Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a longtime defense analyst here, noted that Rumsfeld has the advantage, unusual among recent secretaries of defense, of having already gone through one QDR as Pentagon leader. His experience, combined with current budget pressures and Congress's tendency to defer to military judgments in wartime, offer Rumsfeld an opportunity to use the QDR to drive for more fundamental transformation, Krepinevich said.
"For a secretary of defense who wants to change things, this is about as good as it gets," said Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The question is, will Don Rumsfeld pull the trigger or not?"
Budget shifts could affect Air Force procurement of the F/A-22 Raptor.
(Adrin Snider -- AP)
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A set of proposed military budget cuts for fiscal 2006, reported earlier this month, was cited by several involved in the QDR planning as a harbinger of the emerging shift. The recommended cuts, totaling about $55 billion over the next six years, would affect some of the most prized high-tech weapons of the Air Force and Navy: The Air Force would get fewer advanced F/A-22 fighter planes and C-130J transport aircraft, and the Navy would see trims in its aircraft carrier force and planned purchases of a next-generation destroyer and Virginia-class nuclear submarines.
By contrast, the Army would receive an additional $25 billion for restructuring aimed at breaking down its large divisions into more mobile and flexible "modular" brigades and staffing them with more military police, civil affairs soldiers, psychological operations specialists, and other capabilities for post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction operations.
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said he had reviewed the draft QDR guidance and considers it an endorsement by Pentagon leaders of the direction in which he has started to take the Army.
"I see no inconsistency in what we're putting together and the . . . way they see the future, let me put it that way," he said in a brief interview with several reporters.
The Navy's top officer also has publicly backed the need for "a new strategic construct." In a Jan. 11 speech to the Surface Navy Association, Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, said building forces only to deal with major combat operations "is the incorrect approach."
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon has conducted several major policy reviews attempting to come up with an effective substitute for its earlier focus on combating a single superpower adversary. During the Clinton administration, the Pentagon adopted a model that called for U.S. forces to be capable of fighting not one global war but two major regional conflicts "nearly simultaneously." This was meant to deal with the possibility that U.S. troops could be engaged in wars in the Middle East and Korea.
The Bush administration, in its first year, expanded this concept into something that came to be known as "1-4-2-1."
The "1" called for maintaining enough forces to protect the U.S. homeland, a reflection of the heightened sensitivity to domestic security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The "4" meant the United States needed to be ready to conduct smaller-scale peacetime operations in as many as four areas.
The "2-1" was a variation on the Clinton model. It required shaping U.S. forces sufficiently to "swiftly defeat" aggression in overlapping major conflicts while preserving the option to achieve "decisive victory" in one through regime change or occupation.
But within days of completion of this force-sizing construct in the autumn of 2001, the United States found itself fighting in Afghanistan, a war that had not been envisioned. Nor has the construct adequately provided for today's protracted war on terrorism and the prolonged rotation of Army and Marine forces into and out of Iraq.
To help determine what force changes to make in Bush's second term, Pentagon officials are using a "quad chart" devised last year to show four types of warfare: traditional, irregular (such as insurgencies), catastrophic (such as chemical or biological attack), and disruptive (such as sabotage of U.S. electrical grids).
"This QDR will be looking at how you mitigate risks in these four areas," said Clark Murdock, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who is a consultant on the QDR. "It also will look at where we have overmatch capabilities" -- meaning more than we probably need -- "and where we might be willing to take increased risks" by shifting resources.
A central challenge of the process, several people said, will be striking the right balance between attempting to fix immediate problems in Iraq and preparing adequately for tomorrow's challenges.
"We believe there are some things we can do which would have immediate, beneficial impact on the war, but they also could leave us better prepared for the longer term," Thomas said. "It's not a zero-sum competition."
