Quadrennial Defense
Review ReportFebruary 6, 2006

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportTable of Contents

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
FIGHTING THE LONG WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Afghanistan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Iraq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
The Fight Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Humanitarian and Early Preventive Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The Department’s Role at Home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Operational Lessons Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

OPERATIONALIZING THE STRATEGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Defeating Terrorist Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Defending the Homeland in Depth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Shaping the Choices of Countries at Strategic Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Preventing the Acquisition or Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Reﬁning the Department’s Force Planning Construct for Wartime .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

REORIENTING CAPABILITIES AND FORCES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Joint Ground Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Special Operations Forces (SOF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Joint Air Capabilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Joint Maritime Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Tailored Deterrence / New Triad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Combating WMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Joint Mobility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Achieving Net-Centricity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Joint Command and Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

RESHAPING THE DEFENSE ENTERPRISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Toward A New Defense Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Governance Reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Management and Work Reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

DEVELOPING A 21st CENTURY TOTAL FORCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Reconﬁguring the Total Force. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Building the Right Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Designing an Information Age Human Capital Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

ACHIEVING UNITY OF EFFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Strengthening Interagency Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Working with International Allies and Partners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Strategic Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
CHAIRMAN’S ASSESSMENT OF THE 2006 QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW. . . . A-1
Quadrennial Defense Review Reportiii

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportQuadrennial Defense Review Report

iii

iv

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportPreface

PREFACEThe United States is a nation engaged in what
will be a long war.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, our
Nation has fought a global war against violent
extremists who use terrorism as their weaponof choice, and who seek to destroy our free
way of life. Our enemies seek weapons of mass
destruction and, if they are successful, will likely
attempt to use them in their conﬂict with freepeople everywhere. Currently, the struggle iscentered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we willneed to be prepared and arranged to successfully
defend our Nation and its interests around theglobe for years to come. This 2006 Quadrennial
Defense Review is submitted in the ﬁfth year of
this long war.
In developing this Quadrennial Defense
Review, the senior leaders of the Department of
Defense – civilian and military – worked side byside throughout 2005 to:• test the conclusions of the 2001 QDR;
• apply the important lessons learned from
more than four years of war against a global
network of violent extremists; and• test assumptions about the continuously
changing nature of the world in which we
ﬁnd ourselves.
There is a tendency to want to suggest that
documents such as this represent a “newbeginning.” Manifestly, this document is not a“new beginning.” Rather, this Department has
been and is transforming along a continuum thatreﬂects our best understanding of a world thathas changed a great deal since the end of the lastcentury. This study reﬂects the reality that the
Department of Defense has been in a period ofcontinuous change for the past ﬁve years.
Indeed, when President Bush took oﬃce in 2001,
the country was in many respects still savoring
victory in the Cold War – the culmination ofthat long struggle that occupied generations ofAmericans. But the President understood wellthat we were entering an era of the unexpected
and the unpredictable, and he directed a reviewof the Department of Defense and urged us
to transform our forces to better ﬁt this new
century.
The terrorist attacks on September 11 imposeda powerful sense of urgency to transforming
the Department. Much has been accomplishedsince that tragic day. We have set about making
U.S. forces more agile and more expeditionary.
Technological advances, including dramatic
improvements in information management andprecision weaponry, have allowed our military
to generate considerably more combat capability
with the same or, in some cases, fewer numbers
of weapons platforms and with lower levelsof manning. We also have been adjusting the
U.S. global military force posture, making long
overdue adjustments to U.S. basing by moving
away from a static defense in obsolete Cold War
garrisons, and placing emphasis on the ability tosurge quickly to trouble spots across the globe.

Quadrennial Defense Review Reportv

Preface

Transforming by Shifting Emphasis from the20th Century to the 21st Century
The QDR is not a programmatic or budget
document. Instead, it reﬂects the thinking of
the senior civilian and military leaders of the
Department of Defense:• Need to “ﬁnd, ﬁx and ﬁnish” combat
operations against new and elusive foes.
• Need for considerably better fusion of
intelligence and operations to produce actionplans that can be executed in real time.
• Realization that everything done in thisDepartment must contribute to joint
warﬁghting capability.
• Central reality that success depends on the
dedication, professionalism and skills of themen and women in uniform – volunteers all.
If one were to attempt to characterize thenature of how the Department of Defense istransforming and how the senior leaders of thisDepartment view that transformation, it is useful
to view it as a shift of emphasis to meet the newstrategic environment. In this era, characterized
by uncertainty and surprise, examples of this shift
in emphasis include:• From a peacetime tempo – to a wartime senseof urgency.
• From a time of reasonable predictability – toan era of surprise and uncertainty.

complex challenges.
• From nation-state threats – to decentralized
network threats from non-state enemies.
• From conducting war against nations – toconducting war in countries we are not at war
with (safe havens).
• From “one size ﬁts all” deterrence – to tailoreddeterrence for rogue powers, terrorist networks
and near-peer competitors.
• From responding after a crisis starts (reactive)– to preventive actions so problems do not
become crises (proactive).
• From crisis response – to shaping the future.
• From threat-based planning – to capabilitiesbased planning.
• From peacetime planning – to rapid adaptiveplanning.
• From a focus on kinetics – to a focus oneﬀects.
• From 20th century processes – to 21st century
integrated approaches.
• From static defense, garrison forces – tomobile, expeditionary operations.
• From under-resourced, standby forces (hollow
units) – to fully-equipped and fully-manned
forces (combat ready units).
• From a battle-ready force (peace) – to battlehardened forces (war).

• From single-focused threats – to multiple,vi

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportPreface• From large institutional forces (tail) – to more
powerful operational capabilities (teeth).
• Frommajor
conventional
combatoperations – to multiple irregular, asymmetric
operations.

data to the user.
• From fragmented homeland assistance – tointegrated homeland security.
• From static
partnerships.

alliances–todynamic• From separate military Service conceptsof operation – to joint and combined
operations.

• From predetermined force packages – totailored, ﬂexible forces.

• From forces that need to deconﬂict – tointegrated, interdependent forces.

• From the U.S. military performing tasks – toa focus on building partner capabilities.

• From exposed forces forward – to reachingback to CONUS to support expeditionary
forces.

• Fromstaticpost-operations
analysis– to dynamic diagnostics and real-time lessons
learned.

• From an emphasis on ships, guns, tanks andplanes – to focus on information, knowledge
and timely, actionable intelligence.

• From focusing on inputs (eﬀort) – to tracking
outputs (results).

• From massing forces – to massing eﬀects.

• From Department of Defense solutions – tointeragency approaches.

• From set-piece maneuver and mass – to agility
and precision.

The 2006 QDR in the Context of Continuing
Change• From single Service acquisition systems – tojoint portfolio management.

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR),
above all else, reﬂects a process of change thathas gathered momentum since the release of its
predecessor QDR in 2001. A great deal moreis underway – all in the midst of a continuing
Global War on Terror. A brief summary ofsome of the work and ongoing initiatives of the
Department during this period is outlined below
to set the context for the 2006 QDR.

• From broad-based industrial mobilization– to targeted commercial solutions.
• From Service and agency intelligence – totruly Joint Information Operations Centers.
• From vertical structures and processes (stovepipes) – to more transparent, horizontal
integration (matrix).

• Liberated more than 50 million Afghans
and Iraqis from despotism, terrorism and• From moving the user to the data – to moving
Quadrennial Defense Review ReportviiPreface

dictatorship, permitting the ﬁrst free electionsin the recorded history of either nation.
• Conducted attacks against the al Qaida
terrorist network, resulting in the deathor incarceration of the majority of its top
leadership.
• Worked with a global coalition of over 75
countries participating in the Global War on
Terrorism.
• Executed urgently needed transformation.
As a result of recent combat experience, U.S.
Armed Forces today are more battle-hardened
and combat ready than in decades.
• Transformed a variety of elements andactivities in the Department, including
contingency
planning,
strategic
reconnaissance, management of deployments
and redeployments, logistics and risk
assessment.
• Incorporated hundreds of real world lessons
learned from the battleﬁelds in the Global
War on Terrorism and adapted the force toongoing and future operations.
• Initiated a post-9/11 Global Military Force
Posture Plan to rearrange U.S. forces aroundthe world, while reducing the Cold War era
static footprint abroad, resulting in more
expeditionary and deployable forces.
• Reorganized the operational forces, creating
Northern Command, with important
responsibilities for homeland defense, andmerged Space and Strategic Commands into aviii

single command, Strategic Command.
• Initiated a new concept for Army organization,
including integrating Active, Guard andReserve forces around a new modular Brigade
Combat Team structure.
• Strengthened U.S. Special Forces by increasing
manpower, integrating new technologies,
procuring new aircraft, and including the U.S.
Marines in Special Operations Forces.
• Spearheaded steps to transform NATO,
including enlarging the membership ofNATO, enabling the rapid deploymentof forces, and extending NATO’s role to
Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Invested in new equipment, technology andplatforms for the forces, including advanced
combat capabilities: Stryker Brigades, Littoral
Combat Ships, converted cruise-missile ﬁring
submarines, unmanned vehicles and advanced
tactical aircraft – all linked by Net-CentricWarfare systems.
• Brought on-line an initial Missile Defense
System, while continuing research anddevelopment, providing a nascent defensive
capability.
• Initiated the largest Base Realignment andClosure (BRAC) process in history, rightsizing U.S. infrastructure to future needs.
• Supported the Department of Homeland
Security in natural disaster relief for hurricanes
Katrina and Rita.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportPreface• Undertook massive disaster relief eﬀorts for
the South Asia tsunami and the Pakistan
earthquake.
• Reorganized the Oﬃce of the Secretary of
Defense, creating the positions of Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence,
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland
Defense, Asisstant Secretary of Defense for
Networks and Information Integration and
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Detainee Aﬀairs.
Initiated pay for
performance and a responsive National Security
Personnel System.
The Department isdeveloping a stronger partnership with the
Department of Homeland Security across the
spectrum of potential missions.
Conclusion
It is clear we cannot achieve all we might
without signiﬁcant help from the rest of the U.S.
government. Within the Executive Branch, weare seeking ways to achieve greater eﬃciencies
in the interagency, in our work with partners
in the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice,and Homeland Security, the CIA, and otherparticipants in the Global War on Terror. Still
encumbered with a Cold War organizationand mentality in many aspects of Department
operations, the Department will seek new andmore ﬂexible authorities in budget, ﬁnance,
acquisition and personnel. Now is the time toinstitute still further changes necessary for the
21st century.

Review represents a snapshot in time of the
Department’s strategy for defense of the Nationand the capabilities needed to eﬀectively executethat defense. In the pages that follow, theDepartment’s senior leadership sets out where theDepartment is and where it needs to go in fulﬁlling
our responsibilities to the American people. To
realize our goals, the Department stands readyto join in a collaborative partnership with key
stakeholders in the process of implementationand execution – the Congress, other agencies of
the Executive Branch and alliance and coalition
partners. It will take unity of eﬀort to win thelong war in which our Nation is engaged. The
beneﬁts from such cooperation will be reaped by
future joint warﬁghters, Presidents and, most ofall, by the American people we serve.
Finally, it is important to note that this 2006
Quadrennial Defense Review is part of thecontinuum of transformation in the Department.
Its purpose is to help shape the process ofchange to provide the United States of America
with strong, sound and eﬀective warﬁghting
capabilities in the decades ahead. As we continue
in the ﬁfth year of this long global war, the ideas
and proposals in this document are provided as aroadmap for change, leading to victory.

The Report of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense
Quadrennial Defense Review ReportixQuadrennial Defense Review ReportIntroduction

challenges and to hedge against uncertainty
over the next 20 years.

INTRODUCTION
The Department of Defense conducted the 2006
Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) in the
fourth year of a long war, a war that is irregularin its nature. The enemies in this war are not
traditional conventional military forces but
rather dispersed, global terrorist networks that
exploit Islam to advance radical political aims.
These enemies have the avowed aim of acquiringand using nuclear and biological weapons tomurder hundreds of thousands of Americans
and others around the world. They use terror,
propaganda and indiscriminate violence in an
attempt to subjugate the Muslim world undera radical theocratic tyranny while seeking toperpetuate conﬂict with the United States and its
allies and partners. This war requires the U.S.
military to adopt unconventional and indirect
approaches. Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan are
crucial battlegrounds, but the struggle extends
far beyond their borders. With its allies andpartners, the United States must be prepared towage this war in many locations simultaneously
and for some years to come. As the Departmentof Defense works to defeat these enemies, it
must also remain vigilant in an era of surpriseand uncertainty and prepare to prevent, deter or
defeat a wider range of asymmetric threats.
This QDR deﬁnes two fundamental imperatives
for the Department of Defense:• Continuing to reorient the Department’s
capabilities and forces to be more agile in thistime of war, to prepare for wider asymmetric• Implementing enterprise-wide changes toensure that organizational structures, processes
and procedures eﬀectively support its strategic
direction.
Assessing how the Department is organized andoperates has been a centerpiece of this QDR.
Just as U.S. forces are becoming more agile
and capable of rapid action and are exploiting
information advantages to increase operationaleﬀectiveness, headquarters organizations andprocesses that support them need to develop
similar attributes. Changes should focus on
meeting the needs of the President of theUnited States and joint warﬁghting forces,
represented by the Combatant Commanders.
This QDR sought to provide a broader rangeof military options for the President and newcapabilities needed by Combatant Commanders
to confront asymmetric threats. The principlesof transparency, constructive competition to
encourage innovation, agility and adaptability,
collaboration and partnership should guidethe formulation of new strategic processes andorganizational structures.
The Department must also adopt a model ofcontinuous change and reassessment if it is
to defeat highly adaptive adversaries. In thissense, the QDR is not an end state in itself, butrather an interim Report designed to capture
the best contemporary thinking, planning anddecisions during this period of profound change.
The Department will continue this process of

Quadrennial Defense Review Report1Introduction• Department
governance.

institutional

reformand• Irregular warfare.
• Building partnership capacity.
• Strategic communication.
• Intelligence.
These roadmaps should guide the implementationof key QDR proposals and continue thereﬁnement of the Department’s approaches inthese important areas.
The complexity of the challenges facing the
Department and the changes needed to address
them necessitate a considerably closer partnership
between the Executive and Legislative branches ofgovernment and continuous dialogue. Without
the support of the Congress, it will not be possible
for the Department to undertake many of thechanges outlined in this Report. The ideas andrecommendations presented represent a starting
point for such a dialogue. The Department
welcomes other viewpoints and innovative
proposals from the Congress, allies, and others
that build upon these ideas or provide preferable
alternatives.
This QDR builds upon the transformational
2

defense agenda directed by the President andarticulated in the 2001 QDR, changes in the U.S.
global defense posture and Base Realignment
and Closure study, and, most importantly, on theoperational experiences of the past four years. In
addition to its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the U.S. military has conducted a host of othermissions, from providing humanitarian relief in
the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami and
the South Asian earthquake to supporting civil
authorities at home and responding to natural
disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Lessons
from these missions, which informed the QDR’sdeliberations and conclusions, include the criticalimportance of:• Having the authorities and resources tobuild partnership capacity, achieve unity ofeﬀort, and adopt indirect approaches to act
with and through others to defeat common
enemies – shifting from conducting activities
ourselves to enabling partners to do more forthemselves.
• Shifting from responsive actions toward early,
preventive measures and increasing the speed

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 1stClass Aaron Ansarov, U.S. Navy.

continuous reassessment and improvementwith periodic updates in the coming years andby directing the development of follow-on“roadmaps” for areas of particular emphasis in
the QDR, including:

Coalition Forces and local ﬁshermen in the Khawr Abd
Allah (KAA) waterway in the Persian Gulf communicate
through an Arabic translator. Coalition Forces areworking with Iraqi patrol vessels in a joint eﬀort to deny
the use of the KAA for illegal activity.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportIntroductionof action to stop problems from becoming
conﬂicts or crises.

senior civilian and military leaders identiﬁed fourpriorities as the focus of the QDR:

• Increasing the freedom of action of the UnitedStates and its allies and partners in meetingthe security challenges of the 21st century.

• Defeating terrorist networks.

• Minimizing costs to the United States
while imposing costs on adversaries, inparticular by sustaining America’s scientiﬁcand technological advantage over potential
competitors.

• Shaping the choices of countries at strategic
crossroads.

Applying these lessons will increase theadaptability of the force when confronting
surprise or uncertainty. Maintaining a joint
process to identify lessons learned is importantto support a process of continuous change andimprovement.
The foundation of this QDR is the National
Defense Strategy, published in March 2005.
This strategy calls for continuing to reorient
the Department’s capabilities to address a wider
range of challenges. Although U.S. militaryforces maintain their predominance in traditional
warfare, they must also be improved to address
the non-traditional, asymmetric challenges of thisnew century. These challenges include irregularwarfare (conﬂicts in which enemy combatants
are not regular military forces of nation-states);
catastrophic terrorism employing weapons ofmass destruction (WMD); and disruptive threats
to the United States’ ability to maintain its
qualitative edge and to project power.

• Defending the homeland in depth.

• Preventing hostile states and non-state
actors from acquiring or using WMD.
Although these priorities clearly do not represent
the full range of operations the U.S. military
must be prepared to conduct, they do indicate
areas of particular concern. By focusing onthem, the Department will continue to increase
its capabilities and forces to deal with irregular,catastrophic and disruptive challenges. Improving
capabilities and forces to meet these challenges
will also increase the forces overall adaptability
and versatility in responding to other threats andcontingencies.
Based on their evaluation of the four QDR focus
areas, the Department’s senior leaders decided
to reﬁne the capstone force planning constructthat translates the Department’s strategy into
guidance to shape and size military forces. Thiswartime construct, described in detail later inthis Report, makes adjustments to better capture
the realities of a long war by:• Better deﬁning the Department’s responsibilities for homeland defense within a broader
national framework.

