Choices in Defense

The bills for the Pentagon's expanded role over the last decade are fast coming due. The strains on the services, as reflected in recruiting and retention shortfalls and flagging readiness indicators, have been showing for years. The new administration will soon face key decisions about national military strategy, missile defense and the future of hugely expensive weapons-decisions that will reverberate for years to come. And if that isn't pressure enough, the Pentagon's current spending plans outstrip the agency's annual budget by billions of dollars each year, making those choices all the harder. For the first time in more than a decade, DoD will be forced to make real trade-offs in its planning. No longer can the department maintain forces to fight two wars simultaneously and provide peacekeeping troops on demand anywhere, any time and build a national missile defense system and buy a host of new weapons, including three new types of fighter aircraft that together are expected to top $300 billion.

Plenty has been said about how DoD could be structured and equipped to best respond to conflict in this uncertain world. The Pentagon itself has conducted or commissioned several major reviews of defense posture: The 1991 Base Force, the 1993 Bottom-Up Review, the 1993 Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces; the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 1997 National Defense Panel all made specific recommendations for changing the size and shape of the military forces. If those blue-ribbon reports don't provide the new administration with enough food for thought, more are in the works. Next month, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, chaired by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, will weigh in with a final report on a new national security structure. And by Sept. 30, as required by law, the Pentagon will submit another Quadrennial Defense Review.

Michele Flournoy, project director of the National Defense University's Quadrennial Defense Review 2001 Working Group, an independent panel established by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to frame the QDR debate, best summed up the dilemma facing policy-makers when she wrote, "The magnitude of the current strategy-resources mismatch, and the damaging consequences it will produce over time, demand substantial action." In short, the new administration will have to "spend more, cut costs or do less," as Flournoy says, and probably some combination of all three.

Personnel Reform Is Critical

The best guidance for the new administration-and the political cover for making difficult choices-may come from the bipartisan Hart-Rudman commission next month. The commission was established in 1999 to provide the most comprehensive review of national security since the 1947 National Security Act. Its scope is the entire military, intelligence and diplomatic establishment. Some defense experts anticipate the panel will make sweeping recommendations for restructuring the State and Defense Departments and the intelligence agencies.

But the new administration will probably have to chart its own course to solve a seemingly more mundane problem if it is to seriously address shortfalls in the national security establishment: personnel reform. Almost completely lacking in the debates about national security strategy and military reform is a serious discussion of the personnel crisis in government, and in particular, in the military services.

"The single most important issue regarding the future of the nation's security rests in attracting and retaining sufficient numbers of qualified people to serve in government," says Harlan Ullmann, a defense expert and member of a bipartisan group assembled by the RAND research firm to produce a national security action plan for the President-elect. The military must reform its "up or out" personnel policies for service members and it must articulate a compelling reason to serve. If the Pentagon cannot recruit and retain sufficient numbers of men and women with the right skills, the viability of the all-volunteer force will become questionable, he says.

In particular, the services need to rethink how they treat highly skilled people-from the low-ranking troops who are so often tapped to swab the decks or sweep the barracks to senior officers forced to retire just as they are coming into their intellectual prime-says Ullmann. The services need to look at ways of attracting people in mid-career, and allowing people with valuable skills to continue to serve after they have been passed over for promotion. "This requires a serious cultural readjustment," he says.

The services' personnel systems were designed when there were fewer economic opportunities in the civilian world and when fewer troops were married, and when those who were married had spouses content to forgo careers and adopt the nomadic life of military families. Times have changed, and so must the services, Ullmann says. "If we don't start dealing with this right now, I'm not sure how we're going to manage in the future."