Pentagon Review Calls for No Big Changes - New York Times

Pentagon Review Calls for No Big Changes - New York Times

Pentagon Review Calls for No Big Changes
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — A comprehensive military strategy review once billed as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's architecture for revamping the armed forces eliminates no major weapon systems and calls for only incremental change in other priorities, according to Pentagon officials, outside advisers and independent analysts.

The plan, which is due to be made public next week along with the Bush administration's fiscal 2007 budget, does contain some significant shifts like calls for training thousands of additional special operations troops and for building futuristic weapons to defeat terror groups and potential new adversaries like China.

But initial hopes by Defense Department civilians to use the yearlong reassessment, which takes place every four years, to force far-reaching changes in spending priorities have not materialized, in part, analysts said, because of resistance by the military services.

With much of his time taken up with managing the war in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld was far less involved in this year's review than he was in 2001, when the last review was conducted, officials and analysts said. He delegated much of the decision-making to aides and to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England.

In addition, some of the Pentagon civilian leadership's more innovative ideas were rejected because they were judged too expensive or ineffective by the many teams of the officers and analysts who have been combing through drafts of the blueprint for the past year.

Even Mr. Rumsfeld played down expectations on Wednesday that the review would produce monumental shifts, calling the document "a way point along a continuum of change that began some years past and will continue some years hence."

From the outset, the administration itself raised high expectations for the review, and the theme of "transformation" came to be something of a mantra in the Pentagon's corridors. Some said the fruits of the review might be as lasting a legacy of the Rumsfeld years as the outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ryan Henry, a top Pentagon planning official, declared last fall that the effort, instead of the usual "periodic tool of refinement," would be the "fulcrum of transition to a post-9/11 world."

Instead, by keeping alive some programs whose projected costs have soared in recent years like the F/A-22 fighter, the Army's Future Combat Systems and the Navy's DD(X) destroyer, the review has raised questions about how more exotic weapons and capabilities that Mr. Rumsfeld believes are vital to fight terror groups and other unconventional foes can fit into future military budgets.

Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who participated in the review, said there was a widespread expectation that the review "would find the Defense Department confronting some tough decisions."

"In a sense, a lot of these tough choices are kicked down the road," Mr. Krepinevich said.

The essence of Mr. Rumsfeld's agenda for the military is to make the armed services more mobile and lethal, more capable of dealing with emerging threats from terror groups and insurgents, including weapons of mass destruction, while still able to dominate conventional battlefields. His imprint is plainly visible in decisions like the move to expand the number of special operations troops trained in psychological warfare and civil affairs by 3,700.

Mr. Rumsfeld also has long been worried that the armed forces lack the capability to strike quickly anywhere in the world with conventional weapons.

The review, known formally as the Quadrennial Defense Review, or Q.D.R., calls for doubling the procurement of attack submarines, from one a year to two, by 2012, and arming submarine-carried Trident missiles with conventional warheads.

But beyond such relatively small-scale initiatives, the review generally is better at defining the new threats the armed forces must deal with than precisely laying out how to defeat them, military analysts said. In the past few days and weeks, the conclusions of the review have been widely previewed in Washington.

"While the thrust of the document is that traditional threats are receding and unconventional threats are growing, you don't get the impression that they know what to do about it," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, a research organization in Washington.

Even small-scale initiatives in the plan could be derailed in Congress. A proposal to reduce the number of National Guard combat brigades from 34 to 28 has run into opposition from governors and lawmakers, who have argued that reducing the Guard's combat capability at a time it is playing a substantial role in Iraq and Afghanistan does not make sense.

Pentagon aides say the idea is to consolidate often underequipped and undermanned Guard units, increasing their effectiveness.

One reason this year's review did not make more far-reaching changes seems to be that the conflict in Iraq prevented Mr. Rumsfeld from devoting as much attention to this review as he did in the past.

"In 2001, you couldn't make a major decision without Secretary Rumsfeld in the room," said a former Pentagon official, Michelle Flournoy, who took part in the last review. "This time, he didn't take the hands-on role that he did in 2001."

Mr. Rumsfeld delegated much of the daily work to his aides and to Mr. England, a former weapons industry executive who was Navy secretary before succeeding Paul D. Wolfowitz in April. Several analysts who followed the process closely said that when Mr. England took over the review in early summer, he helped a process that was adrift but that he shied away from far-reaching changes in the priorities of the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines.

When Mr. Rumsfeld's aides did try to pare down the services' wish lists, they were often outmaneuvered, analysts said. The Air Force was able to defeat a proposal to require it and the Navy to buy the same basic version of the Pentagon's next-generation fighter plane, an idea proposed as a cost-savings measure.

But Air Force officials argued that its needs differed substantially from the Navy's, and that it would end up needing costly modifications to any common design, said Mr. Thompson of the Lexington Institute.

"Analysis played a key role, and a lot of times the analysis did not support a lot of trendy ideas," Mr. Thompson said.