and militant extremism.
The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) also emphasizes working with international coalitions and helping to “shape choices of countries at strategic crossroads,” according to Pentagon briefing documents. In particular, the review names China, India and Russia as three countries with which the United States wants to work in constructive ways as their economies and global power grow.
“It is important to remember that we exist in an age of uncertainty and unpredictability,” Ryan Henry, the principal under secretary of defense for policy, said February 6. “We in the Defense Department feel fairly confident that our forces will be called on to be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they're currently not engaged. But we have no idea whatsoever of where that might be, when that might be or in what circumstances that they might be engaged.”
Henry -- along with Navy Rear Admiral Terry Blake, deputy director for resources and acquisition on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff -- briefed international journalists at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center in Washington. The QDR, required by law every four years, was released February 3 and sent to Congress on February 6 as part of President Bush’s proposed $2.7 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2007, which begins October 1.
The QDR sets military spending priorities into the next decade. The fiscal year2007 budget proposal includes some QDR priorities, “but the budgets in fiscal 2008 and beyond will more fully reflect programmatic changes in the QDR,” according to Defense Department briefing documents.
The QDR “has two major themes,” Henry said. “One is that we have to change the capability of our forces and what they can do,” he said, and the second theme ”is that we have to change the way that we do business. … We need to move from an industrial-age organization to an information-age organization.” (See related article.)
The Defense Department has focused on four capability areas:
· Defeat terrorist networks,
· Defend the U.S. homeland in depth,
· Prevent acquisition or use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and
· Shape choices of countries at strategic crossroads.
In the past, the Defense Department has structured itself to respond to a specific array of threats. The new “capabilities-based” approach describes a broader range of tasks that U.S. military personnel will have to perform.
“And as we look to the future, we do not do threats-based planning anymore because we're not in the world we were in in the Cold War, where you could look at our threats, predict where they were going to be and try to jump out in front of them,” Henry said.
Instead, he said, the four new capabilities areas have given Pentagon planners new insights and lessons on how best to use U.S. forces around the world and in partnership with other branches of the U.S. government as well as with the governments of other nations.
“Since the world is uncertain and unpredictable, we can't tell where our forces are going to need to be used, and so we have to develop capabilities that will give the adaptability and agility to meet any sort of challenge they might face,” Henry said. Planners also are recognizing the need “to build capability within partnerships,” he added.
The military forces of other nations would be more suited than U.S. forces in a great many global situations, he said. Not only can other nations perform important military tasks for less money -- “because we tend to have a very cost-intensive force” -- but also, “many times, they'll be able to do it more effectively, too, because they'll understand the local language, the local customs. They'll be culturally adept and be able to get things accomplished that we can't do.”
“ANTICIPATORY MEASURES,” PARTNERSHIPS
Pentagon planners also have learned “the benefit of anticipatory measures,” Henry said. “We want to be able to do things that will prevent problems from becoming crises and crises from becoming conflicts.”
The Pentagon’s QDR report specifically names “three countries that we think are at strategic crossroads that we're interested in being able to work with on being able to make the right choices,” Henry said.
One is China, “which we want to encourage to successfully manage their rise as they become a world economic power and also to take on the geopolitical role of being a constructive partner in a community of nations,” he said.
India “represents the world's largest democracy” and the “second-largest Muslim population in the world,” Henry said. “And we think that we have a lot of common interests with them, and we are interested in developing a strategic partnership with them.”
The third country is Russia, he said: “We want to help it to be able to use democratic processes, representative processes, a certain degree of transparency, and not drift toward authoritarianism.”
The Bush administration and the Defense Department increasingly are using the term “the long war” to describe the long-term goals of the War on Terror. The phrase first was used commonly General John Abizaid, the Arabic-speaking chief of the U.S. Central Command, which coordinates U.S. military action in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and much of Southwest Asia.
President Bush also spoke of a long-term engagement strategy in his January 31 State of the Union Address. (See related article.)
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of a “long war” against terror while addressing an annual security conference in Munich, Germany, on February 4. (See related article.)
“When we refer to 'the long war,'” Henry said, “that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades.” However, that does not mean U.S. forces will be engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades or in large numbers indefinitely, he said.
Rather, “there are large swaths of the world” where U.S. forces are operating on a much less massive but no less important scale. These include missions in the Philippines, in the Horn of Africa and in the Pan-Sahel region of northwest Africa, among other regions, he said.
“There are a number of different places where there are activities, where terrorist elements are out there and that we need to counter them,” Henry said. “We need to be able to attack and disrupt their networks.”
“But we also, in a much broader scope, need to counter the ideological support that they have,” he said. “That’s not an area where the Defense Department has a lead, but we support the State Department in that endeavor, along with all our coalition partners and, most especially, the moderate Muslims in the area who are really the victims of this terrorist extremism that exists.”
The QDR report and supporting materials are available on the Defense Department Web site.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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