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Officials throughout the U.S. Defense Department have committed to the Pentagon’s new 10-year military strategy, giving it a chance to endure.
“I think they’re bought into it,” Michèle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, who is stepping down from her position Feb. 3, said during a Jan. 23 roundtable with reporters at the Pentagon.
“I think that they understand that the pieces fit together in a coherent whole and if you start picking off the pieces and renegotiate and then you start having defections ... that the whole thing will unravel and we will be left with something less than the sum of the parts; we will be left with a defense budget that does not adequately protect and advance the security interests of this country,” she said.
In early January, the Pentagon unveiled strategic guidance intended to direct how DoD will cut $487 billion from planned spending over the next decade.
The strategy calls for U.S. military operations to focus more on the Pacific region as counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan wind down.
Work on the strategy began last spring. Throughout the process, senior Pentagon leaders needed to fend off those who proposed spending cuts that met budget targets but did not adhere to the strategy.
“There were people in the corners during the comprehensive defense review that said: ‘Hey, look. I’ve got a number that adds up to $500 billion,’ ” Jay Rouse, senior strategist in the Joint Staff’s strategic plans and policy directorate, said at a Jan. 17 conference in Arlington, Va.
How did officials respond to those types of suggestions?
“Go away,” Rouse said they were told. “We don’t want to see any of that. We want to get our strategy right, then we’ll talk about what are the numbers.”
Flournoy, who has a wealth of career experience developing defense policy and has worked on quadrennial defense reviews, said development of the Pentagon’s new guidance relied more heavily on strategy than any process in which she had previously been involved.
“I have never seen strategy as actively used or consistently used as a touch point to sort of cast the deciding vote on key program and budget decisions,” Flournoy said. “There’s a lot more alignment, I think, now. I think because of the extent of the fiscal challenge, the size of the cuts, you had the people around the table really take this on from a more strategic perspective than a parochial perspective because the pain is going to be across the department.”
There was also substantial commitment to the process by senior DoD leadership, starting at the top with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. President Barack Obama became the first president to conduct a press briefing at the Pentagon on Jan. 5 when he announced the results of the new strategy review.
“[I]n my experience, this has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views,” Panetta said at the time.
On the same subject, Flournoy said, “I think what struck me about this strategic review was the degree of senior leader participation and buy-in, and that’s really a tribute to Secretary Panetta’s style, which is very, very inclusive.”
“The rule was, anybody who’s going to have a responsibility to execute this thing should be at the table when decisions are being made,” she said.