To operationalize the strategy, the Department’s• Giving greater emphasis to the war on
Quadrennial Defense Review Report3Introduction

terror and irregular warfare activities,
including long-duration unconventional
warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency,
and military support for stabilization andreconstruction eﬀorts.
• Accounting for, and drawing a distinction
between, steady-state force demands and surge
activities over multi-year periods.
At the same time, this wartime construct requires
the capability to conduct multiple, overlappingwars. In addition, it calls for the forces andcapabilities needed for deterrence, reﬂecting ashift from “one size ﬁts all” deterrence toward
more tailorable capabilities to deter advanced
military powers, regional WMD states, or
non-state terrorists.
The 2006 QDR provides new direction
for accelerating the transformation of the
Department to focus more on the needs of
Combatant Commanders and to develop
portfolios of joint capabilities rather than
individual stove-piped programs. In 2001, theDepartment initiated a shift from threat-basedplanning toward capabilities-based planning,changing the way war-ﬁghting needs are deﬁned
and prioritized. The essence of capabilities-basedplanning is to identify capabilities that adversaries
could employ and capabilities that could beavailable to the United States, then evaluate theirinteraction, rather than over-optimize the joint
force for a limited set of threat scenarios. This
QDR continues this shift by emphasizing theneeds of the Combatant Commanders as thebasis for programs and budgetary priorities. The
4goal is to manage the Department increasingly
through the use of joint capability portfolios.
Doing so should improve the Department’s
ability to meet the needs of the President andthe Combatant Commanders. Moving toward
a more “demand-driven” approach should
reduce unnecessary program redundancy,
improve joint interoperability, and streamline
acquisition and budgeting processes.
The
Department is continuing to shift from stovepiped vertical structures to more transparent
and horizontally-integrated structures.
Just
as the U.S. forces operate jointly, so too musthorizontal integration become an organizing
principle for the Department’s investment andenterprise-wide functions. These reforms will
not occur overnight, and care must be taken
not to weaken what works eﬀectively during
the transition to a more cross-cutting approach.
However, the complex strategic environment of
the 21st century demands greater integration offorces, organizations and processes, and closer
synchronization of actions.
This environment also places new demands on
the Department’s Total Force concept. Although
the all-volunteer force has been a key to successful
U.S. military operations over the past several
decades, continued success in future missions
is not preordained. The Total Force of active
and reserve military, civilian, and contractor
personnel must continue to develop the best mixof people equipped with the right skills neededby the Combatant Commanders. To this end,
the QDR updates the Department’s workforce
management policies to guide investments inthe force and improve the workforce’s ability

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportIntroduction

to adapt to new challenges. For example,
to meet the demands of irregular warfare
and operate eﬀectively alongside other U.S.
agencies, allies or partners, the Department will
increase investments focused on developing andmaintaining appropriate language, cultural, andinformation technology skills. The Department
is also adopting new personnel systems to reward
performance rather than longevity. New joint
training initiatives should help ensure that the
Total Force is capable of adapting to emerging
challenges as the Military Departments continue
to rebalance forces between their Active andReserve Components. Acquiring the rightknowledge and skills relevant to the challengesof the 21st century will receive new emphasis in
recruitment, retention, training, assignments,
career development and advancement. Aligningauthorities, policies and practices will produce
the best qualiﬁed Total Force to satisfy the new
demands.
This QDR beneﬁted from the change in thelegislation mandating the review. By shifting
the completion date of the review to coincidewith the submission of the President’s Fiscal Year2007 budget request, the Congress permitted theDepartment to “front load” a limited number of
initiatives into the budget submission for Fiscal
Year 2007, rather than having to wait until thenext full budget cycle. This QDR therefore
recommends a number of adjustments to alignDefense plans, policies and programs with thebroader strategic direction as “leading edge”
measures in the President’s budget request for
Fiscal Year 2007. These proposals represent only
the vanguard of changes that the Department

will initiate in coming years. The Department
will develop additional proposals, based on thestrategic direction set in this Report, including
recommendations for the Fiscal Year 2008 budget
submission.
Among the key programmatic decisions the
QDR proposes to launch in Fiscal Year 2007 are
the following:• To strengthen forces to defeat terrorist
networks, the Department will increase
Special Operations Forces by 15% andincrease the number of Special Forces Battalions by one-third. U.S. Special Operations
Command (U.S. SOCOM) will establish theMarine Corps Special Operations Command.
The Air Force will establish an Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle Squadron under U.S. SOCOM.
The Navy will support a U.S. SOCOM
increase in SEAL Team manning and willdevelop a riverine warfare capability. The
Department will also expand Psychological
Operations and Civil Aﬀairs units by 3,700
personnel, a 33% increase. Multipurpose
Army and Marine Corps ground forces will
increase their capabilities and capacity to
conduct irregular warfare missions.
• To strengthen homeland defense and homeland security, the Department will funda $1.5 billion initiative over the next ﬁve
years to develop broad-spectrum medical
countermeasures against the threat of genetically engineered bio-terror agents. Additional
initiatives will include developing advanced
detection and deterrent technologies andQuadrennial Defense Review Report5Introduction

facilitating full-scale civil-military exercises
to improve interagency planning for complex
homeland security contingencies.
• To help shape the choices of countries atstrategic crossroads, strengthen deterrence,and hedge against future strategic uncertainty,
the Department will develop a wider rangeof conventional and non-kinetic deterrent
options while maintaining a robust nuclear
deterrent. It will convert a small number of
Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles
for use in conventional prompt global strike.
The Department will also increase procurement of unmanned aerial vehicles to increase
persistent surveillance, nearly doubling today’s
capacity. It also will begin development of thenext generation long-range strike systems,
accelerating projected initial operational capability by almost two decades.

Achieving the vision set out in this Report will
only be possible by maintaining and adapting
the United States’ enduring alliances. Alliances
are clearly one of the nation’s greatest sources ofstrength. Over the past four years, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and
U.S. bilateral alliances with Australia, Japan,
Korea and other nations have adapted to retain
their vitality and relevance in the face of new
threats to international security. These alliances
make manifest the strategic solidarity of freedemocratic states, promote shared values andfacilitate the sharing of military and security
burdens around the world. The United States

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class
Chad J. McNeeley, U.S. Navy.

Photo by Petty Oﬃcer Steve Lewis, Royal Navy.

• To improve the nation’s ability to deal withthe dangers posed by states that possess weapons of mass destruction and the possibility ofterrorists gaining control of them, the Department will greatly expand its capabilities andforces for addressing such contingencies. It
has assigned U.S. Strategic Command as thelead Combatant Command for integrating
and synchronizing combating WMD, which
provides a focal point for the Department’s
eﬀorts. The Department will also establish
a deployable Joint Task Force headquarters
for WMD elimination to be able to provide
immediate command and control of forces for
executing those missions.

A soldier of the United Kingdom Black Watch Regiment (center) thanks a U.S. Army heavy transporter driver who
has safely delivered his Warrior armored vehicle to Shaibah base, Basra after a long drive south from North Babil, Iraq.
Australian and U.S. personnel discuss enemy troop movements during an exercise involving Navy, Army, Air Force,
Marine and Special Forces units. The United Kingdom and Australia are key partners in ongoing operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan. (Photos left to right)

6

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportIntroduction

places great value on its unique relationships with
the United Kingdom and Australia, whose forces
stand with the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan
and many other operations. These close military
relations are models for the breadth and depth ofcooperation that the United States seeks to foster
with other allies and partners around the world.
Implementation of the QDR’s agenda will serve
to reinforce these enduring links.
The 2006 QDR was designed to serve as a catalyst
to spur the Department’s continuing adaptation
and reorientation to produce a truly integrated
joint force that is more agile, more rapidly
deployable, and more capable against the wider
range of threats. Through a process of continuous
improvement, constant reassessment andapplication of lessons learned, changes based on
this review will continue over time. Collectively,
and with the cooperation of the Congress, thesechanges will ensure that the Department adapts
to meet the increasingly dangerous security
challenges of the 21st century.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report7

8

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportFighting the Long War

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a
decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory
and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the
air war above Kosovo…Our response involves far
more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes.
Americans should not expect one battle, but alengthy campaign, unlike any other we have everseen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV,
and covert operations, secret even in success. We will
starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against
another, drive them from place to place, until there
is no refuge and no rest.
President Bush, September 20, 2001
Since 2001 the U.S. military has been
continuously at war, but ﬁghting a conﬂict thatis markedly diﬀerent from wars of the past.
The enemies we face are not nation-states but
rather dispersed non-state networks. In manycases, actions must occur on many continents incountries with which the United States is not atwar. Unlike the image many have of war, thisstruggle cannot be won by military force alone,
or even principally. And it is a struggle that may
last for some years to come.
On any given day, nearly 350,000 men andwomen of the U.S. Armed Forces are deployed
or stationed in approximately 130 countries.
They are battle-hardened from operations overthe past four years, ﬁghting the enemies of
freedom as part of this long war. They maintainthe Nation’s treaty obligations and international
commitments. They protect and advance U.S.
interests and values. They are often asked to beprotectors of the peace and providers of relief.
They are a force for good.

Afghanistan
Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. andallied forces clandestinely entered Afghanistan
and linked up with indigenous Afghan forces.
Forces on the ground leveraged joint air powerand swiftly toppled the Taliban’s repressive
theocratic dictatorship. Defeat of the Taliban
and their foreign patrons – al Qaida terrorists
and their associates – was swift. The war in
Afghanistan demonstrated the ability of the
U.S. military to project power rapidly at global
distances; to conduct operations far inland; tointegrate air, ground, special operations, andmaritime forces into a joint force; to provide
humanitarian relief; and to sustain operations
with minimal local basing support. The actionsin 2001 in Afghanistan reinforced the principlesof adaptability, speed of action, integrated joint
operations, economy of force, and the value ofworking with and through indigenous forces toachieve common goals.
DoD Photo.

FIGHTING THE LONG WAR

Special Operations Forces ride alongside Afghan
Northern Alliance forces during a patrol in supportof Operation Enduring Freedom. Special Operations
Forces employed local transportation and worked closelywith air and space assets to bring precision ﬁres against
the Taliban.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report9Fighting the Long War

Since 2001, U.S. forces have helped to establish
the Afghan National Army, to support their ﬁrst
free election in a generation, and to set security
conditions for enduring freedom in Afghanistan.
Vital international contributions have helped toachieve this result: An International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) of 9,000 military
personnel, led by NATO since 2003, operates in
Kabul and an increasing portion of Afghanistan’s
territory, with plans to expand into still more
Afghan provinces later this year. As part of
the ISAF mission, civil-military Provincial
Reconstruction Teams operate in the countryside
and undertake reconstruction projects, incoordination with local Afghan oﬃcials, to help
extend the authority of the central government
beyond Kabul and build its capacity for the longterm.

will not be a threat to its neighbors, and that canserve as a model of freedom for the Middle East.

Iraq

Over the past four years, joint forces haveadapted to the demands of long-duration,
irregular operations. The weight of eﬀort in
Iraq has shifted over time, from defeating the
Iraqi military and liberating the Iraqi people,
to building up Iraqi security forces and local
institutions, and to transitioning responsibility
for security to the Iraqis.

10“Victory by the armies cannot be achieved unless theinfantry occupies the territory. Likewise, victory for
the Islamic movements against the world alliancecannot be attained unless movements possess
an Islamic base in the heart of the Arab region”-Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2001

Photo by Sergeant April L. Johnson, U.S. Army.

Much has been accomplished in Iraq since the
U.S.-led coalition removed the tyrannical regimeof Saddam Hussein and liberated the Iraqi
people in 2003: holding free elections, ratifying
a constitution, improving infrastructure after
decades of neglect, training and equipping Iraqi
security forces, and increasing the capability of
those forces to take on the enemies of freedom andsecure their nation. Although many challenges
remain, Iraq is steadily recovering from decades ofa vicious tyranny, in which government authority
stemmed solely from fear, terror, and brutality.
The international coalition is succeeding insetting security conditions for the emergence of ademocratic Iraq that will be able to defend itself,that will not be a safe haven for terrorists, that

Like Afghanistan, Iraq is a crucial battlegroundin the long war against terrorism. Al Qaida andits associated movements recognize Iraq as theplace of the greatest battle of Islam in this era. As
freedom and democracy take root in Iraq, it will
provide an attractive alternative to the message of
extremists for the people of the region. Successin building a secure, free Iraq will deal the enemy
a crippling blow.

Iraqi women display their ink stained ﬁngers as proof
that they voted.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportFighting the Long War

DoD Photo.

Iraqi security forces, military and police,
continue to grow in numbers and capability. The
Multinational Security Transition CommandIraq (MNSTC-I) has helped create more than 125
Iraqi combat battalions that are now operatingwith U.S. and other coalition units to ﬁnd andclear out enemy forces. As more Iraqi units gain
conﬁdence and operational experience, they will
increasingly take the lead in security operations.
This example is a model for the future: helping
others to help themselves is critical to winningthe long war.

The U.S. Army is harnessing the diversity of American
society by recruiting heritage speakers of priority
languages to serve as translators and interpreters. A
soldier (at the desk with his back turned) is interpretingfor his commander at a local police recruiting station in
Iraq. To date, the Army has recruited 479 individuals
into the heritage speaker program, 133 of whom arecurrently deployed.

One of the greatest challenges facing U.S. forces isﬁnding the enemy and then rapidly acting on that
information. To address this challenge in Iraq,
the Department has established in the theater
the Joint Intelligence Operations Center – Iraq.
This Center integrates intelligence from all
sources – imagery, signals intelligence, and human
intelligence – and then fuses that information
with planning and execution functions to support
operations that are often conducted within hours
or even minutes of receiving an intelligence tip.

The Fight Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
The long war against terrorist networks extends
far beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan
and includes many operations characterized byirregular warfare – operations in which the enemy
is not a regular military force of a nation-state.
In recent years, U.S. forces have been engaged inmany countries, ﬁghting terrorists and helping
partners to police and govern their nations. To
succeed in such operations, the United States
must often take an indirect approach, building up
and working with others. This indirect approachseeks to unbalance adversaries physically andpsychologically, rather than attacking them where
they are strongest or in the manner they expect to
be attacked. Taking the “line of least resistance”
unbalances the enemy physically, exploiting
subtle vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses.
Exploiting the “line of least expectation”
unbalances the enemy psychologically, setting
the conditions for the enemy’s subsequentdefeat. One historical example that illustrates
both concepts comes from the Arab Revolt in
1917 in a distant theater of the First World War,when British Colonel T.E. Lawrence and a groupof lightly armed Bedouin tribesmen seized the
Ottoman port city of Aqaba by attacking from theundefended desert-side, rather than confronting
the garrison’s coastal artillery by attacking fromthe sea. Today, eﬀorts large and small on ﬁve
continents demonstrate the importance of being
able to work with and through partners, tooperate clandestinely and to sustain a persistent
but low-visibility presence. Such eﬀorts represent
an application of the indirect approach to thelong war.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report11Fighting the Long War

Photo by Senior Airman Latonia
L. Brown. U.S. Air Force.

partners in northern and western Africa tocounter emerging terrorist extremist threats.
In Niger, for example, a small team of combat
aviation advisors has helped Niger’s Air Forcehone its skills to prevent the under-developed
eastern part of the country from becoming a safe
haven for transnational terrorists.

In the Republic of Georgia, a two-year U.S. militarytrain and equip mission with small teams of militarytrainers resulted in the creation of that country’s
counterterrorism force.
Georgian forces aremaintaining security internally and are taking part inOperation Iraqi Freedom.

In East Africa, the Combined Joint Task ForceHorn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) is currently helping
to build host-nation capacity in Kenya, Ethiopia
and Djibouti. Operating across large areas but
using only small detachments, CJTF-HOA isa prime example of distributed operations andeconomy of force. Military, civilian, and allied
personnel work together to provide security
training and to perform public works andmedical assistance projects, demonstrating the
beneﬁts of unity of eﬀort. Steps toward more
eﬀective host nation governance have improved
local conditions and set the stage to minimize
tribal, ethnic, and religious conﬂict, decreasing
the possibility of failed states or ungoverned
spaces in which terrorist extremists can moreeasily operate or take shelter.
In the Trans-Sahara region, the U.S. European
Command’s Counter-Terrorism Initiative is
helping regional states develop the internal
security forces and procedures necessary forpolicing their national territories. This initiative
uses military and civilian engagements with
12

Humanitarian and Early
Preventive Measures
U.S. forces continue to conduct humanitarianassistance and disaster relief operations aroundthe globe. Preventing crises from worsening
and alleviating suﬀering are goals consistent
with American values. They are also in the
United States’ interest. By alleviating suﬀeringand dealing with crises in their early stages, U.S.
forces help prevent disorder from spiraling into
wider conﬂict or crisis. They also demonstrate
the goodwill and compassion of the UnitedStates.
In the eastern Indian Ocean, the U.S. military
was at the vanguard of an international eﬀort
to provide relief to stranded victims of thedisastrous December 2004 tsunami. The U.S.
Paciﬁc Command and U.S. Transportation
Command responded rapidly, deploying a Joint
Task Force to Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka
within ﬁve days of the catastrophe. Strategic
airlift, supplemented by the arrival of an aircraft
carrier, amphibious ships, and a hospital shipprovided urgent relief. These forces maintained
24-hour operations and helped coordinate thevarious international relief eﬀorts. Over a sixweek period, U.S. forces airlifted over 8,500 tons

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportFighting the Long War

Photo by Technical Sergeant
Mike Buytas, U.S. Air Force.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 1stClass Bart A. Bauer, U.S. Navy.

of critical emergency supplies to isolated andpreviously unreachable areas, conducted searchand rescue operations and treated more than
10,000 patients.

Pakistani earthquake victims crowd around a U.S.
Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter delivering disaster
relief supplies to the devastated area surrounding thetown of Oghi, Pakistan. The U.S. military participatedin the multinational eﬀort to provide humanitarianassistance after the October 2005 earthquake.

A Landing Craft Air Cushioned (LCAC) crew assigned
to the USS Bonhomme Richard unloads humanitarianrelief supplies in the city of Meuloboh, on the islandof Sumatra, Indonesia. U.S. military elements quickly
responded to provide aid to victims of the December
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Similarly, in October 2005, when a devastating
earthquake struck northern Pakistan, U.S.
forces proved their adaptability by responding
within eighteen hours. U.S. military aircraft,among the ﬁrst on the scene, transported anddistributed humanitarian supplies throughout
the aﬀected areas. A combined PakistaniU.S. Civil-Military Disaster Assistance Center
seamlessly integrated contributions from various
nations and international aid organizations.
U.S. strategic airlift augmented the capacity ofpartner countries by transporting relief personnel
and supplies from across the globe to Pakistan.
Deployable U.S. military ﬁeld hospitals werequickly established to supplement damaged
Pakistani medical facilities, and U.S. militaryengineers helped to re-open hundreds of milesof roads, permitting the ﬂow of aid to remotecommunities.

Over the past four years, U.S. forces havealso played critical roles preventing crises
from becoming more serious conﬂicts. In
Liberia in 2003, civil war and the dissolutionof the government prompted a multinational
intervention to restore order and prevent a fullblown humanitarian crisis. A U.S. European
Command joint task force accompanied aforce from the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS) throughout themission. The U.S. team, working with regional
partners, secured and re-opened the country’s
major seaport to permit the ﬂow of humanitarianassistance. The United States and ECOWAS
succeeded in stabilizing the country, permitting
a rapid turnover of humanitarian assistance
responsibility to the United Nations in supportof the new interim Liberian government.
Similarly, in response to increasing politicalviolence in Haiti in early 2004, U.S. joint forces
rapidly deployed as part of a multinational
stabilization force. This early action prevented
the collapse of political and social structures

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

13

Photo by Lieutenant Colonel
Thomas Collins, U.S. Army

Fighting the Long War

The commander of U.S. forces under Joint Task Force
Liberia speaks with soldiers from Ghana, one of theWest African countries that led the eﬀort to stabilize
Liberia. With the arrival of West African forces, thesecurity environment and humanitarian conditions in
Liberia improved signiﬁcantly.

in the country, averted a humanitarian crisis,
and established a more secure and stableenvironment, which enabled the speedy transfer
of responsibility for supporting the Haitiantransitional government to the United Nations.
U.S. Southern Command’s support for Plan
Colombia is yet another example of preventive
action. The United States has worked with
the Government of Colombia to combat the
production and traﬃcking of illegal drugs. In
2002, at the request of the Administration,
Congress granted expanded authorities to help
the Colombian Government wage a uniﬁed
campaign against terrorism as well as drugs, andthereby assert eﬀective control over its territory.
This broader mission has helped the Colombian
Government seize the initiative against illegal
armed groups, demobilize thousands of illegal
paramilitaries, decrease violence and return togovernment authority areas that had been under
the control of narcoterrorists for decades.
Integrated joint operations have also played
critical roles in deterring conﬂict and preserving
14

stability in the Paciﬁc. Forward-deployed forcesand ﬂexible deterrent options have successfully
dissuaded potential enemies and assured allies
and partners. During operations in Iraq in thespring of 2003, regional deterrence capabilities
and global repositioning of joint forces andprecision munitions demonstrated U.S. resolveand commitment to maintaining the armisticeon the Korean Peninsula.
Highly distributed global operations over the
past several years – in the Paciﬁc and Indian
Oceans, Central Asia, the Middle East, theCaucasus, the Balkans, Africa, and Latin America– make manifest the importance of small teams
conducting missions uniquely tailored to local
conditions. These operations also demonstrate
the agility of U.S. forces forward-deployed inand near these regions to transition quickly fromdeterrence to humanitarian or other operations
as required. In some places, U.S. forces haveconcentrated on attacking and disrupting enemy
forces. In others, U.S. forces have worked to
improve the lives of people in impoverishedregions, or to build up the capacity of local
security forces to police their own countries. In
almost all cases, updated authorities, processes andpractices were required to ensure unity of eﬀort
in these distributed operations. Still, additional
cooperation authorities will be required if the
U.S. Government is to be able to achieve its goals
in the most cost-eﬀective manner.
Recent operations have reinforced the need for
U.S. forces to have greater language skills andcultural awareness. It is advantageous for U.S.
forces to speak the languages of the regions

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportPhoto by Technical Specialist
John M. Foster, U.S. Air Force.

Fighting the Long War

During the exercise New Horizons 2005 in El Salvador,
U.S. Army personnel describe preventive healthmeasures to local citizens. New Horizons included a
civic action project which provided medical assistancevisits, two new schools and three clinics in areas hit byearthquakes in 2004.

where the enemy will operate. In 2004, theDepartment of Defense launched the Defense
Language Transformation Initiative to improve
the ability of the Armed Forces to work more
eﬀectively with international partners. The
Military Departments have also begun more
intensive cultural and language training, which
over time will create a more culturally aware,
linguistically capable force, better able to forge
victory in the long war. The Department mustovercome a legacy of relatively limited emphasison languages and continue to expand eﬀorts toplace linguistically capable individuals at all levelsof the military – from the tactical squad to theoperational commander.

