Congress May Greet QDR With Skeptic’s Eye

When the U.S. Defense Department sends its latest Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress in early February, the report will be greeted by an unusually skeptical audience — the very lawmakers for whom it was written.

The House Armed Services Committee launched its own defense review this fall. Lawmakers feared that Pentagon chiefs would produce a defense review that calls for a military to fit the budgets they expect to receive rather than one designed to counter the threats the nation is likely to face.

Now committee members say they are better prepared than ever to challenge the QDR’s conclusions.

“We’ll now, finally, be in a position to dissect what the Pentagon puts forward and come up with an alternative if that’s necessary,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who is co-chairman of a Committee Defense Review, or CDR, panel on asymmetric and unconventional threats.

His panel examined issues such as cybersecurity and the defense requirements for satellites.

Meanwhile, Rep. Thelma Drake, R-Va., co-chaired a panel that focused on terrorism. “What we’re really doing is trying to identify where there are gaps” between the U.S. military’s capabilities and the threats it must be ready to confront, she said.

One gap that has caught lawmakers’ attention is “the size of special operations forces,” Drake said. “The wars we fight today are different from any wars we have fought before. More and more, they will be fought by special operations troops.”

Drake’s panel also examined how the military works jointly with other agencies that are involved in fighting the war on terrorism, such as the departments of Homeland Security and State, the Agency for International Development, the CIA and the FBI.

“It was clear to us right away that they don’t,” she said.

If the QDR doesn’t propose solutions to the lack of interagency “jointness,” the House Armed Services Committee is likely to, Drake said.

The House Armed Services Committee began its defense review in September by naming a “threat panel” to study future U.S. military needs based on real-world threats.

A month later, the committee assigned six smaller panels to look closely at the gaps between the identified threats and the U.S. military’s ability to respond to them. The panels covered threats ranging from rising regional powers to menacing terrorist organizations.

“The members will be much better educated” when the QDR report lands on their desktops, said an Armed Services Committee staffer. “So when the QDR says the military needs to do X, Y and Z, they will have their own opinions.”

“I think we will have a lot of recommendations that are unlikely to be in the QDR,” said Cooper. One is that the military needs to do a lot more to improve U.S. cybersecurity, he said.

During the CDR, lawmakers were warned about the Defense Department’s intentions in the QDR.

As the Pentagon wraps up its QDR, analysts and contributors to the effort downplay the likelihood that it will propose dramatic change.

That will to be left up to lawmakers.

“The committee is ready for bold thinking,” Cooper said. “We’ve seen very little in the way of bold thinking from the Pentagon.”