PRESIDENT BUSH SUBMITS DEFENSE BUDGET TO CONGRESS
President George W. Bush sent his $439.3 billion defense budget request for fiscal year (FY) 2007 to Congress February 6. The proposed budget represents a 7 percent increase over the FY 2006 budget and incorporates findings from the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review.
The budget invests in four priority areas: irregular warfare operations, homeland defense, maintenance of military superiority and support for military personnel and their families.
The Army won the biggest increases in the budget. Included in the DoD’s funding are the following:
• An increase in the number of active duty special operations forces battalions of 33 percent and expansion of psychological operations and civil affairs personnel by one-third.
• Establishment of a special operations force unmanned aerial vehicle squadron.
• Expanded language training for special operations and intelligence units and an increase in language training, pay and recruitment incentives for members with language skills.
• Continued funding to complete conversion of 48 Army regular combat brigades to 70 brigade combat teams.
• $3.7 billion for the Army’s Future Combat Systems, with major investments in unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles and battlefield command and communications systems.
• An expanded unmanned aerial reconnaissance force to increase intelligence-gathering capabilities and ensure around-the-clock, real-time intelligence.
• Improved worldwide communications through the transformational satellite that will extend high bandwidth satellite capabilities to deployed forces worldwide and deliver eight times the speed and data the military can now transmit and receive.
• Enhanced command and control communications.
• Continued funding for the AH-64 Apache, CH-47 Chinook and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
• A 2.2 percent increase in military base pay above the fiscal year 2006 level.
• A $263 million provision toward targeted pay increases for selected warrant officers and mid-grade and senior enlisted members, and $1.9 billion for retention bonuses and incentives.
• A 5.9 percent increase in the active duty basic housing allowance and elimination of all inadequate military housing in the continental United States.
• Construction of 48 new barracks projects for enlisted members, at $1.5 billion; eight new child development centers, at $68 million; and four dependent education school projects, at $77 million.
• A $39 billion investment in health care for servicemembers and their families.
In addition, the administration also sent to Congress a $140 billion supplemental spending request for this year to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as hurricane relief and flu preparations. The wars would get $70 billion with an extra $50 billion as an “emergency allowance.” Hurricane relief would get $18 billion, with $2.3 billion for flu preparation.
NO NG CUTS
The U.S. Army will not reduce the National Guard’s size and strength. “If they recruit 350,000, the funding is there,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, told reporters at a news conference February 2.
Earlier, the Army announced that it intended to ask Congress to approve funding for the National Guard and Reserve at the existing level of 317,000, rather than the 350,000 authorized by Congress. The Army still plans to cut the Guard’s combat brigades from 34 to 28, replacing the inactivated brigades with six support brigades. The reduction in brigades is a result of a personnel and equipment shortfall exacerbated by the war in Iraq when the Guard’s limited amount of equipment was moved there for rotating units to use.
The Army’s announcement of Guard reductions set off a firestorm reaction in Congress, the Guard and from governors across the country. Seventy-five senators from both sides of the aisle sent Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a letter stressing their opposition to the planned cuts. A resolution was introduced in the Senate by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) calling for more details from the Pentagon. On February 3, state and territorial governors sent a letter to President George W. Bush opposing any reductions and reminding the President that the National Guard makes up nearly 50 percent of the combat forces in Iraq, the majority of the soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula and the Balkans, and 90 percent of the troops on the ground responding to Hurricane Katrina.
QDR FOR THE “LONG WAR.”
The Defense Department submitted its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Report to Congress on February 6. The QDR is a comprehensive review of the military which charts the way the military will fight. The report is designed to capture the best contemporary thinking, planning and decisions during this period of profound change. The QDR “represents a snapshot in time of [DoD’S] strategy for defense of the nation and the capabilities needed to effectively execute that defense.”
The QDR focuses on what the Pentagon now calls the “long war”—the war against violent extremists who use terrorism as a weapon. First coined by Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, the term refers to the global war against terrorism but it also implies the long-term challenge of the war and the need for political and economic measures to win. President George W. Bush first used the term during his recent State of the Union Address.
