by Bob Kemper

Pentagon planners now conducting the second phase of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Defense Department's comprehensive plan for the future size, shape and scope of the U.S. military, are looking for ways to reduce big-ticket weapons systems and other programs associated with convention warfare to free up $60 billion that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said is needed to prepare for future threats like counterinsurgencies and smaller regional foes.

After conducting extensive studies of existing programs, strategies and weapons since the QDR was launched in April 2009, the Pentagon now must sort out how to pay for it all at a time when the defense budgets are expected to remain flat over the next five years. The double-digit annual increases in defense spending, the supplemental funding bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that added $167 billion for defense procurement and the ability to continue funding cutting-edge but high-risk weapon systems common over the last several years are all now fading. So Gates has ordered planners to find $12 billion a year between 2011 to 2015 to pay for programs he says are more relevant to the changing nature of threats faced by the United States at home and abroad.

The Pentagon's overall strategy has long been based on the notion that the U.S. military must be prepared to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously. But Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, said the changing threat environment is more likely to require the military to deal with one major war and several smaller regional contingencies, a shift in strategy that could fundamentally alter numerous programs and the need for some weapon systems.
 

The latest QDR also will address issues that past reviews, done every four years between 1997 and 2006, didn't have to accommodate or addressed only marginally. Top among some issues is climate change. The issue has long been a source of political and social debate, but for the first time the Pentagon is examining its national security implications, including food shortages, mass cross-border migration and pandemics that could follow in the wake of floods or droughts and destabilize governments.

The QDR is scheduled to go to Congress in February 2010 and will begin impacting defense budgets in 2011.