US Defence review calls for rebalancing to deal with multiple threats
Updated
The United States Defence department has outlined a strategy for what it calls 'rebalancing' its force structure to respond to burgeoning sources and types of threats. The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review says conventional wars are still on it's agenda but addressing non-conventional threats is to be given much more attention.
Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speakers: Michelle Flournoy is U-S Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Dr Ron Huisken, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Australian National University
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MOTTRAM: The Quadrennial Defence Review is a massive undertaking. It engages hundreds of often competing interests as the Pentagon seeks to define ends and to align them with ways and means. And looking out from 2010, the review lays bare the multi-layered and often unpredictable security landscape America's military will have to be prepared for.
FLOURNOY: We argue that the international system is being reshaped by a number of factors. Rising powers, continued proliferation, uneven rates of development and integration, rising demand for resources, rapid urbanisation and other trends that can spark conflict or state failure.
MOTTRAM: Michelle Flournoy is U-S Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and on the release of the review earlier this week, the Q-D-R as it's known, she addressed a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in Washington.
FLOURNOY: And globalisation continues to lower barriers for a wider range of actors to acquire sophisticated technologies that in the last century would only have been available to a few.
MOTTRAM: The QDR wants defence to fill gaps in dealing with non-conventional threats .. in the cyber realm, in space but also on the battlefield, where Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed just how poorly prepared the U-S has been in everything from dealing with insurgency to coping with cultural difference.
First in a list of four priorities though, the review says the U-S must prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Doctor Ron Huisken, a security specialist from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, has been studying the review. He predicts those wars most likely set a pattern for the U-S.
HUISKEN: My instinct would be to say that future uses of U-S forces are more likely to be in relatively messy protracted situations like Iraq and Afghanistan than big but relativesly short state-on-state engagements.
MOTTRAM: But while the review seeks to push more resources to preparing for the unconventional, it doesn't abandon the need to prepare for the conventional. Ron Huisken again.
HUISKEN: You just quoted that quite arresting sentence in the QDR which talks about an indefinite number of simultaneous engagements around the world. But in there, the U-S military is told we still have to sustain the capability to conduct two major operations at the same time. So even that old contingency survives if you like. The post-Cold War world hasn't unravelled yet to the extent that they can't imagine if not two conflicts in regions arising by accident, the more likely scenario is that the second one would erupt precisely because they thought that the U-S was pre-occupied with the first one.
MOTTRAM: The line about the issue of the collapse of a WMD armed state being among "our most troubling concerns", that presumably refers most likely to Pakistan?
HUISKEN: I think most likely but North Korea wouldn't be far behind. So yeah either or both but I think the scariest one at the moment is the Pakistani one, precisely because the nature of the agents that would be walking around a broken-down Pakistan are precisely the ones the U-S is most worried about, international terrorist groups of various kinds.
MOTTRAM: Other key challenges include what's described as improving anti-access capabilities .. code for denying China and even Iran the ability to block access in global sea and air arteries. But at the other end of the fighting spectrum, it also concedes it's got a problem with its people in uniform, badly stressed after eight years of war and in urgent need of better treatment.
Michelle Flournoy again.
FLOURNOY: For too long the health of the All Volunteer Force has been underemphasised in our planning. This QDR includes the need to preserve and enhance the force as a core component of our strategy, as a strategic imperative.
MOTTRAM: The review also stresses the key role of building and tending alliances and partnerships, of empowering international institutions, while it outlines a force structure for the U-S looking five years ahead that'll make use of the budget space Defence Secretary Gates has created by already ditching high priced programs like the F-22 and delaying other elements. Its a review stamped distinctively by President Obama and Secretary Gates. And there's no doubt it will be tested.