The Department’s Role at Home
The long war has also seen U.S. forces taking on
greater roles at home. Immediately following
the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces were called upon
to assist in securing the homeland. Working
with other Federal agencies, the Department

answered the call. At the President’s direction,
active and reserve forces conducted combat air
patrols over major cities to prevent follow-on
attacks, reinforced the Nation’s land borders,guarded shipping lanes, protected harbors,
secured critical infrastructure, and guarded
airports and other transportation hubs until theestablishment of the Transportation Security
Administration. Specialized anti-terrorism andchemical and biological incident response forces
deployed to Washington, D.C. in the wake of the2001 anthrax attacks.
The Department has undertaken a number ofmajor changes to strengthen its ability to defend
the homeland and support civil authorities. In
2002, the Department created a new CombatantCommand, U.S. Northern Command (U.S.
NORTHCOM), with the responsibility toconsolidate homeland defense missions under asingle headquarters. To coordinate its eﬀorts andto increase the emphasis on homeland defense
issues, the Department established the newcivilian post of Assistant Secretary of Defense forHomeland Defense.
The Department has played an active role inFederal eﬀorts to shore up defenses against thethreat of biological terrorism. It is helping todevelop vaccines for Project BioShield, a nationaleﬀort to accelerate the development of medical
counter-measures to defend against potential
biological attacks. In Project BioWatch, theDepartment collaborates with other Federal
agencies on improving technologies andprocedures to detect and identify biologicalattacks. In 2004, the Department led the

Quadrennial Defense Review Report15

Fighting the Long War

At the state level, the National Guard is ﬁelding
55 WMD Civil Support Teams (CSTs) – in eachstate, territory and the District of Columbia.
These 22-member teams can provide criticalcommunications links, quick assessment ofdamage from any WMD attack and consequence
management support to local, state and Federal
agencies. The National Guard is also creating
twelve Enhanced Response Force Packages
for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear
and high-yield explosive attacks. These units
provide capabilities to locate and extract victims
from a WMD-contaminated environment, toconduct casualty and patient decontaminationand to provide medical treatment. To improvecommand and control functions for emergencies
and major public events, the National Guard iscreating a Joint Force Headquarters in each state.
Just as they have proved adaptable in providing
rapid response to disasters abroad, U.S. forces havebeen called upon to respond to natural disasters
at home. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, prepositioned forces arrived in neighborhoods ofGulf Coast communities within four hours after
the storm hit, to assist rescue eﬀorts. More than
50,000 National Guard personnel deployed to thedisaster zone. Active forces added an additional
22,000 personnel, including units previously
deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Together,working with the Coast Guard, they conducted16

Photo by Technical SergeantDavid Neve, U.S. Air Force.

establishment of the National BioDefense
Campus at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which
provides a means for coordination amongagencies working on research and developmentof medical biological defenses.

An Air Force ﬁre truck is loaded onto a C-130 Hercules
bound for Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina relief
eﬀorts. The U.S. Air Force personnel are from the162nd Fighter Wing, Arizona Air National Guard.

search and rescue missions, evacuations, andmedical airlift from the air, land, and sea. The
Department’s response to Hurricane Katrina
and other civil support operations provided
valuable lessons for improving force integrationand command and control in large, complex
interagency operations.

Operational Lessons Learned
Operational experiences – in Afghanistan andIraq, in wider operations as part of the war
on terror, in humanitarian relief eﬀorts andpreventive actions and in the Department of
Defense’s role at home – have provided importantlessons and principles that the Department has
already begun to apply. These overarching lessons
have broad applicability to many of the challenges
the Department faces. They have informed the
new approaches developed during the QDR
aimed at continuing the reorientation of militarycapabilities and implementing enterprise-widereforms to ensure that structures and processes
support the warﬁghter. They include:

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportFighting the Long War

authorities include: institutionalizing CERP
for named contingency operations world-wide;
expanding the President’s authority to task
and resource best-situated Federal agencies inan emergency; and broader reimbursement
authority for coalition support forces andexpanded logistics support to other nations
partnering with the United States in the war
on terror.
Photo by Specialist Jerry T. Combes, U.S. Army.

• Having the Authorities and Resources to Build
Partnership Capacity. Recent operations
demonstrate the critical importance of beingorganized to work with and through others,
and of shifting emphasis from performing
tasks ourselves to enabling others. They also
underscore the importance of adopting amore indirect approach to achieve common
objectives. The Department must help partners
improve their ability to perform their intendedroles and missions. This includes foreign
governments trying to police themselves andgovern their populations more justly andeﬀectively; at home, it includes other Federal
agencies and state and local governments.
The U.S. military’s interaction with foreign
militaries provides valuable opportunities toexpand partner capacity as well as to establish
trust and build relationships. Recent eﬀorts
to build partnership capacity also highlightthe importance of ﬂexible access to funding
through programs such as the Commander’s
Emergency Response Program (CERP) andTrain and Equip authorities for operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Expanding authorities
to build on the lessons learned in Iraq and
Afghanistan will help enable the UnitedStates to defeat terrorist networks wherever
they are located. Congress is urged to work
alongside the Department to provide the fullset of authorities needed to build security
partnerships to ﬁght the war on terror. In
addition to the recently enacted authority to
Build the Capacity of Foreign Military Forcesand Emergency Transfer Authority for the State
Department’s Coordinator for Reconstructionand Stabilization amendments, needed

Members of Task Force Phoenix, Indiana National
Guard (center), conduct an after-action review with
Afghan National Army soldiers. With the aid of U.S.
forces, Afghan soldiers are becoming increasingly selfsuﬃcient.

• Taking Early Preventive Measures. Drawing
on lessons from recent operations, the QDR
emphasized the importance of early measures
to prevent problems from becoming crises andcrises from becoming conﬂicts. Operations in
Haiti and Liberia demonstrate the advantage
of taking prompt action to quell disorder
before it leads to the collapse of politicaland social structures. Those operations help
set conditions for the restoration of security
and civil society. Taking early measuresrequires greater speed of action and a clear
understanding of the situation, including theway potential adversaries make decisions. In
many recent counterterrorist operations, theQuadrennial Defense Review Report17Fighting the Long Wartime available to apprehend a terrorist, once
located, has been measured in mere minutes.
Similarly, as the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001 showed, defending the homelandagainst air or missile attacks with little or no
warning also requires the ability to act on very
short notice. U.S. forces have demonstrated
time and again their agility in responding
rapidly to crises. However, operational agility
has not yet been matched by the availability ofsuﬃciently broad authorities or the processes
and procedures needed to support the
warﬁghter. In a number of recent operations,the lack of needed authorities hindered theability of U.S. forces to act swiftly, and theprocess to get appropriate authorities hasoften taken months to achieve.
Recent• Increasing Freedom of Action.
operations also reinforce the need to increase
the freedom of action and the range ofoptions available to the United States, aswell as its allies and partners, to address the
security challenges of the 21st century. The
ability of U.S. and allied forces to conduct
operations in land-locked Afghanistan only
weeks after the 9/11 attacks demonstrated
the value of operational readiness and global
reach. Building partnership capacity andstrengthening alliances to defeat terrorist
networks is an example of how the UnitedStates can strengthen freedom of action at thestrategic level. The QDR proposes measures
to increase both strategic and operational
freedom of action by combining a moreindirect approach, stealth, persistence, ﬂexible
basing and strategic reach.
18• Shifting Cost Balances. For a few hundred
thousand dollars and the lives of nineteen
terrorists, on September 11, 2001, al Qaida
murdered some 3,000 people and inﬂicted
enormous economic costs on the UnitedStates. In confronting the range of security
challenges it will face in the 21st century,
the United States must constantly strive tominimize its own costs in terms of lives andtreasure, while imposing unsustainable costs
on its adversaries. The United States, NATO,other allies and partners can impose costs by
taking actions and making investments thatcomplicate an adversary’s decision-making or
promote self-defeating actions. Eﬀective costimposing strategies also heighten an adversary’s
sense of uncertainty, potentially creatinginternal ﬁssures in its leadership. Sustaining
America’s scientiﬁc and technologicaladvantages over any potential competitor
contributes to the nation’s ability to dissuade
future forms of military competition.
The Department applied these lessons over thecourse of the QDR as it identiﬁed changes to themix of joint capabilities and the enterprise-widereforms needed to ﬁght the long war.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

OPERATIONALIZINGTHE STRATEGYThe National Defense Strategy, published in
March 2005, provides the strategic foundationof the QDR. The strategy acknowledges that
although the U.S. military maintains considerable
advantages in traditional forms of warfare, thisrealm is not the only, or even the most likely, one
in which adversaries will challenge the UnitedStates during the period immediately ahead.
Enemies are more likely to pose asymmetricthreats, including irregular, catastrophic anddisruptive challenges. Some, such as non-state
actors, will choose irregular warfare – including
terrorism, insurgency or guerrilla warfare – inan attempt to break our will through protracted
conﬂict. Some states, and some non-state actors,
will pursue WMD to intimidate others or murder
hundreds of thousands of people. Finally, somestates may seek capabilities designed to disrupt ornegate traditional U.S. military advantages.
To operationalize the National Defense Strategy,
the Department’s senior civilian and militaryleaders identiﬁed four priority areas for
examination during the QDR:
• Defeating terrorist networks.
• Defending the homeland in depth.
• Shaping the choices of countries at strategic
crossroads.
• Preventing hostile states and non-state actors
from acquiring or using WMD.

These inter-related areas illustrated the typesof capabilities and forces needed to address thechallenges described in the National Defense
Strategy. They helped the Department to assessthat strategy and review its force planning
construct.

As the diagram shows, the Department is shiftingits portfolio of capabilities to address irregular,catastrophic and disruptive challenges while sustaining
capabilities to address traditional challenges.

Although these focus areas do not encompass thefull range of military activities the Department
may have to conduct, senior leaders identiﬁedthem as among the most pressing problems the
Department must address. All of them have bothnear-term and long-term implications. In all
four areas, there are immediate measures that canbe put in place to reduce near-term risks whileother measures are being developed to increase
the range of options available in the future.
Strengthening capabilities in these areas will also
improve the versatility of the force to perform awider range of military operations than today.
Senior leaders considered the nature of eachproblem, identiﬁed desired objectives in each area

Quadrennial Defense Review Report19Operationalizing the Strategy

This chapter outlines each of the four focus
areas. It then describes the reﬁnement of the
Department’s force planning construct to betteralign the shape and size of U.S. forces to addressthese new challenges and to conduct the fullrange of military operations.

Common to all of the focus areas is the imperative
to work with other government agencies, allies
and partners and, where appropriate, to help
them increase their capacities and capabilities andthe ability to work together. In all cases, the four
focus areas require the application of multiple
elements of national power and close cooperation
with international allies and partners. The
Department cannot solve these problems alone.
The QDR proposes, therefore, that the UnitedStates strengthen existing alliances and develop
new partnerships to address common threats.
Through these partnerships, the Department
can assist others in developing the wherewithal
to protect their own populations and police theirown territories, as well as to project and sustain
forces to promote collective security.

Defeating Terrorist Networks

Photo by Sergeant Jeremy Clawson, U.S. Army.

and developed approaches for achieving thoseobjectives. The focus areas helped to identify
the capabilities that are needed to continue thereorientation of the joint force over time. Thesechanges will not occur all at once, but will be partof a process of continuous change.

“The jihad movement must adopt its planon the basis of controlling a piece of land in
the heart of the Islamic world on which it
could establish and protect the state of Islamand launch its battle to restore the rational
caliphate based on the traditions of the prophet.”- Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2001
An Army reservist with the Herat Provisional
Reconstruction Team visits children at a local orphanage.
Working on Provincial Reconstruction Teams alongsidepersonnel from the U.S. State Department, NATO andother allies, U.S. forces are bringing a sense of normalcy
to remote areas of Afghanistan.

20

The rise of global non-state terrorist networks
is one of the deﬁning characteristics of the last
decade. The enemies we face are not traditional
conventional military forces, but rather
distributed multi-national and multi-ethnic
networks of terrorists. These networks seek tobreak the will of nations that have joined the ﬁght
alongside the United States by attacking their
populations. Terrorist networks use intimidation,
propaganda and indiscriminate violence in an
attempt to subjugate the Muslim world undera radical theocratic tyranny. These networks
also aim to exhaust the will of the United Statesand its allies and partners, including those in
the Muslim world, to oppose them. Terrorist
networks seek ever deadlier means, including
nuclear and biological weapons, to commit massmurder.

For the past several decades, al Qaida and its
associated movements have focused their eﬀorts
on their “near enemy”: moderate governments

Quadrennial Defense Review Reportthroughout the greater Middle East. In the
1990s, they shifted toward attacking their “farenemy”: the United States and other western
powers – in an attempt to change the characterof the conﬂict, galvanize pan-Islamic support,
bleed the United States (as the Mujahideen had
done to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during
the 1980s), and weaken Western support for
Middle Eastern governments. They use terrorist
attacks to perturb the international community
and trigger actions that could strengthen theirposition and move them closer toward theirobjectives.
Such terrorist networks oppose globalizationand the expansion of freedom it brings.
Paradoxically, they use the very instruments ofglobalization – the unfettered ﬂow of informationand ideas, goods and services, capital, people
and technology – as their preferred means ofattack. They target symbols of modernity likeskyscrapers with civilian jetliners used as missiles.
They exploit the Internet as a cyber-sanctuary,which enables the transfer of funds and the crosstraining of geographically isolated cells. They use
cell phones and text messaging to order attacks
and detonate car bombs. They send pre-recorded
video messages to sympathetic media outlets todistribute their propaganda “free of charge” andto spread their ideology of hate. They encourage
terrorist “startup franchises” around the worldthat conduct attacks in copy-cat fashion. They
depend on 24/7 news cycles for the publicity
they seek to attract new recruits. They plan toattack targets from safe-houses half a world away.
They seek weapons of mass destruction fromtransnational proliferation networks.

Photo by Staﬀ Sergeant Kevin Wastler, U.S. Army.

Operationalizing the Strategy

A U.S. soldier questions an Iraqi man on a rooftop
during a nighttime raid at the location of a known
terrorist in Mosul, Iraq. Apprehending terrorists isvital for security and stability in Iraq.

Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan are crucial
battlegrounds in this war, but the struggle extends
far beyond their borders and may well be fought indozens of other countries simultaneously and formany years to come. Al Qaida and its associatedmovements operate in more than 80 countries.
They have conducted attacks around theworld – in New York, Washington, D.C., Jakarta,Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London, Islamabad,
New Delhi, Moscow, Nairobi, Dar Es Salaam,Casablanca, Tunis, Riyadh, Sharm el-Sheikh, andAmman – killing ordinary people of all faiths andethnicities alike. They exploit poorly governedareas of the world, taking sanctuary where stateslack the capacity or the will to police themselves.
State sponsors such as Iran and Syria provide yet
another form of safe haven. Increasingly, in manystates in the developing world, terrorist networks
pose a greater threat than external threats.
Victory will come when the enemy’s extremist
ideologies are discredited in the eyes of their
host populations and tacit supporters, becoming
unfashionable, and following other discredited

Quadrennial Defense Review Report21

Operationalizing the Strategy

creeds, such as Communism and Nazism, into
oblivion. This requires the creation of a global
environment inhospitable to terrorism.
Itrequires legitimate governments with the capacity
to police themselves and to deny terrorists the
sanctuary and the resources they need to survive.
It also will require support for the establishmentof eﬀective representative civil societies aroundthe world, since the appeal of freedom is thebest long-term counter to the ideology of theextremists. The ultimate aim is that terrorist
networks will no longer have the ability or support
to strike globally and catastrophically, and theirability to strike regionally will be outweighed by
the capacity and resolve of local governments to
defeat them.
Just as these enemies cannot defeat the UnitedStates militarily, they cannot be defeated solely
through military force. The United States, its
allies and partners, will not win this long war ina great battle of annihilation. Victory can only
be achieved through the patient accumulationof quiet successes and the orchestration of allelements of national and international power.
U.S. military forces are contributing and willcontinue to contribute to wider government andinternational eﬀorts to defend the homeland,
attack and disrupt terrorist networks, andcounter ideological support for terrorism overtime. But broad cooperation, across the entire
U.S. Government, society, and with NATO,other allies, and partners is essential.
This war is both a battle of arms and a battle ofideas – a ﬁght against terrorist networks and against
their murderous ideology. The Department
22of Defense fully supports eﬀorts to counter theideology of terrorism, although most of the U.S.
Government’s capabilities for this activity residein other U.S. Government agencies and in theprivate sector. It is important, however, that the
Department continues to improve its ability tounderstand and engage with key audiences. The
Department will work closely with interagency
partners to integrate strategic communication
into U.S. national security policy planning andoperations. The battle of ideas ultimately will
be won by enabling moderate Muslim leadershipto prevail in their struggle against the violent
extremists.
The United States, its allies and partners must
maintain the oﬀensive by relentlessly ﬁnding,
attacking and disrupting terrorist networks
worldwide. They must increase global pressure
on terrorist networks by denying them sanctuary
in both the physical and information domains.
They will continue to survey, inﬁltrate and attack
the enemy’s global networks and to perturb those
networks. Such eﬀorts will yield actionable
intelligence that can be operationally exploitedwith follow-on actions combining military andnon-military measures directed against the visible
parts of the enemy’s network as a means to reachwhat is hidden. There is, however, no “one sizeﬁts all” approach, no “silver bullet.” To achieve
global eﬀects across countries, regions andgroups, the United States must localize and defeat
terrorist extremist cells with approaches that are
tailored to local conditions and diﬀerentiatedworldwide. Doing so will help to disaggregate
the global network and sever transnational links.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

Photo by Technical Sergeant DavidD. Underwood, Jr., U.S. Air Force.

and can thereby more eﬀectively ﬁght terrorist
networks. Setting security conditions for the
expansion of civil society and the rule of law is arelated element of this approach.
“In the absence of…popular support, the mujahedmovement would be crushed in the shadows…”– Ayman al-Zawahiri, July 2005

A Senegalese squad practices maneuvers during small
unit training exercises which are part of the Trans Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), the U.S.
Government’s long-term interagency plan to combat
terrorism in northern Africa.

Long-duration, complex operations involving
the U.S. military, other government agencies
and international partners will be waged
simultaneously in multiple countries around theworld, relying on a combination of direct (visible)
and indirect (clandestine) approaches. Above all,they will require persistent surveillance and vastly
better intelligence to locate enemy capabilities andpersonnel. They will also require global mobility,
rapid strike, sustained unconventional warfare,
foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, andcounterinsurgency capabilities.
Maintaining
a long-term, low-visibility presence in many
areas of the world where U.S. forces do not
traditionally operate will be required. Building
and leveraging partner capacity will also be an
absolutely essential part of this approach, andthe employment of surrogates will be a necessary
method for achieving many goals. Working
indirectly with and through others, and thereby
denying popular support to the enemy, will help
to transform the character of the conﬂict. In
many cases, U.S. partners will have greater local
knowledge and legitimacy with their own people

Consistent with this approach, defeating terrorist
networks highlights the need for the following
types of capabilities:• Human intelligence to discern the intentionsof the enemy.
• Persistent surveillance to ﬁnd and precisely
target enemy capabilities in denied areas.
• Capabilities to locate, tag and track terrorists
in all domains, including cyberspace.
• Special operations forces to conduct direct action, foreign internal defense, counterterrorist
operations and unconventional warfare.
• Multipurpose forces to train, equip, and advise
indigenous forces; deploy and engage withpartner nations; conduct irregular warfare;and support security, stability, transition, andreconstruction operations.
• Capabilities and organizations to help fuseintelligence and operations to speed action
based on time-sensitive intelligence.
• Language and cultural awareness to facilitate
the expansion of partner capacity.
• Non-lethal capabilities.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report23

Operationalizing the Strategy• Urban warfare capabilities.
• Prompt global strike to attack ﬂeeting enemy
targets rapidly.
• Riverine warfare capabilities to improve theability of U.S. forces to work with the security
forces of partner countries to deny terroristgroups the use of waterways.
• The ability to communicate U.S. actions effectively to multiple audiences, while rapidly
countering enemy agitation and propaganda.
• Joint coordination, procedures, systems and,
when necessary, command and control to planand conduct complex interagency operations.
• Broad, ﬂexible authorities to enable theUnited States to rapidly develop the capacityof nations to participate eﬀectively in disrupting and defeating terrorist networks.

