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Budgeting for empire: ambitions outweigh strategy.

Article Excerpt
One might think that given all the stresses and strains on the U.S. military caused by fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the Defense Department would at least be doing its utmost to grasp the geostrategic realities of the day. But the Pentagon's last Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), released on February 6, 2006 showed that American defense plans continue to fail engagements with reality. While the QDR was big on rhetoric, it was woefully short on action.

The QDR is something the Pentagon goes through every four years. Congress requires the Secretary of Defense to:

Conduct a comprehensive examination (to be known as a "quadrennial defense review") of the national defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements of the defense program and policies of the United States with a view toward determining and expressing the defense strategy of the United States and establishing a defense program for the next 20 years.

But instead of taking the opportunity to rethink the U.S. military position in the world, the latest version of the QDR continues to position the U.S. as the global policeman, funds outdated weapon systems, and fails to readjust the mission of the military to meet the real threats of the 21st century.

The "New" Vision of Defense

Four years of war against Islamic extremists only persuaded Donald Rumsfeld (who drew up the plans when he was Defense Secretary) to continue to maintain every conventional weapons system in the pipeline. Gone is the talk about canceling major purchases to direct money to a smaller, lighter, faster, high-tech force.

Despite all the spin about how the recent QDR was fully managed by the Rumsfeld Pentagon from start to finish, many think that with much of his time taken up with the Iraq War, Secretary Rumsfeld was far less involved in this QDR than he was in 2001, when the last review was conducted. This time, he delegated much of the decision making to his aides and to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England.

According to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the QDR had four specific priorities:

1. Defeating violent extremists;

2. Defending our homeland;

3. Helping countries at strategic crossroads; and,

4. Preventing terrorists and dangerous regimes from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. (1)

The problem is that none of these missions are military. As one observer noted:

Military missions entail defending or conquering territory, or destroying the military capabilities of potential aggressors. Military forces are not organized, equipped or trained to "defeat terrorist extremism," much less to "help shape the choices of countries." Those are jobs for police, intelligence services or diplomats, and nobody in his right mind would, for example, give...

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