The 92-page report shifts military capabilities away from fighting the Cold War model of nation-states with conventional forces to fighting terrorism and other nontraditional, asymmetric threats. It also will shape the defense structure to better support and speed up reorientation to these new threats.
The report’s four main goals are to:
• Defeat terrorist networks.
• Defend the homeland in depth.
• Shape the choices of countries at strategic crossroads.
• Prevent hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction.
The QDR recognizes the continued need to defend against conventional threats, conduct humanitarian missions at home and abroad, and help U.S. allies and partners develop their own defense capabilities. It incorporates lessons learned from operational experiences from Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, it incorporates experiences gained in other operations associated with the long war against terrorism in places like the Philippines, Horn of Africa, Georgia and North Africa.
The QDR addresses the DoD’s shift to meet the new strategic environment, including the following changes:
• From single-focused threats to multiple complex challenges.
• From nation-states threats to decentralized network threats from non-state enemies.
• From conducting war against nations to conducting war in countries providing safe havens for terrorists where we are not at war.
• From “one size fits all” deterrence to tailored deterrence for rogue powers, terrorist networks and near-peer competitors.
• From responding after a crisis starts (reactive) to preventive actions so problems do not become a crisis (proactive).
• From a focus on kinetics to a focus on effects.
• From static defense, garrison forces to mobile, expeditionary operations.
• From underresourced, standby forces (hollow units) to fully equipped and fully manned forces (combat ready forces).
• From exposed forces forward to reaching back into the continental United States to support expeditionary forces.
• From an emphasis on ships, guns, tanks and planes to focus on information, knowledge and timely, actionable intelligence.
• From massing forces to massing effects.
• From set-piece maneuver and mass to agility and precision.
• From single service acquisition systems to joint port-folio management.
• From broad-based industrial mobilization to targeted commercial solutions.
• From moving the user to the data to moving the data to the user.
• From fragmented homeland assistance to integrated homeland security.
• From Department of Defense solutions to interagency approaches.
In addition, the QDR promotes a wartime construct of fighting multiple, overlapping wars and a tailored force to deter various enemy elements.
The report focuses on a lighter force that operates with allies with a more efficient defense operation supporting it. It promotes more special operations, intelligence gathering, language and cultural capabilities, improved communications and enhanced security-cooperation activities.
Away from the battlefield, DoD will fund a $1.5 billion initiative over the next five years to develop broad-spectrum medical countermeasures against the threat of genetically engineered biological terrorist agents here at home. It will also conduct full-scale civil-military exercises to improve interagency planning in the event of an attack on the United States.
DoD will continue to develop follow-on roadmaps for areas of particular emphasis in the QDR including department institutional reform and governance, irregular warfare, building partnership capacity, strategic communication and intelligence.
For the full text of the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, go to http://www.defenselink.mil/qdr/ and click on QDR image.
For the full text of the FY 2007 Defense Budget, go to http://www.dod.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2007/index.html.
NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR WAR
The Department of Defense released its national strategy for the war on terrorism on February 6. It outlines strategic guidance for military activities and operations and was developed to prevent conflicting views within the DoD that were hurting cooperation and efficiency.
The plan emphasizes that violent extremism, in its various forms, is the primary threat to the United States, its allies and interests, and that the global war on terrorism is a war to preserve ordinary people’s ability to live as they choose.
The plan explains that the U.S. strategy for the war is to continue to lead an international effort to deny extremist networks the components they need to operate and survive.
To execute this strategy, the military will focus on three areas:
• Expanding international partnerships to combat violent extremists.
• Denying terrorists the use of weapons of mass destruction.
• Institutionalizing the strategy against violent extremism, both domestically and internationally.
The military also has a crucial role in establishing conditions that counter terrorist ideologies. This includes providing security, giving humanitarian assistance, maintaining contact with foreign military leaders and considering how operations can affect ideological support for terrorists.