Defending the Homeland in Depth
Throughout much of its history, the UnitedStates enjoyed a geographic position of strategic
insularity. The oceans and uncontested borders
permitted rapid economic growth and allowed
the United States to spend little at home todefend against foreign threats. The adventof long-range bombers and missiles, nuclear
weapons, and more recently of terrorist groups
with global reach, fundamentally changed
the relationship between U.S. geography andsecurity. Geographic insularity no longer confers
security for the country.

24

Globalization
enablesmany
positive
developments such as the free movement of
capital, goods and services, information, people
and technology, but it is also accelerating thetransmission of disease, the transfer of advanced
weapons, the spread of extremist ideologies, themovement of terrorists and the vulnerability ofmajor economic segments. The U.S. populace,territory and infrastructure, as well as its assets
in space, may be increasingly vulnerable to theseand a variety of other threats, including weaponsof mass destruction, missile and other air threats,
and electronic or cyber-attacks.
Globalization also empowers small groups andindividuals. Nation-states no longer have amonopoly over the catastrophic use of violence.
Today, small teams or even single individuals canweaponize chemical, biological and even crude
radiological or nuclear devices and use them tomurder hundreds of thousands of people. Looselyorganized and with few assets of their own toprotect, non-state enemies are considerably morediﬃcult than nation-states to deter throughtraditional military means. Non-state enemies
could attempt to attack a wide range of targets
including government facilities; commercial
and ﬁnancial systems; cultural and historicallandmarks; food, water, and power supplies; andinformation, transport, and energy networks.
They will employ unconventional means
to penetrate homeland defenses and exploit
the very nature of western societies – theiropenness – to attack their citizens, economic
institutions, physical infrastructure and social
fabric.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

The threat to the U.S. homeland, however, isbroader than that posed by terrorists. Hostile
states could also attack the United States using
WMD delivered by missiles or by less familiar
means such as commercial shipping or generalaviation. They could attack surreptitiously
through surrogates. Some hostile states are
pursuing advanced weapons of mass destruction,
including genetically engineered biological
warfare agents that can overcome today’s defenses.
There is also a danger that the WMD capabilities
of some states could fall into the hands of, or be
given to, terrorists who could use them to attack
the United States.
As set forth in the Defense Department’s
National Maritime Security Policy and in theStrategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,
the Department’s strategic goal for homeland
defense is to secure the United States from direct
attack. To achieve this goal, the Department
will work as part of an interagency eﬀort, with
the Department of Homeland Security andother Federal, state and local agencies, to address
threats to the U.S. homeland. The Department
will maintain a deterrent posture to persuade
potential aggressors that their objectives inattacking would be denied and that any attack
on U.S. territory, people, critical infrastructure(including through cyberspace) or forces could
result in an overwhelming response. U.S. forcesmust be capable of defeating threats at a distanceand of swiftly mitigating the consequences of an
attack. Capabilities to mitigate attacks on the
U.S. homeland may also play a role in responding
to natural disasters, as the response to Hurricane
Katrina demonstrated. Over time, the goal is thatthe capacity of other agencies and state and local
governments to respond to domestic incidents
will be suﬃcient to perform their assigned
responsibilities with minimal reliance on U.S.
military support. To that end, the Department
will develop concepts of operations to leverage
its strengths in areas such as planning, training
and command and control, in support of its
interagency homeland security partners.
Photo by Airman Jeremy L. Grisham, U.S. Air Force.

“The need [is] to inﬂict the maximum casualties
against the opponent, for this is the language
understood by the west, no matter how
much time and eﬀort such operations take.”– Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2001.

A National Guard multi-purpose utility truck fords
Hurricane Katrina ﬂoodwaters to bring supplies tovictims in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.

Protecting the U.S. homeland requires anactive and layered defense strategy. The strategyemphasizes partnerships with neighboring states
and allies, as well as with other Federal, state andlocal agencies. The Department’s Strategy forHomeland Defense and Civil Support identiﬁes
three diﬀerent roles it plays: leading Departmentspeciﬁc assigned missions; supporting otheragencies; and helping to enable partners.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report25

Operationalizing the Strategy

Lead. At the direction of the President or the
Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense
executes military missions that dissuade, deteror defeat external attacks upon the UnitedStates, its population, and its defense criticalinfrastructure.
The Department plays an important role inidentifying and characterizing threats at theearliest possible time so that, where possible,
they can be prevented, disrupted, interdicted,
or otherwise defeated. In the air domain,
the Department has primary responsibility
for defending U.S. airspace and protecting
the nation’s air approaches. In the maritime
approaches, the Department works alongside theDepartment of Homeland Security to integrate
U.S. maritime defense – optimizing the mutually
supporting capabilities of the U.S. Navy and the
U.S. Coast Guard. Forward deployed naval assets
work with other agencies to identify, track, andintercept threats before they threaten the UnitedStates. The Department remains prepared toreinforce the defense of the land approaches tothe United States if directed by the President.
Through its deterrent force posture andcapabilities, the Department seeks to convince
adversaries that they cannot achieve theirobjectives through attacks on the U.S. homeland,
and that any attack will prompt a swift response.
U.S. forces are prepared to: intercept anddefeat threats against U.S. territory, within U.S.
territorial waters and airspace, and at a distancefrom the homeland; protect against and mitigate
the consequences of any attack; and / or conduct
military operations in response to any attack. The
26

Department has begun deploying interceptors toprotect the U.S. homeland from ballistic missile
attack. It is taking steps to ensure it can continue
to perform its assigned duties during or after anattack. It ensures the nation’s ability to respond to
an attack by protecting its forces and the defensecritical infrastructure necessary to project powerand sustain operations.
Support. At the direction of the President or
Secretary of Defense, the Department supports
civil authorities for designated law enforcement
and / or other activities and as part of acomprehensive national response to prevent andprotect against terrorist incidents or to recoverfrom an attack or a disaster. As discussed,
the Department’s substantial humanitarian
contributions to relief eﬀorts in the aftermathsof Hurricanes Katrina and Rita fall into thiscategory. In the future, should other catastrophes
overwhelm civilian capacity, the Department may
be called upon to respond rapidly with additional
resources as part of an overall U.S. Government
eﬀort. In order to respond eﬀectively to futurecatastrophic events, the Department will provide
U.S. NORTHCOM with authority to stage forcesand equipment domestically prior to potential
incidents when possible. The Department will
also seek to eliminate current legislative ceilings
on pre-event spending.
Enable. The Department seeks to improve thehomeland defense and consequence management
capabilities of its national and international
partners and to improve the Department’s
capabilities by sharing information, expertiseand technology as appropriate across military

Quadrennial Defense Review Reportand civilian boundaries. The Department does
this by leveraging its comparative advantages inplanning, training, command and control andexercising and by developing trust and conﬁdence
through shared training and exercises. Successful
homeland defense requires standardizing
operational concepts, developing compatible
technology solutions and coordinating planning.
Toward that end, the Department will workwith the Department of Homeland Security andwith state and local governments to improvehomeland security capabilities and cooperation.
Working together will improve interagency
planning and scenario development and enhanceinteroperability through experimentation, testing
and training exercises.
Overall, consistent with the National Maritime
Security Policy and the Strategy for Homeland
Defense and Civil Support, defending thehomeland in depth and mitigating theconsequences of attacks highlight the need forthe following types of capabilities:• Joint command and control for homeland
defense and civil support missions, including
communications and command and control
systems that are interoperable with otheragencies and state and local governments.
• Air and maritime domain awareness capabilities to provide increased situational awarenessand shared information on potential threats
through rapid collection, fusion and analysis.
• Capabilities to manage the consequences ofmajor catastrophic events.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rdClass Jay C. Pugh, U.S. Navy.

Operationalizing the Strategy

U.S. Navy Search and Rescue personnel retrieve an
evacuee victim of Hurricane Katrina from a rooftop
in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Navy’s involvementin the humanitarian assistance operations is led by theFederal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in
conjunction with the Department of Defense.

• Broad spectrum medical countermeasures
to defend against genetically engineered or
naturally mutating pathogens for which there
are no current defenses.
• Tailored deterrence, including prompt global
strike capabilities to defend and respond in an
overwhelming manner against WMD attacks,
and air and missile defenses, as well as otherdefensive measures, to deter attacks by demonstrating the ability to deny an adversary’s
objectives.
• New or expanded authorities to improve access to Guard and reserve forces for use in theevent of a man-made or natural disaster.

Shaping the Choices of Countries
at Strategic Crossroads
The choices that major and emerging powers
make will aﬀect the future strategic position andfreedom of action of the United States, its allies
and partners. The United States will attempt to

Quadrennial Defense Review Report27

Operationalizing the Strategy

shape these choices in ways that foster cooperationand mutual security interests. At the same time,
the United States, its allies and partners mustalso hedge against the possibility that a majoror emerging power could choose a hostile pathin the future. The pursuit of exclusionary or
coercive policies and the development of highend military capabilities that target U.S. orcoalition forces are of particular concern.
Beyond Europe and the Asia-Paciﬁc region, theMiddle East, Central Asia and Latin America arein ﬂux and represent new geo-strategic crossroads.
The United States will seek to shape not only the
choices of countries in those regions, but choicesof countries outside them that have interests or
ambitions within them.
Many countries in the Middle East ﬁnd themselves
at strategic crossroads. Democracy is emerging in
Iraq, giving political voice to people who suﬀered
for decades under a ruthless tyranny. Freedom isalso taking root in Lebanon. Libya has decided
to give up its nuclear program. Many countries
in the region are acting in partnership with theUnited States to combat terrorist networks.
Although positive developments have been
made, the region remains volatile. Many states
continue to face internal security threats. The
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by Iranis a destabilizing factor in the region. Terrorist
networks remain active in many states and could
threaten regional energy supplies in an attempt
to cripple the global economy.
The countries of Central Asia have emerged fromdecades of Communist rule, but some countries
28

still have a long way to go toward adopting
basic political liberties and free markets. Statesin the region face the threat of Islamist terrorist
extremism. The energy resources of the region
oﬀer both an opportunity for economic
development, as well as a danger that outside
powers may seek to gain inﬂuence over thoseresources.
In Latin America, there has been steady progress
toward political and economic development overthe past several decades. Still, slow economic
growth, weak democratic institutions andcontinuing stark economic inequality have led
to a resurgence of populist authoritarian politicalmovements in some countries, such as Venezuela.
These movements threaten the gains achieved andare a source of political and economic instability.
Beyond these regions, the choices of major andemerging powers, including India, Russia andChina, will be key factors in determining theinternational security environment of the 21st
century.
India is emerging as a great power and a key
strategic partner. On July 18, 2005 the President
and Indian Prime Minister declared their resolve
to transform the U.S.-India relationship into a
global partnership that will provide leadershipin areas of mutual concern and interest. Sharedvalues as long-standing, multi-ethnic democracies
provide the foundation for continued andincreased strategic cooperation and represent an
important opportunity for our two countries.
Russia remains a country in transition. It is

Quadrennial Defense Review Reportunlikely to pose a military threat to the UnitedStates or its allies on the same scale or intensity as
the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Where
possible, the United States will cooperate with
Russia on shared interests such as countering theproliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
combating terrorism, and countering thetraﬃcking of narcotics. The United States remains
concerned about the erosion of democracy inRussia, the curtailment of non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs) and freedom of the press,
the centralization of political power and limits
on economic freedom. Internationally, theUnited States welcomes Russia as a constructive
partner but views with increasing concern its
sales of disruptive weapons technologies abroad
and actions that compromise the political andeconomic independence and territorial integrityof other states.
Of the major and emerging powers, China has
the greatest potential to compete militarily
with the United States and ﬁeld disruptive
military technologies that could over time oﬀset
traditional U.S. military advantages absent U.S.
counter strategies. U.S. policy remains focusedon encouraging China to play a constructive,
peaceful role in the Asia-Paciﬁc region and toserve as a partner in addressing common security
challenges, including terrorism, proliferation,
narcotics and piracy. U.S. policy seeks toencourage China to choose a path of peaceful
economic growth and political liberalization,rather than military threat and intimidation. The
United States’ goal is for China to continue as an
economic partner and emerge as a responsible
stakeholder and force for good in the world.

DoD Photo.

Operationalizing the Strategy

A Tomahawk Land Attack Missile is launched fromthe USS Florida during Giant Shadow, a U.S. Navyexperimental exercise. The USS Florida is one of four
nuclear ballistic missile submarines being converted
to conventional-warhead guided missile submarines.
After conversion, the submarines will be able to launchTomahawk Missiles, Unmanned Underwater and Aerial
Vehicles and Special Forces personnel and equipment.

China continues to invest heavily in its military,
particularly in its strategic arsenal and capabilities
designed to improve its ability to project power
beyond its borders. Since 1996, China has
increased its defense spending by more than
10% in real terms in every year except 2003.
Secrecy, moreover, envelops most aspects ofChinese security aﬀairs. The outside world has
little knowledge of Chinese motivations anddecision-making or of key capabilities supporting
its military modernization. The United Statesencourages China to take actions to make its
intentions clear and clarify its military plans.
Chinese military modernization has accelerated
since the mid-to-late 1990s in response to central
leadership demands to develop military options
against Taiwan scenarios. The pace and scope ofChina’s military build-up already puts regional
military balances at risk. China is likely tocontinue making large investments in high-end,
asymmetric military capabilities, emphasizing
electronic and cyber-warfare; counter-space

Quadrennial Defense Review Report29

Operationalizing the Strategy

The United States will work to ensure that all
major and emerging powers are integrated as
constructive actors and stakeholders into theinternational system. It will also seek to ensurethat no foreign power can dictate the terms ofregional or global security. It will attempt todissuade any military competitor from developing
disruptive or other capabilities that could enableregional hegemony or hostile action against
the United States or other friendly countries,
and it will seek to deter aggression or coercion.
Should deterrence fail, the United States would
deny a hostile power its strategic and operational
objectives.
Shaping the choices of major and emerging
powers requires a balanced approach, one thatseeks cooperation but also creates prudent hedges
against the possibility that cooperative approaches
by themselves may fail to preclude future conﬂict.
A successful hedging strategy requires improving
the capacity of partner states and reducing
their vulnerabilities. In this regard, the UnitedStates will work to achieve greater integration30

of defensive systems among its international
partners in ways that would complicate any
adversary’s eﬀorts to decouple them. The UnitedStates will work with allies and partners tointegrate intelligence sensors, communication
networks, information systems, missile defenses,
undersea warfare and counter-mine warfare
capabilities. It will seek to strengthen partner
nations’ capabilities to defend themselves andwithstand attack, including against ambiguous
coercive threats.
Photo by Master Sergeant Val
Gempis, U.S. Air Force.

operations; ballistic and cruise missiles; advanced
integrated air defense systems; next generation
torpedoes; advanced submarines; strategic
nuclear strike from modern, sophisticated landand sea-based systems; and theater unmanned
aerial vehicles for employment by the Chinese
military and for global export. These capabilities,
the vast distances of the Asian theater, China’s
continental depth, and the challenge of en routeand in-theater U.S. basing place a premium on
forces capable of sustained operations at great
distances into denied areas.

An F-15 Eagle pilot assigned as an exchange oﬃcer to
Nyutabaru Air Base, Japan (right) discusses tactics witha Japan Air Self Defense Force F-15 pilot (left) before a
mission. The U.S. alliance with Japan is important tothe stability in the Asia-Paciﬁc region.

To dissuade major and emerging powers fromdeveloping capabilities that could threaten
regional stability, to deter conﬂict, and to defeat
aggression should deterrence fail, the UnitedStates is further diversifying its basing posture.
Based on the Department’s Global Defense
Posture Review, the United States will continue toadapt its global posture to promote constructive
bilateral relations, mitigate anti-access threats
and oﬀset potential political coercion designed tolimit U.S. access to any region. The United States
will develop capabilities that would present any
adversary with complex and multidimensional
challenges and complicate its oﬀensive planning

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

eﬀorts. These include the pursuit of investmentsthat capitalize on enduring U.S. advantages
in key strategic and operational areas, such as
persistent surveillance and long-range strike,stealth, operational maneuver and sustainmentof air, sea and ground forces at strategic distances,
air dominance and undersea warfare. These
capabilities should preserve U.S. freedom ofaction and provide future Presidents with an
expanded set of options to address all of the QDR
focus areas and a wide range of potential futurecontingencies. The aim is to possess suﬃcientcapability to convince any potential adversarythat it cannot prevail in a conﬂict and thatengaging in conﬂict entails substantial strategicrisks beyond military defeat.
Consistent with this approach, shaping the
choices of countries at strategic crossroads
highlights the need for the following types ofcapabilities:• Security cooperation and engagement activities including joint training exercises, seniorstaﬀ talks, and oﬃcer and foreign internal

defense training to increase understanding,strengthen allies and partners, and accurately
communicate U.S. objectives and intent. This
will require both new authorities and 21st century mechanisms for the interagency process.
• Considerably improved language and culturalawareness to develop a greater understanding of emerging powers and how they may
approach strategic choices.
• Persistent surveillance, including systems thatcan penetrate and loiter in denied or contested
areas.
• The
capability
todeployrapidly,assemble, command, project, reconstitute, andre-employ joint combat power from all
domains to facilitate assured access.
• Prompt and high-volume global strike todeter aggression or coercion, and if deterrence fails, to provide a broader rangeof conventional response options to the
President.
This will require broader
authorities from the Congress.

Photo by Master Sergeant John
E. Kennedy, U.S. Air Force.

• Secure broadband communications into
denied or contested areas to support
penetrating surveillance and strike systems.
• Integrated defenses against short-, intermediate-, and intercontinental-range ballistic andcruise missile systems.
U.S. Air National Guard personnel familiarize their
Polish counterparts with aspects of the F-16 Fighting
Falcon during the U.S. European Command exercise
Sentry White Falcon 2005. In 2006, the Polish Air
Force will begin receiving delivery of 48 F-16 Fighting
Falcons they purchased to begin replacing their Sovietmade MiG ﬁghters as the country modernizes its
military to NATO standards.

• Air dominance capabilities to defeat advanced
threats.
• Undersea warfare capabilities to exploit stealth

Quadrennial Defense Review Report31Operationalizing the Strategy

and enhance deterrence.
• Capabilities to shape and defend cyberspace.
• Joint command and control capabilities thatare survivable in the face of WMD-, electronic-, or cyber-attacks.

