November 21, 2000

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: THOMAS DONNELLY, Deputy Director

SUBJECT: Defense

During the last days of an administration, it is not uncommon for departing officials to express pangs of remorse about the policy problems they are leaving behind them. Normally these are empty gestures; witness the lament of retiring Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters several weeks ago that the Pentagon needed an additional $100 billion per year to carry out its assigned missions.

Occasionally, however, such final gestures reflect not remorse but professional objectivity and thus can have greater substantive impact. One such example can be found in the recent report of the National Defense University’s Quadrennial Defense Review 2001 Working Group (on the web at http://www.ndu.edu/inss/spa/qdr.html). The report represents a settling of accounts on the part of Michèle Flournoy, who served throughout the Clinton Administration in the Defense Department’s strategy and resources secretariat and had a large hand in shaping the previous defense review in 1997. Although Flournoy is about to leave the government to take up a post at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the working group’s report, prepared over the past year, has provided an uncompromising framework for facing up to the tough choices on defense that confront the incoming administration.

The report begins by acknowledging the large and growing gap between U.S. security strategy and military resources, demanding that next year’s QDR accept “the responsibility to address mismatch between strategy and resources estimated at $30-50 billion per year.” The Flournoy report also makes it clear that the incoming administration must pay the price for the neglect of the Clinton years. “The magnitude of the current strategy-resources mismatch, and the damaging consequences it will produce over time, demand substantial action in one or more of three key areas,” it says. “This fundamental set of choices - spend more, cut costs, or do less - might be called the iron triangle of the 2001 QDR, and it will require substantial political will and leadership on the part of the new administration to address.”
Given that internal reforms alone cannot generate savings of the kind needed to appreciably close the strategy-resources gap, the true choice is between spending more for defense or retreating from America’s role as global superpower. As a long-serving Clinton-era defense official, Michele Flournoy came to know perhaps better than anyone the constraints of the “iron triangle.” It is somehow fitting -- if also ironic -- that her pre-QDR working group may also provide a way for her successors to free the U.S. military from its death-like grip.