Politics might trump massive Defense review

As top Pentagon officials craft their sweeping quadrennial review of military capabilities and strategies, their biggest hurdle to implementing any plan might be waiting across the river on Capitol Hill, a former Senate senior defense budget analyst and others warn.

Pentagon leaders need to worry about laying the groundwork to build support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers can change statutes and alter weapons-system funding requests to deter the Pentagon from making many of its recommended changes, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate Budget Committee analyst who is now senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information.

With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the center of the much-anticipated review and keeping major conclusions to a core group of key advisers, Congress has been largely shut out of the process, as it was during two similar reviews in 1997 and 2001.

Wheeler, speaking Friday at a panel discussion on the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, predicted that with the budget environment becoming increasingly constrained, Rumsfeld's blueprint for restructuring national defense might prompt a congressional backlash when it arrives on Capitol Hill in February. "The relationship between Congress and Rumsfeld is pretty poisonous," Wheeler said.

Cindy Williams, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Programs, cautioned that lawmakers will not necessarily negate all of the findings in the review. But "certainly Congress holds the power of the purse," she observed.

The quadrennial review is mandated by Congress. While it requires Pentagon civilian leaders to consult with the department's top brass, it does not require Defense officials to reach out to Capitol Hill.

Earlier this year, the House Armed Services Committee decided to get involved indirectly by launching its own study in tandem with the Pentagon's quadrennial review. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., has said his panel's months-long review is intended to complement the Pentagon exercise and better prepare lawmakers to evaluate the department's findings.

But Wheeler said the two reviews strike him as a "competitive process" that involve little or no back-and-forth between the committee and the Pentagon. As such, the congressional review ultimately might arm lawmakers with the background information they need to keep assembly lines running on any pricey programs the Pentagon targets for cancellation.

It "looks to me like a rear-guard exercise for systems," Wheeler said.

Williams said, however, that the committee's review might not just be a parochial political maneuver to shield favored systems from cancellation. It might also reflect a concern on Capitol Hill that the review is so much up to Rumsfeld's personal views that the final version might contain little input from the military services and combatant commanders, she added.