Preventing the Acquisition or Useof Weapons of Mass Destruction
During the Cold War, the main challenge facing
the United States was deterring the former Soviet
Union from using weapons of mass destruction(WMD) against the United States and its allies.
Today, the United States faces a greater danger
from an expanding number of hostile regimes
and terrorist groups that seek to acquire anduse WMD. These actors may not respond to
traditional tools and concepts of deterrence.
A number of potentially hostile states possess
or seek weapons of mass destruction. For thesestates, WMD – particularly nuclear weapons– provide the means to assert regional hegemony
and intimidate others. They may brandish
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons toensure regime survival, deny the United Statesaccess to critical areas, or deter others from taking
action against them. Even when they do notpose a direct military threat to the United States,
these states may threaten the United States or
its allies indirectly by transferring weapons orexpertise to terrorists. North Korea has pursued
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons andhas developed and sold weapons, including
long-range missiles, to other states of concern.
32

Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities, support
for terrorism, and threatening statements about
regional neighbors raise similar concerns about its
intentions. Iran is rapidly developing long-range
delivery systems and a full nuclear fuel cycle thatwould enable it to produce nuclear weapons.
“Israel must be wiped oﬀ the map. And
God willing, with the force of God behindit, we shall soon experience a world
without the United States and Zionism.”
Iranian President Ahmadinejad, October 2005

In the event of a conﬂict, WMD-armed states
could use their weapons against the United States
or its allies preemptively, during conﬂict or toslow follow-on stabilization eﬀorts. In somecases, states could have hundreds of suspectfacilities and storage sites that would need to
be secured, searched and remediated following
the end of combat. Such operations could
overwhelm stabilization eﬀorts.
Several other WMD-armed states, although notnecessarily hostile to the United States, could
face the possibility of internal instability andloss of control over their weapons. The lack ofeﬀective governance in many parts of the worldcontributes to the WMD danger, providing
opportunities for terrorist organizations toacquire or harbor WMD. The prospect that a
nuclear-capable state may lose control of someof its weapons to terrorists is one of the greatest
dangers the United States and its allies face.
Technological trends heighten the threat.
Nuclear weapons, sophisticated and/or bioengineered biological agents, and non-traditional

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

chemical agents – once the sole purview oflarge, complex state weapons programs – will
be within reach of a growing number of actors
in the coming decades. Technological advances
and widely distributed technical information are
making ever more dangerous weapons easier toproduce. At the same time, expanded relianceon sophisticated electronic technologies by theUnited States, its allies and partners increases
their vulnerability to the destructive eﬀects ofelectromagnetic pulse (EMP) – the energy burst
given oﬀ during a nuclear weapon explosion. The
eﬀect of a nuclear blast could be catastrophic toboth military forces and the civilian population.
It is extremely diﬃcult to collect reliable
intelligence on WMD programs and activities,
which are closely guarded secrets. The prevalenceof dual-use technologies and legitimate civilian
applications means nuclear, chemical andbiological research eﬀorts are easy to conceal anddiﬃcult to detect and monitor. Based on thedemonstrated ease with which uncooperative
states and non-state actors can conceal WMD
programs and related activities, the UnitedStates, its allies and partners must expect further
intelligence gaps and surprises.
It is in this environment that terrorists –including Osama bin Laden and his associates– seek to acquire these catastrophic weapons andtechnologies, preying on vulnerable governments,
ungoverned
territories
andsusceptible
individuals. They beneﬁt from determined
proliferators and criminal enterprises that seek
to traﬃc in catastrophic technologies and that
continue to aid and abet them.

Posted Monday, January 11, 1999
TIME Reporter: “The U.S. says you are trying toacquire chemical and nuclear weapons.”
Osama bin Laden: “Acquiring weapons for the
defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I haveindeed acquired these weapons, then I thank
God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek toacquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty.
It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess
the weapons that would prevent the inﬁdels frominﬂicting harm on Muslims.”
The principal objective of the United States isto prevent hostile states or non-state actors fromacquiring WMD. This involves diplomaticand economic measures, but it can also involve
active measures and the use of military force
to deny access to materials, interdict transfers,
and disrupt production programs.
For
example, in October 2003, German and Italianauthorities, acting under the framework of theProliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and basedon information provided by the United States,
stopped a shipment of advanced centrifuge parts
bound for Libya’s nuclear program. Two months
after confronting Libyan oﬃcials with this new
evidence of an active and illegal nuclear program,
Libya voluntarily agreed to end its WMD andlong-range missile programs. Yet despite suchsuccesses, additional states and some terrorist
organizations may nevertheless acquire WMD in
the coming years.
To address such threats, the United States must
be prepared to deter attacks; locate, tag and track
WMD materials; act in cases where a state thatpossesses WMD loses control of its weapons,
especially nuclear devices; detect WMD acrossQuadrennial Defense Review Report33Operationalizing the Strategy

all domains; sustain operations even while under
WMD attack; help mitigate the consequences of
WMD attacks at home or overseas; and eliminate
WMD materials in peacetime, during combat,
and after conﬂicts. National eﬀorts to counterthe threat posed by weapons of mass destruction
must incorporate both preventive and responsive
dimensions.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2ndClass Aaron Peterson, U.S. Navy.

Preventive Dimension: The United States seeks
to build and expand global partnerships aimed
at preventing proliferation; stopping WMDrelated traﬃcking; helping friendly governments
improve controls over existing weapons, materials
and expertise; and discrediting weapons of mass
destruction as instruments of national power.
Improving the ability to detect, identify, locate,tag and track key WMD assets and development
infrastructure in hostile or denied areas and tointerdict WMD, their delivery systems, andrelated materials in transit are essential to thisapproach. In addition, the United States must
improve its ability to identify and penetratecriminal networks bent on proﬁting from theproliferation of such dangerous weapons andU.S. and Pakistani sailors prepare to conduct boardings
in a simulated maritime interdiction operation. In
2003, international cooperation led to the interdictionof a shipment of centrifuge parts to Libya. Thisaction, combined with Pakistani arrests of A.Q. Khan
network aﬃ liates, helped to successfully shut down thesophisticated black market network.

34

expertise. Multinational eﬀorts such as PSI
provide a model to expand global cooperation toprevent proliferation.
Responsive Dimension: If prevention eﬀorts fail,the United States must be prepared to respond.
An eﬀective response requires that the UnitedStates use all elements of national power, working
with like-minded nations, to locate, secure,and destroy WMD. The United States will
use peaceful and cooperative means wheneverpossible, but will employ force when necessary.
This will require growing emphasis on WMDelimination operations that locate, characterize,
secure, disable and/or destroy a state or nonstate actor’s WMD capabilities and programs ina hostile or uncertain environment. The Military
Departments will organize, train and equip joint
forces for this increasingly important mission.
There are two particularly diﬃcult operational
and technical challenges associated with WMDelimination: detecting ﬁssile material andrendering safe nuclear, chemical and biologicaldevices. This requires the ability to locate, tag
and track ﬁssile materials rapidly, including indenied areas, and to deploy specialized teams
trained to render safe nuclear weapons quickly
anywhere in the world.
Finally, if a WMD attack cannot be prevented,
the Department must be prepared to respond torequests to help mitigate the eﬀects of the attackat the earliest opportunity, initiate or support
ongoing consequence management eﬀorts, andactively support local, state, Federal and allied andpartner authorities. To ensure that its responses

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

to the new WMD threat are considered bothcredible and legitimate, the United States will
work closely with its partners, allies, and othermembers of the international community.
Consistent with this approach, preventing state
or non-state actors from acquiring or using
WMD highlights the need for the following
types of capabilities:

WMD elimination mission.
• The capability to deploy, sustain, protect, support and re-deploy special operations forces inhostile environments.
• The capability to shield critical and vulnerable
systems and technologies from the catastrophic eﬀects of EMP.

Photo by Staﬀ Sergeant Quinton
T. Burris, U.S. Air Force.

• Special operations forces to locate, characterize and secure WMD.
• Capabilities to locate, tag and track WMD,
their delivery systems and related materials,
including the means to move such items.
• Capabilities to detect ﬁssile materials such as
nuclear devices at stand-oﬀ ranges.
• Interdiction capabilities to stop air,maritime, and ground shipments of
WMD, their delivery systems and relatedmaterials.
• Persistent surveillance over wide areas to locate
WMD capabilities or hostile forces.
• Human intelligence, language skills andcultural awareness to understand better theintentions and motivations of potential adversaries and to speed recovery eﬀorts.
• Capabilities and specialized teams to rendersafe and secure WMD.
• Non-lethal weapons to secure WMD sites sothat materials cannot be removed.

A U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman (left) and Departmentof Defense Civilian Equipment Specialist (right) discuss
assembling a Chemical Biological Protective Shelter
during a training session at Camp Coyote, Kuwait. The
Department leverages expertise in all elements of the
Total Force to conduct operations.

Reﬁning the Department’s Force
Planning Construct for Wartime
The four focus areas informed the Department’s
review of the guidance for sizing and shaping the
U.S. Armed Forces. This guidance is commonlyreferred to as the Department’s Force Planning
Construct. Such guidance informs the analysis
that provides a guide to determine both theappropriate size of the force (capacity), as well as
the types of capabilities (forces and equipment)
needed across a range of scenarios.

• Joint command and control tailored for the
Quadrennial Defense Review Report35

Operationalizing the Strategy

The 2001 QDR led the Department to direct the
military to organize, train and equip suﬃcient
forces to defend the U.S. homeland; operate in
and from four forward regions; “swiftly defeat”
adversaries in two overlapping military campaigns
while preserving for the President the option to“win decisively” one of those campaigns; andconduct a limited number of lesser military andhumanitarian contingencies.

• In the post-September 11 world, irregularwarfare has emerged as the dominant formof warfare confronting the United States, its
allies and its partners; accordingly, guidancemust account for distributed, long-duration
operations, including unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stabilization andreconstruction operations.

During this QDR, senior leaders conﬁrmed theimportance of the main elements of that Force
Planning Construct: maintaining the ability to
defend the U.S. homeland; continuing to operate
in and from forward areas; and above all, theimportance of maintaining capabilities and forces
to wage multiple campaigns in an overlapping
time frame – for which there may be little or
no warning of attack. This latter capability inparticular remains a strong deterrent against
opportunistic aggression or attempted coercion.
At the same time, lessons learned from recent
operations suggest the need for some reﬁnementof the construct to take better account of wartime
demands:• For the foreseeable future, steady-state operations, including operations as part of a long
war against terrorist networks, and associatedrotation base and sustainment requirements,
will be the main determinant for sizing U.S.
forces.

• The Department’s homeland defense responsibilities should be more clearly distinguishedfrom the responsibilities of other agencies.
• U.S. forces must continue to operate in forward areas, but operational demands over the
past four years demonstrate the need to operate around the globe and not only in and fromthe four regions called out in the 2001 QDR(Europe, the Middle East, the Asian Littoral,
and Northeast Asia).
36• Consistent with the QDR’s emphasis on prevention, guidance must place greater emphasis
on forces and capabilities needed for deterrence and other peacetime shaping activities.
• Finally, operational end-states deﬁned interms of “swiftly defeating” or “winning decisively” against adversaries may be less usefulfor some types of operations U.S. forces may
be directed to conduct, such as supporting
civil authorities to manage the consequencesof catastrophic, mass casualty events at home,or conducting a long-duration, irregularwarfare campaign against enemies employing
asymmetric tactics.
Based on these considerations, the Department
has reﬁned its Force Planning Construct, dividing
its activities into three objective areas: Homeland
Defense, War on Terror / Irregular (Asymmetric)
Warfare and Conventional Campaigns. In

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2ndClass R.J. Stratchko, U.S. Navy.

each area, it accounts both for activities that the
Department conducts continuously (steadystate) as well as those it conducts episodically(surge). In addition to normal force generation,
sustainment and training activities, this wartime
force planning construct calls for U.S. forces tobe able to:

Photo by Technical Sergeant
Andy Dunaway, U.S. Air Force.

Defend the Homeland

Photo by Master Sergeant Val
Gempis, U.S. Air Force.

• Steady-state – detect, deter, and if necessary,defeat external threats to the U.S. homeland,and enable partners to contribute to U.S.
national security. Examples of such activities
include: routine homeland security training
and exercises with other Federal agencies andstate and local governments; strategic deterrence; routine maritime operations conductedwith the U.S. Coast Guard; North American
air defense, including air sovereignty operations; missile defense; and readiness to provide
support to civil authorities for consequence
management events.
U.S. military forces are deployed around the globe
conducting operations in accordance with theForce Planning Construct reﬁned for wartime. The
amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima sits pierside
in New Orleans, Louisiana, in support of Hurricane
Katrina humanitarian assistance operations. U.S. Armysoldiers and U.S. Marines look for weapons caches andinsurgents near the Syrian border in Iraq. A B-2 Spirit
bomber soars during a deployment to Andersen Air Force
Base, Guam, as part of a rotation that has provided U.S.
Paciﬁc Command a continuous bomber presence in the
Asia-Paciﬁc region. (photos top to bottom)

all cases, the Department should increase its
capabilities to conduct operations against enemies
who employ asymmetric approaches. This reﬁned
Force Planning Construct for wartime describes
the relative level of eﬀort the Department should
devote to each of the three objective areas. In• Surge – contribute to the nation’s responseto and management of the consequences of
WMD attacks or a catastrophic event, such as
Hurricane Katrina, and also to raise the levelof defense responsiveness in all domains (e.g.,air, land, maritime, space and cyberspace) if
directed.
Prevail in the War on Terror and Conduct
Irregular Operations• Steady-state – deter and defend against
external transnational terrorist attacks, enable partners through integrated security

Quadrennial Defense Review Report37Operationalizing the Strategy

cooperation programs, and conduct multiple,
globally distributed irregular operations ofvarying duration. Employ general purpose
forces continuously to interact with allies,
build partner capability, conduct long-duration counter insurgency operations and deter
aggressors through forward presence.
• Surge – conduct a large-scale, potentially longduration irregular warfare campaign including counterinsurgency and security, stability,transition and reconstruction operations. An
example of an irregular surge campaign would
be the current level of eﬀort associated with
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conduct and Win Conventional Campaigns• Steady-state – deter inter-state coercion or
aggression through forward deployed forces,
enable partners through theater security
cooperation, and conduct presence missions.
These activities include day-to-day presence
missions, military-to-military exchanges, combined exercises, security cooperation activities
and normal increases in readiness during theseasonal exercises of potential adversaries.
• Surge – wage two nearly simultaneous conventional campaigns (or one conventional
campaign if already engaged in a large-scale,
long-duration irregular campaign), while
selectively reinforcing deterrence against opportunistic acts of aggression. Be prepared in
one of the two campaigns to remove a hostile
regime, destroy its military capacity and set
conditions for the transition to, or for the
restoration of, civil society.
38This reﬁned force planning construct for
wartime will be used in lieu of the force planningguidance published in the March 2005 National
Defense Strategy. The Department will use thisconstruct as the basis for future analysis of neededcapabilities and forces.
In conducting follow-on analyses and assessments
to determine more fully the implications of
this guidance, U.S. operational and force
planning will consider a somewhat higher levelof contributions from international allies andpartners, as well as other Federal agencies, insurge operations ranging from homeland defense
to irregular warfare and conventional campaigns.
This assumption is consistent with the increased
level of security cooperation and other activities
to enable partners as required by the reﬁned
Force Planning Construct. The construct also
acknowledges that policy decisions, such as
mobilization policies and war aims, may changeover time and have implications for the shape andsize of U.S. forces. Finally, as part of a processof continuous reassessment and improvement,

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportOperationalizing the Strategy

this wartime construct will be further developed
over time to diﬀerentiate among the Military
Departments as to how they should best size andshape their unique force structures, for use by the
Combatant Commanders, since all parts of theconstruct do not apply equally to all capability
portfolios.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

39

40

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

REORIENTING CAPABILITIESAND FORCES
During the QDR, the senior leadership of the
Department considered potential adjustments
to capabilities and forces in light of thefour focus areas and reﬁned Force Planning
Construct. They identiﬁed desired future force
characteristics prior to developing proposals
for the following capability portfolios: joint
ground; special operations forces; joint air; joint
maritime; tailored deterrence; combating WMD;
joint mobility; ISR and space capabilities; netcentricity; and joint command and control.
As part of a process of continuous change, theDepartment’s capabilities and forces will be
reoriented over time to reﬂect these desired
characteristics.
This reorientation builds upon transformationalchanges already underway, shifting the joint
force: from dependence on large, permanent
overseas garrisons toward expeditionary
operations utilizing more austere bases abroad;from focusing primarily on traditional combat
operations toward greater capability to deal withasymmetric challenges; from deconﬂicting joint
operations to integrated and even interdependent
operations – all while massing the cumulative
power of joint forces to achieve synergistic
eﬀects.
Insights derived from a series of complementary
analyses, including the Mobility Capabilities
Study and the Joint Staﬀ’s Operational Availability(OA) Studies, informed capability portfolio
development. The Operational Availability seriesof studies is a four-year ongoing joint analyticaleﬀort to assess force capabilities and capacities
to meet the priorities of the National Defense
Strategy. These analyses helped to identify the
Department’s progress in each capability portfolio
since 2001, gaps in capabilities needed to realize
the future force vision, insights about potential
excess capacity, and future opportunities forinvestment. For example, Operational Availability
assessed the availability of forces prior to, during
and following major combat operations, as wellas to meet routine missions and the increased
demands of the long war. It revealed shortfalls
in capabilities for special operations forces andintelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,
among other capabilities.
Based on the Operational Availability analysis,other related assessments, and extensive seniorleader discussions, the Department concluded
that the size of today’s forces – both the Active
and Reserve Components across the Military
Departments – is appropriate to meet current
and projected operational demands. At thesame time, these analyses highlighted theneed to continue re-balancing the mix of joint
capabilities and forces. This chapter summarizes
recommended changes in the mix of capabilities
and the Department’s resource priorities. The
President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2007 reﬂects
the QDR’s “leading edge” priorities to change
the mix of capabilities in key areas. The fullbudgetary and programmatic implications of the
QDR will be reﬂected in the upcoming budget
cycle.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

41

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Joint Ground Forces

Photo by Staﬀ Sergeant JamesL. Harper Jr., U.S. Air Force.

Vision. Joint ground forces will continue to takeon more of the tasks performed by today’s special
operations forces. The result will be a new breedof warrior able to move more easily between
disparate mission sets while preserving their depthof skill in primary specialties. Future warriors
will be as proﬁcient in irregular operations,
including counterinsurgency and stabilization
operations, as they are today in high-intensity
combat. They will be modular in structure at
all levels, largely self-sustaining, and capableof operating both in traditional formations aswell as disaggregating into smaller, autonomous
units. They will be able to sustain long-duration
irregular operations, while exploiting reachback to non-deployed elements of the force.
They will understand foreign cultures andsocieties and possess the ability to train, mentor
and advise foreign security forces and conduct
counterinsurgency campaigns. They will haveincreased capabilities to conduct time-sensitive
operations, by fusing intelligence and operations
at the tactical level and with larger numbers of
Joint Tactical Air Controllers to achieve a higher
level of joint ground-air integration.

U.S. Army soldiers conduct a patrol in Mosul, Iraq,
in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their Stryker
vehicles enable them to maneuver rapidly in bothurban environments and open terrain.

42

Progress to Date. Consistent with these futureforce characteristics, the Army is signiﬁcantly
expanding its capabilities and capacity for thefull range of military operations, including
irregular warfare and support to security, stability
and transition operations. It is reorganizing
its combat and support forces into modular
brigade-based units – including brigade combat
teams (BCTs) and the support brigades to sustain
them – to increase breadth and depth for thelong war. They are increasing their proﬁciency
in irregular warfare, thereby freeing up somespecial operations forces for more complex
tasks. Tactical and operational headquarters
have been redesigned to support geographically
distributed brigade operations and provide jointcommand and control. In 2004, the Armyterminated the Comanche helicopter program
and reallocated funds to reinvigorate its aviation
capabilities, including unmanned aerial vehicles.
The restructured Future Combat Systems (FCS)
program is accelerating “spin-outs” of advanced
capabilities into the new Army modular forces, aswell as for U.S. SOCOM and the Marine Corps.
The Marine Corps has increased both its capacity
and its capability to conduct irregular warfare.
Since 2001, the Marines Corps has realigned its
force structure to address lessons learned in recent
operations, resulting in a 12% increase in infantry
capacity and related intelligence support toinfantry units, an additional Active Component
rotary wing aircraft squadron, a 25% increase inlight armor units, a 38% increase in reconnaissancecapacity, 50% more Joint Fire Liaison Teams anda 30% increase in reserve intelligence structure.
It has also established Foreign Military Training

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Photos by Technical Sergeant Russell
E. Cooley IV, U.S. Air Force.

Units to train indigenous forces worldwide.
This rebalancing has increased potential Marine
Corps contributions, especially for preventive
actions and irregular warfare operations.
Additionally, the Marine Corps has increased thecapability of the individual Marine to conduct
distributed operations, providing the CombatantCommanders an expeditionary force able toconduct “low-end” SOF missions as well as
traditional operations.

• Continue to rebalance capabilities by creating
modular brigades in all three Army components: 117 in the Regular Army (42 BCTs
and 75 support brigades); 106 in the Army
National Guard (28 BCTs and 78 support
brigades); and 58 support brigades in the U.S.
Army Reserve. This equates to a 46 percent
increase in readily available combat power anda better balance between combat and support
forces.
• Transform Army units and headquarters tomodular designs.
• Incorporate FCS improvements into themodular force through a spiral development
eﬀort that will introduce new technologies as
they are developed.
• Expand the Air Force Joint Tactical Air Control program by jointly training personnel for
air/ground operations and use of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles.

