Summary
Maintaining the U.S. military’s global preeminence is vital to protect American interests and promote American values. Yet, in order to sustain U.S. military pre-eminence in an emerging strategic environment characterized by new threats and constrained resources, the Department of Defense (DOD) will need to organize and operate America’s armed forces in new ways. The reality of constrained defense budgets presents DOD with an opportunity to adopt reforms that will make the U.S. military more effective as well as less expensive. Such reforms will ensure that the U.S. military remains the world’s pre-eminent fighting force at a sustainable cost to American taxpayers.
In early 2012, DOD released new strategic guidance and a corresponding budget reflecting $487billion in cuts over 10 years as imposed by the 2011Budget Control Act. The guidance directs the U.S. military to prioritize the Asia-Pacific and greater Middle East. These are the correct regional priorities for the U.S. military, as we argued in our October 2011 report, “Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity.”
However, the Pentagon still has not enacted the types of reforms that we believe are necessary to sustain U.S. military pre-eminence into the future. Too many DOD structures, processes, programs and operational concepts are legacies of the past, which create unnecessary redundancies, waste valuable resources and encourage unproductive competition among the services rather than competition. These practices are no longer acceptable in the current fiscal environment.
In this report, we argue that DOD should make numerous policy changes to achieve sustainable pre-eminence. While most studies focus primarily on either strategic ends or budgetary means, this report concentrates more on operation always, the connective tissue that links goals to resources. Our recommendations rely on judgments about both security threats and available resources, the inseparable elements of any practical strategy.
PDF