Photos by Technical Sergeant
Andy Dunaway, U.S. Air Force.

QDR Decisions. To achieve future joint groundforce characteristics and build on progress todate, the Department will:

The small, tactical Raven unmanned aerial vehicle
is an example of UAVs being employed by groundforces to provide persistent, remote surveillance andreconnaissance for U.S. forces beyond their line of sight.
This Raven pictured at bottom is used to identify anddeter the placement of improvised explosive devices on
Route Trans-Am, Iraq.

• Stabilize the Army’s end strength at 482,400
Active and 533,000 Reserve Component
personnel by Fiscal Year 2011.
• Stabilize the Marine Corps’ end strength at
175,000 Active and 39,000 Reserve Component personnel by Fiscal Year 2011.

Special Operations Forces (SOF)
Vision. The future special operations force
will be rapidly deployable, agile, ﬂexible andtailorable to perform the most demanding

Quadrennial Defense Review Report43and sensitive missions worldwide. As general
purpose joint ground forces take on tasks thatSpecial Operations Forces (SOF) currently
perform, SOF will increase their capacity toperform more demanding and specialized tasks,
especially long-duration, indirect and clandestine
operations in politically sensitive environments
and denied areas. For direct action, they will
possess an expanded organic ability to locate,tag and track dangerous individuals and otherhigh-value targets globally. SOF will also havegreater capacity to detect, locate and render safe
WMD. For unconventional warfare and training
foreign forces, future SOF will have the capacity
to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously.
SOF will have increased ability to train andwork with partners, employ surrogates, operateclandestinely and sustain a larger posturewith lower visibility. SOF will sustain current
language and cultural skills while increasing
regional proﬁciency speciﬁc to key geographic
operational areas: the Middle East, Asia, Africa
and Latin America. Longer duration operations
will emphasize building personal relationships
with foreign military and security forces andother indigenous assets to achieve common
objectives.
Progress to Date. There have been impressive
gains in SOF capabilities since 2001, supported
by an 81% increase in the baseline budget.
This increase is consistent with U.S. SOCOM’s
designation as the lead Combatant Commandfor planning, synchronizing and executing
global operations against terrorist networks as
speciﬁed in the 2004 Uniﬁed Command Plan.
Supplemental appropriations of $5.5 billion
44

DoD Photo

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

The AC-130 gunship’s primary missions are close air
support, air interdiction and force protection. The
ability to call on direct ﬁre power from the air by joint
forces on the ground gives SOF a unique edge in urban
and rural environments.

between Fiscal Years 2002 and 2006 contributed
to improvements in dedicated SOF intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), organic
human intelligence and technical capabilities.
The Army Special Forces (SF) School increased
its training throughput from 282 new active duty
enlisted Special Forces personnel in 2001 to 617
new personnel in 2005 – the equivalent of anadditional SF Battalion each year – with a further
goal of increasing to 750 students per year. The
demands of Operation Enduring Freedom andOperation Iraqi Freedom have also led to adramatic improvement in SOF’s unconventional
warfare capabilities and skills.
QDR Decisions. To achieve the future force
characteristics for SOF and build on progress todate, the Department will:• Further increase SOF capability and capacity
to conduct low-visibility, persistent presence
missions and a global unconventional warfare
campaign.
• Increase (starting in Fiscal Year 2007) active
duty Special Forces Battalions by one-third.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces• Expand Psychological Operations and Civil
Aﬀairs units by 3,700 personnel (33% increase) to provide increased support for SOF
and the Army’s modular forces.
• Establish a Marine Corps Special Operations
Command (MARSOC) composed of 2,600
Marines and Navy personnel to train foreign
military units and conduct direct action andspecial reconnaissance.
• Increase SEAL Team force levels to conduct
direct action missions.
• Establish a SOF unmanned aerial vehicle
squadron to provide organic capabilities tolocate and target enemy capabilities in deniedor contested areas.

Photo by Chief Photographer’s Mate
Andrew McKaskle, U.S. Navy.

• Enhance capabilities to support SOF insertionand extraction into denied areas from strategic
distances.

A member of U.S. Navy Sea, Air, Land (SEAL)
Delivery Vehicle Team prepares to launch on a
training exercise from the deck of the submarine USS
Philadelphia. The vehicles are one method of insertionand extraction of Special Operations Forces.

Joint Air Capabilities
Vision. Joint air capabilities must be reoriented
to favor, where appropriate, systems that have far

greater range and persistence; larger and more
ﬂexible payloads for surveillance or strike; andthe ability to penetrate and sustain operations
in denied areas. The future force will place apremium on capabilities that are responsive andsurvivable. It will be able to destroy moving
targets in all weather conditions, exploit nontraditional intelligence and conduct nextgeneration electronic warfare. Joint air forces will
be capable of rapidly and simultaneously locating
and attacking thousands of ﬁxed and mobile
targets at global ranges. The future force will
exploit stealth and advanced electronic warfare
capabilities when and where they are needed.
Maritime aviation will include unmanned
aircraft for both surveillance and strike. Joint
air capabilities will achieve a greater level of airground integration.
Progress to Date. Consistent with these futureforce characteristics, the Air Expeditionary
Forces (AEF) concept has matured over the last
four years, increasing personnel available for
deployment by 20% (51,000). The Air ForceBattleﬁeld Airman concept has improved combat
training to increase joint air-ground integration
for directing air strikes in support of groundforces during conventional and irregular warfare
operations. Since 2001, Air Force Joint Tactical
Attack Controllers (JTACs), many attached to
SOF units, have directed over 85% of air strikes in
Afghanistan. The Air Force is optimizing Reserve
Component personnel for new missions that canbe performed from the United States, including
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations and
ISR reach-back, leveraging the core competenciesof the reserves while reducing stress on the force.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report45

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

weather. The Air Force has set a goal of increasing
its long-range strike capabilities by 50% and thepenetrating component of long-range strike by afactor of ﬁve by 2025. Approximately 45% of the
future long-range strike force will be unmanned.
The capacity for joint air forces to conduct global
conventional strikes against time-sensitive targets
will also be increased.

The Department is continuing to reconﬁgure
its strategic bomber ﬂeet for enhanced
conventional long-range strike missions.
Satellite communications now permit the near
instantaneous re-targeting of bombers andcruise missiles in ﬂight. The integration ofsmart standoﬀ weapons keeps older systems likethe B-52 relevant in the modern, high-threat
battlespace. New weapons provide increased
capacity: the new 500-pound Joint Direct Attack
Munition (JDAM) gives a single B-2 the ability
to strike 80 separate targets, with precision, in all• Develop a new land-based, penetrating longrange strike capability to be ﬁelded by 2018
while modernizing the current bomber force.

Photo by Senior Airman
Brian Ferguson, U.S. Air Force.

Since 2002, the Navy and Marine Corps haveintegrated their tactical aircraft programs to
reduce excess capacity and provide equal or
greater combat capability with fewer resources.
The Navy and Marine Corps have integrated
their tactical aircraft squadrons within acommon scheduling process to address their
air requirements, achieving greater operational
gains. Their integration cut potential costs byapproximately $35 billion and reduced future
Department of the Navy procurement by nearly
500 tactical aircraft.

• Reduce the B-52 force to 56 aircraft and use
savings to fully modernize B-52s, B-1s, andB-2s to support global strike operations.
• Restructure the Joint Unmanned Combat Air
System (J-UCAS) program and develop an
unmanned longer-range carrier-based aircraft
capable of being air-refueled to provide greater
standoﬀ capability, to expand payload andlaunch options, and to increase naval reachand persistence.
• Nearly double UAV coverage capacity by accelerating the acquisition of Predator UAVs
and Global Hawk.

A B-52 Stratofortress drops live ordnance over the
Nevada Test and Training Range during a ﬁrepower
demonstration. In its ﬁfth decade of service, B-52s
continue to provide long-range strike capability to
the joint force. The B-52 continues to be upgraded toprovide new capabilities, including close air support
to U.S. and partner ground forces, through the use of
precision strike weapons.

46

QDR Decisions. To achieve the future joint force
characteristics and build on progress to date, theDepartment plans to:• Restructure the F-22A program and extend
production through Fiscal Year 2010 with amulti-year acquisition contract, to ensure theDepartment does not have a gap in 5th generation stealth capabilities.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

The Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ﬂies down theport side of the USS Carl Vinson. The ﬂight was the
Predator’s ﬁrst maritime mission with a carrier battlegroup and provided near-real-time infrared and color
video images of the ship.

• Organize the Air Force around 86 combat
wings (e.g., ﬁghter, bomber, ISR/Battle Management/Command and Control, mobility,
Air Operations Centers, Battleﬁeld Airmen,
other missions and Space/Missile) with emphasis on leveraging reach-back to minimize
forward footprints and expedite force deployments, while reducing Air Force end strength
by approximately 40,000 full-time equivalent
personnel with balanced cuts across the Total
Force.

Joint Maritime Capabilities
Vision. Joint maritime forces, including the Coast
Guard, will conduct highly distributed operations
with a networked ﬂeet that is more capable ofprojecting power in the “brown and green waters”
of coastal areas. They will be capable of projecting
force and extending air and missile defenses
from far greater ranges. Coast Guard and naval
capabilities will be fully integrated. Undersea
capabilities, both manned and unmanned, will
use stealth, survivability, endurance, payload
size and ﬂexibility to complicate potential foes’

planning eﬀorts and strengthen deterrence. The
future force will have capabilities for conventional
global strikes against time-sensitive targets. It
will have greater capacity for riverine operations
and other irregular operations. The future joint
force will exploit the operational ﬂexibility of
seabasing to counter political anti-access andirregular warfare challenges. The Maritime
Prepositioning Force (Future) family of ships will
advance the capability of seabasing to support awide spectrum of joint force operations. Special
Operations Forces will exploit Aﬂoat Forward
Staging Bases (AFSB) to provide more ﬂexible
and sustainable locations from which to operate
globally. The ﬂeet will have greater presence in
the Paciﬁc Ocean, consistent with the global shiftof trade and transport. Accordingly, the Navyplans to adjust its force posture and basing toprovide at least six operationally available andsustainable carriers and 60% of its submarines in
the Paciﬁc to support engagement, presence anddeterrence.
Progress to Date. Consistent with these futureforce characteristics, the Navy has developed andimplemented several initiatives to increase theoperational availability, or “employability,” of
Photo by Chief Photographer’s MateJohnny R. Wilson, U.S. Navy.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rdClass Jeﬀ Viano, U.S. Navy.

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

A Visit, Board, Search and Seizure team, consisting of
U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard sailors, approaches
the starboard side of an unidentiﬁed dhow suspectedof smuggling oil out of the Iraq Sea.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report47

Navy and Marine Corps ﬂeet forces. Applying
distributed operating concepts, the Navy
increased the number of available independent
strike groups from 19 to 36. The Fleet Response
Plan (FRP) modiﬁed the Navy’s tiered readinessposture to increase the amount of time a shipor other naval unit is fully ready to deploy. The
FRP produces adaptable force packages andsustains higher readiness throughout a unit’s
operational cycle, decreasing the Fleet’s downtime and enabling immediate deployment of sixof the Navy’s eleven carrier strike groups, with theaddition of two more within 90 days. Rotationalcrewing has further increased the operational
availability of forces by up to 33%.
The Navy is rapidly developing and ﬁelding
the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to provide anadvanced littoral warfare capability. The Coast
Guard is recapitalizing its deepwater ships andimproving its ability to conduct joint operations
with the Navy. In 2003, the Navy beganconverting four of the oldest nuclear ballistic
missile submarines (SSBNs) to guided missile
and special operations platforms. The four
submarines will re-enter service by September
2007. Modiﬁcations will allow embarked Special
Operations Force (SOF) personnel to penetratedenied areas to locate high-value individuals,
designate targets for precision strike, or conduct
direct action missions. Each submarine will also
carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
QDR Decisions. To achieve the future joint
maritime force characteristics and build on
progress to date, the Department will:

48

The USS Florida is underway in the Atlantic Ocean.
A port security Rigid Hull Inﬂatable Boat (RHIB) is
underway oﬀ the starboard side. The USS Florida is
one of four submarines being converted to a guided
missile and special operations platform.

• Build a larger ﬂeet that includes 11 Carrier
Strike Groups, balance the need to transformand recapitalize the ﬂeet, improve aﬀordability and provide stability for the shipbuilding
industry.
• Accelerate procurement of Littoral Combat
Ships to provide power projection capabilities
in littoral waters.
• Procure the ﬁrst eight ships of the Maritime
Pre-Position Force (Future) to improve theDepartment’s ability to operate in restricted
access environments.
• Provide a Navy riverine capability for river patrol, interdiction and tactical troop movement
on inland waterways.
• Build partner capacity to improve global
maritime security by reinvigorating the Navy
Foreign Area Oﬃcer program and procuring
Disaster Relief Command and Control ﬂyaway communication support capabilities.
• Return to a steady-state production rate of
two attack submarines per year not later than
2012 while achieving an average per-hull procurement cost objective of $2.0 billion.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Photo by Journalist Seaman 3rd Class
B.L. Keller, U.S. Navy.

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Tailored Deterrence / New Triad
Vision. The Department is continuing its shift
from a “one size ﬁts all” notion of deterrence
toward more tailorable approaches appropriate
for advanced military competitors, regional
WMD states, as well as non-state terrorist
networks. The future force will provide a fullybalanced, tailored capability to deter bothstate and non-state threats – including WMD
employment, terrorist attacks in the physicaland information domains, and opportunistic
aggression – while assuring allies and dissuading
potential competitors. Consistent with the
New Triad priorities developed during the 2001
Nuclear Posture Review, the force will include
a wider range of non-kinetic and conventional
strike capabilities, while maintaining a robust
nuclear deterrent, which remains a keystoneof U.S. national power. The force will also
include integrated ballistic and cruise missile
defenses, and a responsive infrastructure. These
capabilities will be supported by a robust andresponsive National Command and Control
System, advanced intelligence, adaptive planningsystems and an ability to maintain access tovalidated, high-quality information for timely
situational awareness. Non-kinetic capabilities
will be able to achieve some eﬀects that currently
require kinetic weapons. The Department willﬁght with and against computer networks as it
would other weapon systems. For prompt global
strike, capabilities will be available to attack ﬁxed,
hard and deeply buried, mobile and re-locatabletargets with improved accuracy anywhere in
the world promptly upon the President’s order.
Nuclear weapons will be accurate, safe andreliable, and tailored to meet modern deterrence
requirements.
Progress to Date. Consistent with these futureforce characteristics, the Department has retired
the Peacekeeper ICBM, removed four ballistic
missile submarines from strategic nuclear service,
and removed hundreds of warheads from deployed
Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Department has ﬁelded and deployed newconventional
precision-guided
munitions,
including the conventionally armed Joint Air to
Surface Standoﬀ Missile and improved Tactical
Tomahawk cruise missile, which can hold at risktargets that might have required nuclear forcesin the past. Ballistic missile defenses have begun
limited operations to defend against a range ofpotential threats as system development, testing,and ﬁelding continue. In late 2004, the Navybegan limited defensive operations in the Sea
of Japan to identify and track ballistic missile
launches aimed at the United States or its allies.
U.S. eﬀorts to expand international missile
defense cooperation have also seen success. For
example, the United States and Japan recently
agreed in principle to cooperate in the area of
missile defense through the joint developmentof an advanced SM-3 sea-based interceptor. The
Department is working with the Departmentof Energy to assess the feasibility and cost of the
Reliable Replacement Warhead and, if warranted,
begin development of that system. This system
could enable reductions in the number of older,
non-deployed warheads maintained as a hedge
against reliability problems in deployed systems,
and assist in the evolution to a smaller and more
responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

49

The
U.S. Strategic
Command (U.S.
STRATCOM) has been assigned a numberof new missions, including global strike;
integration of global missile defense; space
operations; integration of command, control,
communications
andintelligence;andcombating WMD. In the information domain,
the Department assigned U.S. STRATCOM
responsibility for global network operations.
The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks& Information Integration (the Departmentof Defense’s Chief Information Oﬃcer) in
coordination with U.S. STRATCOM, hasdeveloped a defense-in-depth strategy forprotecting the Department’s computer networks.
U.S. Joint Forces Command is developing an
information operations evaluation capability
to integrate computer network operations into
warﬁghting activities more eﬀectively, consistent

with its role as joint force integrator establishedby the Uniﬁed Command Plan of 2004.

DoD photo

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces• Upgrade E-6B TACAMO command andcontrol aircraft to sustain a survivable airborne
link to strategic nuclear forces and provide anairborne cellular base station for domestic
catastrophic events.

QDR Decisions. To achieve the characteristicsof the future joint force and build on progress todate, the Department will:• Within two years, deploy an initial capability
to deliver precision-guided conventional warheads using long-range Trident SubmarineLaunched Ballistic Missiles.
• Reduce the number of deployed Minuteman
III ballistic missiles from 500 to 450 beginning in Fiscal Year 2007.
• Retire four E-4B National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC) aircraft and accelerate
procurement of two C-32 aircraft withstate-of-the-art mission suites as replacement
aircraft.

• Retire the U.S. STRATCOM Mobile Consolidated Command Center in Fiscal Year 2007,
while funding a new distributed ground-based
communications system to provide survivable and enduring command and control for
nuclear forces starting in Fiscal Year 2007.

A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) is launched from the
Aegis cruiser USS Lake Erie as part of a Ballistic
Missile Defense System (BMDS) test to defeat a
medium range ballistic missile target.

50• Make additional investments in information
assurance capabilities to protect informationand the Department’s computer networks.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces• Strengthen coordination of defensive and offensive cyber missions across the Department.
Photo by Corporal Bryant V. Cox, U.S. Marine Corps.

• Leverage lessons learned from computer
network attack and exploitation activities toimprove network defense and adopt a defense-in-depth planning approach to protect
information.
• Improve the Department’s information sharing with other agencies and with international
allies and partners by developing information
protection policies and exploiting the latest
commercial technologies.

Combating WMD
Vision. The future force will be organized,
trained, equipped, and resourced to deal with all
aspects of the threat posed by weapons of mass
destruction. It will have capabilities to: detect
WMD, including ﬁssile material at stand-oﬀ
ranges; locate and characterize threats; interdict
WMD and related shipments whether on land,
at sea, or in the air; sustain operations under
WMD attack; and render safe or otherwise
eliminate WMD before, during or after a conﬂict.
The Department will develop new defensive
capabilities in anticipation of the continued
evolution of WMD threats. Such threats
include electro-magnetic pulse, man-portable
nuclear devices, genetically engineered biologicalpathogens, and next generation chemical agents.
The Department will be prepared to respondto and help other agencies to mitigate theconsequences of WMD attacks.

Marines of the Decontamination Team from the
Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF)
responded to anthrax attacks in Washington, D.C.
CBIRF teams have also been deployed in support ofOperation Iraqi Freedom and are trained to manage ahost of contingences.

Progress to Date. Since the 2001 QDR, theDepartment has nearly doubled its investmentsin chemical and biological defenses andimplemented several important organizationalchanges to address the challenges posed by WMD
more eﬀectively. For the next ﬁve years, beginningin Fiscal Year 2006, the Department is further
increasing funding for the Chemical Biological
Defense Program (CBDP) by an additional$2.1 billion (an increase of approximately 20%),
focused primarily on improving its research,development and testing infrastructure as well
as expanding eﬀorts to improve defenses against
emerging chemical and biological threats. In
2004, the Department led the establishment of
a National BioDefense Campus at Fort Detrick,
Maryland – with the U.S. Army Medical ResearchInstitute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)

Quadrennial Defense Review Report51

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Armed
Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC) at
its core – to improve cooperation among agencies
conducting research and development of medical
biological defenses.

This designation establishes for the ﬁrst timea single focal point charged with integrating
the Department’s eﬀorts for combating WMD
in support of the geographic CombatantCommanders’ operational requirements.

In 2002, the United States led a NATO eﬀort
to establish the Alliance’s multinational CBRN
Defense Battalion, a unit that can provide rapidly
deployable chemical, biological, radiological andnuclear (CBRN) detection, identiﬁcation andhazard response support in the event of a WMD
attack. This unique multinational unit became
operational in July 2004. To date, more thanseventeen NATO countries have contributed
forces and capabilities to this battalion.

QDR Decisions. To achieve the characteristicsof the future joint force and build on progress todate, the Department will:

In 2003, the United States launched theProliferation Security Initiative (PSI) asa multinational eﬀort to interdict WMD
proliferation-related shipments. Since then, morethan 60 countries have begun participating in theinitiative. In the past year, the United States andten of its PSI partners have quietly cooperated on
more than eleven successful WMD interdiction
eﬀorts. The Department has played a leading rolein eﬀorts to improve the operational capabilitiesof the United States and other PSI nations,with more than 40 countries having hosted andparticipated in 19 multinational PSI interdiction
training exercises and gaming activities.
In 2005, the Secretary of Defense modiﬁed the
Uniﬁed Command Plan by designating theCommander of U.S. Strategic Command as thelead Combatant Commander for integrating
and synchronizing eﬀorts to combat WMD.
52

• Designate the Defense Threat Reduction
Agency as the primary Combat Support
Agency for U.S. Strategic Command in its
role as lead Combatant Commander for integrating and synchronizing combating WMD
eﬀorts.
• Expand the Army's 20th Support Command(CBRNE) capabilities to enable it to serve as a
Joint Task Force capable of rapid deployment
to command and control WMD eliminationand site exploitation missions by 2007.
• Expand the number of U.S. forces with advanced technical render-safe skills and increase
their speed of response. The Department willdevelop further recommendations to improve
render-safe capabilities for the Fiscal Year2008 budget.
• Improve and expand U.S. forces’ capabilities
to locate, track and tag shipments of WMD,
missiles and related materials, including thetransportation means used to move suchitems.
• Reallocate funding within the CBDP to invest
more than $1.5 billion over the next ﬁve years

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

The Department will conduct this last initiativein cooperation with partner agencies utilizing
the National Biodefense Campus.
Afterleading the initial eﬀort, the Department willpass responsibility for further research to thoseagencies best suited to manage medical projects.

reducing exposure to asymmetric threats. The
U.S. overseas posture will include upgradedair support infrastructure, additional forwarddeployed expeditionary maritime capabilities,
long-range strike and ISR assets, and cutting-edge
ground forces such as rotational Stryker units.
The eﬀective combination of seabasing, overseas
presence, enhanced long-range strike, reach-back,and surge and prepositioned capabilities will
reduce the forward footprint of the joint force.
Photo by Technical Sergeant Efrain Gonzalez,
U.S. Air Force.

to develop broad-spectrum medical countermeasures against advanced bio-terror threats,
including genetically engineered intracellularbacterial pathogens and hemorrhagic fevers.

Joint Mobility
Vision. Rapid global mobility is central tothe eﬀectiveness of the future force. The joint
force will balance speed of deployment withdesired warﬁghter eﬀects to deliver the rightcapabilities at the right time and at the rightplace. Eﬀectiveness of mobility forces will bemeasured not only by the quantity of material
they move, but also by the operational eﬀects
they help to achieve. Mobility capabilities will
be fully integrated across geographic theaters
and between warﬁghting components and force
providers, with response times measured in hours
and days rather than weeks. They will enable theDepartment’s move from a large institutional
force to a future force that concentrates more
operational capabilities at the front line. They
will underpin the transition from a Cold War-era
garrisoned force to a future force that is tailoredfor expeditionary operations. Future joint
forces will increasingly use host-nation facilities
with only a modest supporting U.S. presence,
decreasing the need for traditional overseas main
operating bases with large infrastructures andU.S. Navy personnel provide perimeter security for a
C-17A Globemaster III aircraft operating in supportof Operation Enduring Freedom. The operation
marked the ﬁrst successful airlift operation by
C-17 aircraft into an undeveloped dirt landing strip.

Progress to Date. The Department’s overseas
posture plan and the Integrated Global
Presence and Basing Strategy informed QDR
assessments of mobility priorities. In addition,
the recommendations of the BRAC, now being
implemented, will support overseas restructuring
and the imperative of rapid power projection,with domestic basing that provides needed
training infrastructure. BRAC changes will also
promote joint and multi-Service basing in orderto achieve economies of scale. Global mobility
has made signiﬁcant advances in the last decade.
The Department has procured 140 of 180
contracted C-17 heavy-lift aircraft and 27 lighter

Quadrennial Defense Review Report53

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

C-130Js. Both are being ﬁelded with defensive
countermeasure systems, improving their ability
to operate in irregular warfare environments. The
Department is also considering the acquisition ofa future KC-X aircraft that will have defensive
systems and provide signiﬁcant cargo carrying
capacity while supporting its aerial refueling
mission. The U.S. Air Force is upgrading its
C-5 aircraft with new engines and modernizedavionics to improve ﬂeet reliability and mission
capability rates. The Department is pursuingthe development of Joint High Speed Vessel(JHSV) and inter-theater high-speed sealift
while maintaining sealift capabilities to support
the needs of the future joint force.
QDR Decisions. In accordance with Section 131of the Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006, theDepartment provides the following assessment of
the inter-theater airlift capabilities:• Extensive investments in cargo transportability, strategic lift, and prepositioned stocks overthe past decade have yielded military forces
capable of responding to a broad spectrum of
security challenges worldwide.
• To maintain and enhance this capability, theDepartment must continue to recapitalize
and modernize its mobility platforms, complete the C-17 multiyear contract, replenish
prepositioned stocks consumed in recent
operations, and proceed with C-5 modernization eﬀorts. The Department plans to acquireand modernize a ﬂeet of 292 inter-theater
airlifters (180 C-17s and 112 modernized andreliability-enhanced C-5s). C-17 tooling will54

be moved to oﬀsite storage to preserve the option of procuring additional C-17s.
• In addition, the Department must continue
to pursue enabling technologies for transformational logistics and innovative operational
concepts such as seabasing.
The Department’s Mobility Capabilities Study(MCS) examined the mobility force structureneeded to support the National Defense Strategy.
Study participants included the Military
Departments, the Combatant Commands, theJoint Staﬀ and the Oﬃce of the Secretary of
Defense. The study analyzed the deployment offorces to two overlapping major wars as outlined in
the Joint Staﬀ-led Operational Availability (OA)
studies. It also examined concurrent demandson the mobility system associated with multiple
homeland defense events and contingency
operations in other theaters. Included in theselatter activities are the demands associated with
Special Operations Forces’ worldwide operations.
Additionally, both the OA studies and the MCS
took into account alterations in the deploymentof forces associated with the Integrated Global
Presence and Basing Strategy.
The MCS and OA studies assessed the capabilities
provided by a combination of forward-deployed
forces, prepositioned equipment, and forces
deploying from the United States. The MCS foundthat programmed mobility forces were capable ofdeploying and sustaining combat forces called forin the scenarios. The simulation exploited the
air transportability of modular brigade combat
teams in support of Combatant Commanders’Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forcesneeds. The swift employment of larger divisionsized units relied upon a combination of airlift,
fast sealift and prepositioned materiel. The study
demonstrated the mobility system’s ability to
deploy these units on timelines consistent with
the Combatant Commanders’ needs, as well as toprovide ongoing support to combat forces within
the theater of operations.
To achieve the characteristics of the future joint
mobility force and build on progress to date, theDepartment will also:• Complete the C/KC-130 multi-year contract
to procure an additional 18 Air Force C-130Js
and 8 Marine Corps KC-130Js.
• Establish a joint program oﬃce for a new
intra-theater light cargo aircraft for future
expeditionary needs.
• Recapitalize the tanker ﬂeet to ensure global
mobility and power projection.

Intelligence, Surveillance,
Reconnaissance (ISR)
Vision. The ability of the future force to establish
an “unblinking eye” over the battle-space throughpersistent surveillance will be key to conducting
eﬀective joint operations. Future capabilities
in ISR, including those operating in space, will
support operations against any target, day ornight, in any weather, and in denied or contested
areas. The aim is to integrate global awarenesswith local precision. Intelligence functions will
be fully integrated with operations down to thetactical level, with far greater ability to reach backto intelligence collection systems and analytic
capabilities outside the theater. Supporting
this vision will require an architecture thatmoves intelligence data collected in the theater
to the users, rather than deploying users to thetheater. Future ISR capabilities will be designed
to collect information that will help decisionmakers mitigate surprise and anticipate potential
adversaries’ actions. An essential part of the
future ISR architecture is a robust missile warning
capability.
The future force will deﬁne ISR needs by sensor
or type of intelligence needed rather than theplatforms that carry the sensors or the medium inwhich they operate. This approach will facilitate
the substitution of one capability for anotherto achieve the same eﬀect, and will allow the
suppliers of sensor capability to meet the needsof Combatant Commanders more eﬃciently.
This sensor-centric approach will also improve
the ability to integrate data horizontally acrosssensor inputs, thereby ensuring that information
is available on a timely basis to a much wider
range of users. Future ISR systems will employ
faster and more secure technical solutions toimprove the automation, integration, analysis
and distribution of information to operational
forces.
The United States should continue to enjoy anadvantage in space capabilities across all mission
areas. This advantage will be maintained bystaying at least one technology generation aheadof any foreign or commercial space power.
The Department will continue to develop
responsive space capabilities in order to keep

Quadrennial Defense Review Report55

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Progress to Date. Experience from recent
operations, supported by the ﬁndings andrecommendations in the 2001 QDR and anumber of studies and commissions charteredby the Congress and the President – including
those on national security space management,
remote sensing, weapons of mass destruction andterrorism – have underscored the increasingly
critical role that intelligence capabilities,
including those in space, play in supporting
military operations, policy and planning andacquisition decisions in the Department.
The Department has undertaken a number oforganizational and operational changes, andhas directed new or additional investments toincrease intelligence and space capabilities andbetter manage the ISR resources available to the
warﬁghter. The Department established the Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence to provide
leadership, guidance and oversight of DefenseIntelligence, Security and Counterintelligence tomeet Combatant Commander requirements. It
also created the Executive Agent for Space andimplemented steps to meet the demand for space
services, including intelligence, from defense andnon-defense users.
The Department has implemented measures56

to strengthen human intelligence (HUMINT)
capabilities, including steps to improve culturaland linguistic skills across the joint force. It is
improving the integration of intelligence with
operations as well as integration across intelligence
disciplines (e.g., imagery, signals and human
intelligence). In particular, the Department
is establishing Joint Intelligence Operations
Centers within the Combatant Commands
and developing Intelligence Campaign Plans
for all theaters. Under U.S. STRATCOM, theDepartment established a functional command tosynchronize strategy and planning and integrate
all national, theater and tactical ISR capabilities.
Photo by Specialist Johnny
R. Aragon, U.S. Army

access to space unfettered, reliable and secure.
Survivability of space capabilities will be assured
by improving space situational awareness andprotection, and through other space control
measures. Penetrating airborne surveillance willcomplement space–based capabilities in order tofocus on areas of interest in or near denied areas.

A U.S. military intelligence oﬃcer (middle) andAfghan military intelligence soldier (right) speak
privately with the elder of a village (left) in the ShahWali Ko District, Afghanistan. Coalition Forces
are building capacity of indigenous forces, forging
relationships with local leaders and preventing Taliban
attempts to reestablish themselves in the area.

To manage more eﬀectively the Department’s
intelligence resources, the Department has
approved the creation of a Military Intelligence
Program and is implementing an enhanced
Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System
to better compete for, develop and retain
the professional intelligence workforce. The
Department has increased the number ofintelligence professionals working in collection
and analytical disciplines to support growth inhomeland defense and war on terror missions.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

Combat Support Agencies have also relocatedor deployed signiﬁcant numbers of intelligence
analysts, intelligence collectors and collection
managers to areas where they can be of greatest
value to their customers.
QDR Decisions. To achieve the future joint force
characteristics and build on progress to date, theDepartment will:• Improve both the capability and capacity ofdefense human intelligence assets to identify
terrorists and characterize and penetrate their
networks, in cooperation with other government agencies and international partners.

sustain selected legacy systems (e.g., a newengine for the Joint Surveillance Target Attack
Radar System).
• Implement a new imagery intelligence approach focused on achieving persistent collection capabilities in cooperation with the
Director of National Intelligence. Investments
in moving target indicator and synthetic aperture radar capabilities, including Space Radar,
will grow to provide a highly persistent capability to identify and track moving groundtargets in denied areas.

• Increase measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) capabilities to identify
enemy WMD and their delivery systems, andto support other applications.
• Expand signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection with suﬃcient revisit rate and geo-location capabilities for military operations. The
Aerial Common Sensor (ACS) program will
be restructured as the Department explores a
new tri-service solution to meet “multi-intelligence” requirements.
• Fund the U.S. contribution to establish a
NATO Intelligence Fusion Center.
• Increase investment in unmanned aerial
vehicles to provide more ﬂexible capabilities
to identify and track moving targets in denied
areas.
• Realign capabilities to free up resources fornext generation systems and modernize and

The Space Radar program (in development) will
provide persistent, all-weather, day and night
surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities indenied areas for the Department of Defense and theIntelligence Community. (Artist’s conception)• Balance air- and space-borne ISR capabilities
and integrate them with other forces, andinvestigate the use of high-altitude loitering
capabilities.
• Fully fund E-10A technology demonstrator
while terminating procurement.
• Improve responsive space access, satellite operations, and other space enabling capabilities

Quadrennial Defense Review Report57

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces• Increase Maritime Domain Awareness throughimproved integration with interagency andinternational partners, and accelerated investment in multinational information sharing
systems such as the Automatic Identiﬁcation
System and the Multinational Information
Sharing System.

Achieving Net-Centricity
Vision. Harnessing the power of information
connectivity deﬁnes net-centricity. By enabling
critical relationships between organizations andpeople, the Department is able to accelerate
the speed of business processes, operational
decision-making and subsequent actions. Recent
operational experiences in Afghanistan and
Iraq have demonstrated the value of net-centric
operations. Ground forces were able to reachback to remote UAV pilots in Nevada to direct
UAVs in support of their operations, achieving alevel of air-ground integration that was diﬃcult
to imagine just a decade ago. Such connectivity
is helping joint forces gain greater situationalawareness to attack the enemy.
Achieving the full potential of net-centricity
requires viewing information as an enterpriseasset to be shared and as a weapon system to beprotected. As an enterprise asset, the collection
and dissemination of information should bemanaged by portfolios of capabilities thatcut across legacy stove-piped systems. These
58

capability portfolios would include networkbased command and control, communications
on the move and information fusion. Current
and evolving threats highlight the need todesign, operate and defend the network to ensure
continuity of joint operations.
Progress to Date. The foundation for net-centric
operations is the Global Information Grid
(GIG), a globally interconnected, end-to-end setof trusted and protected information networks.
The GIG optimizes the processes for collecting,processing, storing, disseminating, managing andsharing information within the Department andwith other partners. The Department has madesteady progress implementing net-centric systems
and concepts of operation. It has deployed anenhanced land-based network and new satellite
constellation as part of the Transformational
Communication Architecture to provide
high-bandwidth, survivable internet protocol
communications. Together, they will support
battle-space awareness, time-sensitive targetingand communications on the move. Deployed

Photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman
Dominique V. Brown, U.S. Navy.

such as the space industrial base, space scienceand technology eﬀorts, and the space professional cadre.

Air Traﬃc Controllers stand watch in the Carrier Air
Traﬃc Control Center aboard the USS Nimitz. The
collection and sharing of information such as thatobtained by the USS Nimitz in support of Maritime
Security Operations denies terrorists use of the maritime
environment as a venue for attack or to transportpersonnel, weapons or other material.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

terminals – from command and control (Joint
Tactical Radio System) to very large bandwidth
ISR systems – are extending the communications“backbone” down to the smallest tactical unit in
the ﬁeld. The Department has also implemented
a data strategy enabling the fusion of informationfrom any platform or terminal. Pulling all this
together, the revised Uniﬁed Command Plan has
assigned U.S. STRATCOM lead responsibility
to operate and protect the Department’s Global
Information Grid.

• Restructure the Transformational Satellite(TSAT) program to “spiral develop” its capabilities and re-phase launches accordingly, andadd resources to increase space-based relay
capacity.
• Develop an integrated approach to ensurealignment in the phasing and pacing of terminals and space vehicles.
• Develop a new bandwidth requirements
model to determine optimal network size andcapability to best support operational forces.

• Strengthen its data strategy – including thedevelopment of common data lexicons, standards, organization, and categorization – toimprove information sharing and information
assurance, and extend it across a multitude of
domains, ranging from intelligence to personnel systems.
• Increase investment to implement the GIG,
defend and protect information and networks
and focus research and development on its
protection.
• Develop an information-sharing strategy to
guide operations with Federal, state, local andcoalition partners.
• Shift from Military Service-focused eﬀorts
toward a more Department-wide enterprise
net-centric approach, including expansion of
the Distributed Common Ground System.

Photo by Staﬀ Sergeant Todd
Lopez, U.S. Air Force.

QDR Decisions. To move closer toward
this vision and build on progress to date, theDepartment will:

The master air attack plan (MAAP) toolkit is an
example of software tools that will improve accuracy
and facilitate planning. The toolkit is designed to makeproduction of the MAAP and subsequent air taskingorder quicker and less prone to error.

Joint Command and Control
Vision. The joint force of the future will havemore robust and coherent joint commandand control capabilities. Rapidly deployable,
standing joint task force headquarters will beavailable to the Combatant Commanders ingreater numbers to meet the range of potential
contingencies. These headquarters will enable
the real-time synthesis of operations andintelligence functions and processes, increasing

Quadrennial Defense Review Report59Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

joint force adaptability and speed of action. The
joint headquarters will have better information,
processes and tools to design and conduct
network-enabled operations with other agencies
and with international partners. Implementationof Adaptive Planning in the Department willfurther enhance the lethality of both subordinate
standing joint task force headquarters and theirparent Combatant Commands by enabling themto produce high-quality, relevant plans in as little
as six months. Adaptive Planning is the catalyst
that will transform the Department’s operational
planning processes and systems. Furthermore,
Global Force Management, the Department’s
model for force management, reporting andanalysis, will provide Commanders with anunprecedented depth of up-to-date and decisionquality information on unit readiness, personnel
and equipment availability.
Progress to Date. Since 2001, the Department
has made marked progress towards strengthening
joint operations as a focus of defense
transformation. The activation of standing jointtask force headquarters has improved the abilityof the force to respond to crises. With a “coreelement” – a standing command and control
team with functional and geographic expertise– these headquarters provide peacetime planningcapabilities for contingencies, a departure frompast practices of implementing ad hoc approaches
after crises occur. The ﬁrst Standing Joint Force
Headquarters (core element) was establishedin 2004 and has since deployed to Iraq, theHorn of Africa and to relief eﬀorts associatedwith Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistani
earthquake. The implementation of Global
60

Force Management, by integrating data on
worldwide availability and readiness, allows the
Department’s leadership to source forces ﬂexibly
for operations, regardless of where they arelocated or what command they have traditionally
supported.
QDR Decisions. To achieve the characteristicsof the future joint force and build on progress todate, the Department will:• Transform designated existing Service operational headquarters to fully functional andscalable Joint Command and Control Joint
Task Force-capable Headquarters beginningin Fiscal Year 2007.
• Establish a second operationally ready and
immediately deployable Standing Joint Force
Headquarters core element at the U.S. Joint
Forces Command consistent with its responsibilities as Joint Force Integrator under the2004 Uniﬁed Command Plan.
• Automate and link key planning processes ina networked, virtual environment to enablereal-time collaboration and rapid productionof high-quality planning products.
• Implement Adaptive Planning across the
Department by increasing the number offully qualiﬁed planners, investing in advancedplanning toolsets, and organizing planningstaﬀs to exploit the advantages that newtechnology and highly trained, experienced
planners provide.
• Increase resources to develop software, tactics,

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Reorienting Capabilities and Forces

techniques, procedures and other initiatives
needed to support the Global Force Management System.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

61

62

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterprise

RESHAPING THE
DEFENSE ENTERPRISE
Just as we must transform America’s militarycapability to meet changing threats, we must
transform the way the Department works and what
it works on. We must build a Department where
each of the dedicated people here can apply theirimmense talents to defend America, where they havethe resources, information and freedom to perform…
It demands agility—more than today’s bureaucracy
allows. And that means we must recognize anothertransformation: the revolution in management,
technology and business practices.
Successful
modern businesses are leaner and less hierarchicalthan ever before. They reward innovation and theyshare information. They have to be nimble in theface of rapid change or they die.
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense,
September 10, 2001
To win the long war, the Department of Defense
must reshape the defense enterprise in ways that
better support the warﬁghter and are appropriate
for the threat environment. Today, the armed
forces are hampered by ineﬃcient businesspractices. The Department’s current structure
and processes are handicaps in the protracted
ﬁght we now face against agile and networked
foes. Over the last twenty years, the Department
has increasingly integrated its warﬁghting
concepts, organization, training and operations
to create the world’s most formidable joint force.
Sustaining continuous operational change andinnovation are a hallmark of U.S. forces. The
Department’s organizations, processes andenabling authorities urgently require a similartransformation. The Department’s approach is toimprove signiﬁcantly organizational eﬀectiveness,and in so doing, reap the rewards of improved
eﬃciencies.
The 2001 QDR highlighted the loss of resources,in terms of people and dollars, caused by
ineﬃciencies in the Department’s support
functions. The Department responded witha comprehensive eﬀort to streamline businessand decision-making processes, with the express
goal of better supporting the joint warﬁghter.
Since 2001, the Department has moved steadily
toward a more integrated and transparent
senior decision-making culture and process forboth operational and investment matters. The
Department has made substantial strides infostering joint solutions, including the creationof new organizations and processes that cut
across traditional stovepipes. It has standardized
business rules and data structures for common
use. Most importantly, the Department has madenotable progress toward an outcome-oriented,
capabilities-based planning approach thatprovides the joint warﬁghter with the capabilities
needed to address a wider range of asymmetricchallenges.
Recentoperational
experiences
havedemonstrated the need to bring further agility,
ﬂexibility and horizontal integration to thedefense support infrastructure. The Department
has responded to that need with several
innovations in its organizations and support
services. Three examples of such innovations
are the Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED)
Defeat Task Force, the Joint Rapid Acquisition

Quadrennial Defense Review Report63Reshaping the Defense Enterprise

Cell and improved supply-chain logistics.

Photo by Technical Sergeant
Russell E. Cooley IV, U.S. Air Force.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorist weaponof choice remains the improvised explosive
device, normally taking the form of roadsidebombs, suicide car bombs and a variety of
remotely initiated devices. To counter the threat
posed by these weapons, the Department created
the Joint IED Defeat Task Force. The Task Force
uniﬁed all Department eﬀorts to defeat IEDs,
combining the best technology solutions with
relevant intelligence and innovative operating
methods. In Fiscal Year 2005, the Department
invested more than $1.3 billion in IED Defeat
initiatives, including counter-radio controlled
IED electronic warfare, IED surveillance, theJoint IED Defeat Center of Excellence, counterbomber programs and stand-oﬀ IED detection
and neutralization. The Task Force has also
provided funds for training to military units enroute to operational theaters as well as expert ﬁeld
teams that work directly with units in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Since the Task Force’s inception,
the Department has decreased the IED casualty
rate by a factor of two.

A Talon 3B tracked robot waits for its next command
after an improvised explosive device was detonatedin Baghdad, Iraq. The increasing use of robotics
has improved U.S. force protection signiﬁcantly in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

64

The Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell (JRAC)
is another innovation that grew out of U.S.
experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
Department’s standard processes for providing
materiel and logistics proved too slow andcumbersome to meet the immediate needs offorces in the ﬁeld. Recognizing this deﬁciency, theSecretary of Defense established a cell dedicated toﬁnding actionable solutions to urgent warﬁghter
needs. The JRAC has supported eﬀorts thatprovided military personnel key force protection
items such as the Advanced Combat Helmet,
lightweight Global Positioning System receivers,
improved ammunition packs and individual
weapon optics. Working with the Military
Departments and Combatant Commands,
this initiative has accelerated development anddelivery of more than a dozen critical programs,
from intelligence collection and dissemination toenhanced force protection.
Improved support to the warﬁghter has occurredin the logistics chain as well. The Department
vested leadership of the complex distribution
process in a single owner, the U.S. Transportation
Command (U.S. TRANSCOM). Exercising
its new role, U.S. TRANSCOM established a
Deployed Distribution Operations Center in
Kuwait to speed the ﬂow of materiel into Iraq and
Afghanistan in support of coalition operations.
The Center quickly assembled a team of logistics
experts and gave them authority to direct air andseaport operations and cross-country moves in thetheater. Lead times for stocked items dropped bymore than 45% since the peaks recorded in 2003.
Better synchronization of transportation assets
allowed the Army to cut costs by $268 million in

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterprise

Fiscal Year 2004. On-time delivery rates are now
at over 90%. The Center’s process innovations
improved mission performance at less cost to the
Department and the American taxpayer.
Department reforms since 2001, including thoseinnovations born of wartime necessity, represent
the types of changes the QDR has sought toaccelerate.

Toward A New Defense Enterprise
The Department’s enterprise reforms are guided
by a three-part vision:• First, the Department must be responsive toits stakeholders. Not only must the Department’s support functions enhance the U.S.
military’s ability to serve the President andprovide a strong voice for the joint warﬁghter,it must also provide the best possible value tothe American taxpayer. The Department will
work to improve eﬀectiveness dramatically
across civilian and military functions as thefoundation for increased eﬃciency.
• Second, the Department must provide
information and analysis necessary to maketimely and well-reasoned decisions. The
Department’s culture, authorities, and organizations must be aligned in a manner thatfacilitates, rather than hinders, eﬀective decision-making and enables responsive mission
execution while maintaining accountability.
Improved horizontal integration will be critical to the Department’s success.
• Third, the Department must undertake

reforms to reduce redundancies and ensure
the eﬃcient ﬂow of business processes. As
we capitalize on existing transformationaleﬀorts across the enterprise, we will continually evaluate support systems and processes tooptimize their responsiveness.
To achieve this vision and produce strategydriven outcomes, the Department’s roles
and responsibilities, and those of each of its
component organizations, must be clearlydelineated. Roles and responsibilities within
the Department of Defense fall into roughly
three categories. At the senior-most levels,
leaders are concerned with governance – setting
strategy, prioritizing enterprise eﬀorts, assigning
responsibilities and authorities, allocating
resources and communicating a shared vision.
In order to meet the strategic objectives set out
by the Department’s senior leadership, somecomponents act in a management role, focusing
on organizing tasks, people, relationships andtechnology. The vast majority of the Department’s
personnel then work to execute the strategy andplans established at management level.
In the 2006 QDR, the Department looked
across these three levels of responsibility –governance, management and work – to ensurethat organizations, processes and authorities arewell aligned.

Governance Reforms
Senior Leadership Focus
A key measure of success is the extent to which
the Department’s senior leadership is able toQuadrennial Defense Review Report65Reshaping the Defense Enterpriseare employed in ways that meet the President’s
strategic objectives.

fulﬁll the following functions:• Strategic Direction – Identify the key outputs – not inputs – they expect from the
Department’s components and determine theappropriate near-, mid-, and long-term strategies for achieving them. Such outputs will befocused on the needs of the President as Commander in Chief and the joint warﬁghters.
• Identity – Establish an organizational culturethat fosters innovation and excellence. Communicate the Department’s strategy, policy
and institutional ethos to the internal workforce and to external audiences.
• Capital Acquisition and Macro Resource
Allocation – Shape the Department’s major
investments in people, equipment, concepts
and organizations to support the Nation’s
objectives most eﬀectively.
• Corporate Decision Making – Implement
agile and well-aligned governance, management and work processes. Ensure the Department has the processes, tools and transparent
analyses to support decisions.
• Performance Assessment – Monitor performance to ensure strategic alignment and makeadjustments to strategic direction based on
performance.
• Force Employment – Determine how U.S.
forces are utilized and meet the day-to-day
oversight needs of the joint force. Operational matters are the responsibility of thejoint warﬁghters. The Department’s seniorcivilian and military leaders ensure that forces
66

The Department will work to better alignprocesses, structures and, as necessary, authorities
to improve its senior leaders’ ability to governin these core areas. Today, the Oﬃce of theSecretary of Defense and the Joint Staﬀ performmany functions beyond those identiﬁed above,
including program management and execution.
To ensure that senior leadership can maintainfocus on the key governance issues elaborated
above, the Department will identify management
and execution activities currently being
conducted at the governance level and consider
them for elimination or realignment.
Build Capability to Inform Strategic Choice
To better support the joint warﬁghter, theDepartment is launching several initiatives
to integrate the processes that deﬁne neededcapabilities, identify solutions and allocate
resources to acquire them. The following
four interrelated reforms emphasize theneed for improved information-sharing andcollaboration.
First, the Department will implement a moretransparent, open and agile decision-making
process. To do this, common authoritative
information sources will be identiﬁed,
Department-level ﬁnancial databases will be
combined, and common analytic methods will be
adopted. For example, the Department is testing
a number of tools that could provide common
capability views using existing resource andprogramming databases. One such pilot project

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterpriseis a transparent integrated air and missile defense
database. Experimenting through such pilots,
the Department will seek to identify and rapidly
develop preferred capability area solutions thatwill facilitate open and agile decision-making.
Second, the Department will reach investment
decisions through collaboration among thejoint warﬁghter, acquisition and resource
communities. Joint warﬁghters will assess needs
in terms of desired eﬀects and the time framein which capabilities are required. Assessmentsof potential solutions should be informedby the acquisition community’s judgment oftechnological feasibility and cost-per-incrementof capability improvement, and by the resource
community’s assessment of aﬀordability. These
inputs will be provided early in the decisionmaking process, before signiﬁcant resources arecommitted. Once an investment decision has
been approved, changes will require collaboration
among all three communities at the appropriate
decision level to ensure strategy-driven, aﬀordable
and achievable outcomes.
A recent, much-needed restructuring of thetroubled Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS)
program exempliﬁes this collaborative approach.
Because the radio system must be interoperablewith other systems across the full spectrum of thejoint force, decisions regarding the future of the
JTRS program had profound eﬀects throughout
the Department. To ensure a solution that willmeet the joint warﬁghter’s needs and provide
best value to the taxpayer, the warﬁghting
and acquisition communities worked closely
together to develop the investment strategy andthe Military Departments contributed needed
resources for the restructuring.
Third, the Department will begin to break out its
budget according to joint capability areas. Usingsuch a joint capability view – in place of a Military
Department or traditional budget category
display – should improve the Department’s
understanding of the balancing of strategic risks
and required capability trade-oﬀs associated withparticular decisions. The Department has alreadydeveloped and tested at U.S. Paciﬁc Command
an automated process that maps resource needs
to discrete operational plans and missions. For
the ﬁrst time, a Combatant Commander is able
to ascertain the resource requirements associatedwith particular capabilities, such as striking
ﬂeeting targets. The Department is working to
expand on this program to enable Departmentwide assessment of capability areas and facilitate
capability portfolio management and will explore
this approach with the Congress.
Fourth, to manage the budget allocation processwith accountability, an acquisition reform study
initiated by the Deputy Secretary of Defense
recommended the Department work with theCongress to establish “Capital Accounts” for
Major Acquisition Programs. The purpose ofcapital budgeting is to provide stability in thebudgeting system and to establish accountability
for acquisition programs throughout thehierarchy of program responsibility fromthe program manager, through the Service
Acquisition Executive, the Secretaries of theMilitary Departments and the Oﬃce of theSecretary of Defense.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report67Reshaping the Defense Enterprise

Aligning Authority and Accountability throughJoint Capability Portfolios
Most of the Department’s resources are provided
through the Military Services. This arrangement
can lead both to gaps or redundancies withincapability areas as each Service attempts to
supply a complete warﬁghting package rather
than organize to depend on capabilities provided
by other Military Departments. To optimize theprovision of capabilities for the joint warﬁghter,
the Department will work to re-orient its
processes around joint capability portfolios.
In the acquisition realm, the Department has
already instituted several joint capability reviews.
These reviews look across major force programs
to assess needed investments in speciﬁc capability
portfolio areas such as integrated air and missile
defense, land attack weapons and electronic
warfare.
The QDR used such a portfolio approachto evaluate surveillance capabilities.
The
Department began by accounting for all of its
current and planned surveillance capabilities andprograms. This included a transparent review ofcapabilities at all levels of classiﬁcation. Viewing
capabilities across the entire portfolio of assets
enabled decision-makers to make informed
choices about how to reallocate resources among
previously stove-piped programs, to deliver
needed capabilities to the joint force more rapidly
and eﬃciently.
68

The Department will build on these initialeﬀorts to integrate tasks, people, relationships,
technologies and associated resources more
eﬀectively across the Department’s many
activities. By shifting the focus from Servicespeciﬁc programs to joint capabilities, theDepartment should be better positioned tounderstand the implications of investment andresource trade-oﬀs among competing priorities.
As a ﬁrst step, the Department will manage
three capability areas using a capability portfolio
concept: Joint Command and Control, Joint NetCentric Operations and Joint Space Operations.
As we learn from experience and gain conﬁdence
in this approach, we plan to expand it to othercapability areas.
DoD Photo.

Together, these improvements should enablesenior leaders to implement a risk-informed
investment strategy reﬂecting joint warﬁghting
priorities.

High Speed Vessel Two participated in a 2003 exercise
with West African nations. The follow-on Joint High
Speed Vehicle (J-HSV) is a joint experiment between
the Navy, Marines, Army and Special Operations
Command utilizing a modiﬁed high speed, lightweightcommercial ferry produced in Australia for potential
U.S. military usage. Future variants of the J-HSV will
provide a capability to transport signiﬁcant groundforces at high speeds into shallow water ports without
modern unloading equipment.

Managing Joint Task Assignments
Eﬀective governance is facilitated by the clearalignment of authority, responsibility andresources at the management level. Some of
the most diﬃcult challenges in governance

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterprise

arise when joint management arrangements
cut across the traditional and often statutory
authority structure of the Military Departments
and Defense Agencies. The establishment of the
Combatant Commands created new sources ofdemand for joint capabilities separate from theorganizations with responsibility to supply them.
For example, when a program or mission is
identiﬁed as a priority area, the Secretary may
choose to direct an organization to manage orresource the joint eﬀort for the Department.
In the past, this has been accomplished bydesignating a component or activity as the“Executive Agent” – a term the meaning of which
varies widely from one arrangement to the next.
When the responsibilities for joint management
activities are not clearly deﬁned or strategicallyaligned, implementation is problematic andresources are used less eﬃciently.
This QDR underscores the need for a better way
to organize and manage joint activities to ensurethat mission assignment is accompanied by theauthorities, resources and clear performance
expectations necessary for mission success.
Consequently, the Department is implementing
a disciplined process for assigning joint
missions and tasks and evaluating their resource
priority. The Joint Task Assignment Process will
centrally assign and oversee joint management
arrangements to ensure joint activities arealigned to the Department’s strategic objectives;
designated with the proper authorities,
responsibilities and resources; eﬀectively
structured to minimize overlaps and gaps;
established with clear lines of accountability; andcontinually assessed for performance and need.
Driving Business Transformation
The Defense Business Systems Management
Committee (DBSMC) was established to
improve governance of the Department’s business
transformation eﬀort. The DBSMC is a top-level,
single point-of-decision mechanism that brings
together senior leaders from across the enterprise
to drive business process change and improve
support to the joint warﬁghter. The Department
also developed an Enterprise Transition Plan andassociated Architecture to guide transformationof the Department’s business operations. The
DBSMC will govern execution of the EnterpriseTransition Plan by ensuring accountability andincreasing senior leadership direction.
To ensure alignment with the business
transformation strategy, the Department hascreated Investment Review Boards to evaluate
programs of record against the EnterpriseArchitecture. Funds cannot be obligated for any
business system investment not certiﬁed by theappropriate oﬃcial and approved by the DBSMC
to be in compliance with the Department’s
architecture.
More recently, the Defense BusinessTransformation Agency (BTA) was created tointegrate and oversee corporate-level businesssystems and initiatives.
The BTA is the
management link responsible for integrating
work across the Department in areas suchas human resources, ﬁnancial management,
acquisition, and logistics. It is accountable to the
DBSMC governing body for results.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report69Reshaping the Defense EnterpriseManaging Risks and Measuring Performance
Across the Enterprise
In the 2001 QDR, the Department introduced
a risk management framework to enable theDepartment’s senior leadership to better balancenear-term demands against preparations forthe future. This balanced risk approach has
been successfully implemented in a numberof organizations throughout the Department
to guide strategic planning and day-to-day
management. The Department is now taking
advantage of lessons learned from this initial
implementation phase to reﬁne and develop
a more robust framework to enable decisionmaking.
The Department will reevaluate its enterprisewide outcome goals to maintain strategicalignment and ensure the Department’s objectives
are clearly set forth. The Department will also
evaluate and develop or reﬁne the metrics tomeasure eﬀorts to implement the strategy toprovide useful information to senior leadership.
Improved metrics will allow senior leaders at
the governance level to manage by exception—
monitoring the overall health of the organizationand focusing attention on areas needing top-level
direction and support. Each level of the enterpriseis accountable for measuring performance anddelivering results that support the Departmentwide strategy. Organizations must have theautonomy needed to perform within guidance,
but with adequate oversight to ensure strategicalignment.

Additional Governance Reforms
The Department is considering additional
initiatives aimed at improving governance in eachof the ﬁve corporate focus areas. These include
the following:• Designating a single lead advocate for the
future joint warﬁghter in order to improve theDepartment’s long-range, joint perspectiveon the requirements, acquisition and resource
allocation processes.
• Creating new horizontal organizations to better integrate the Department’s activities in key
areas, including strategic communication andhuman capital strategy.
• Migrating toward a shared services model for
support functions, such as administration,
management and computer support.
Although reforms cannot occur overnight,
the course is clear. The complex strategic
environment demands that our structure andprocesses be streamlined and integrated to bettersupport the President and joint warﬁghter. The
Department is committed to doing so.

Management and Work Reforms
Beyond governance, this QDR identiﬁedopportunities for continued transformation of
acquisition and logistics processes.
Improving Defense Acquisition Performance
There is a growing and deep concern in the
Department of Defense’s senior leadership and70

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterpriseis responsive to the joint warﬁghter.
The Department of Defense is focusing on
bringing the needed capabilities to the joint
force more rapidly, by fashioning a much more
eﬀective acquisition system and associated setof processes. The Department is considering
adopting a risk-based source selection process
in place of the current cost-based approach.
Source selection decisions would not use cost
as the sole criteria but rather would be basedon technical and management risk. Eﬀectively
balancing cost, technical risk and management
realities would require closer integration of the
Department’s joint capabilities identiﬁcation,
resource allocation and acquisition processes,with clear responsibilities deﬁned for each.
In an eﬀort to ensure needed capabilities are
ﬁelded rapidly, acquisition development andprocurement programs will shift to a time-certain
approach. Early in program development, seniorleaders will make the key trade-oﬀs necessary
to balance performance, time and available
resources. Upgrades and improvements canbe added in subsequent spirals based on thematurity of the technology. Combining timecertain development and procurement ofcapability with a risk-based approach to source
selection should provide much greater stability inthe acquisition system. Stability should allow for
more predictable acquisition programs measured
by cost, schedule and performance.
Managing Supply Chain Logistics
In response to the 2001 QDR, the Department
undertook a number of initiatives to improvethe eﬀectiveness and eﬃciency with which
the Department moves and sustains militaryforces. These initiatives included eﬀorts toimprove the deployment process and reduce thelogistics footprint and its associated costs. The

Photo by Specialist Preston Cheeks, U.S. Army.

in the Congress about the acquisition processes.
This lack of conﬁdence results from an inability
to determine accurately the true state of major
acquisition programs when measured by cost,schedule and performance. The unpredictable
nature of Defense programs can be traced to
instabilities in the broader acquisition system.
Fundamentally reshaping that system shouldmake the state of the Department’s major
acquisition programs more predictable andresult in better stewardship of the U.S. tax dollar.
There are several ongoing reviews of defense
acquisition improvements being conducted bothwithin and outside the Department in an eﬀort
to address these issues. Their results will informthe Department’s eﬀorts to reshape defense
acquisition into a truly 21st century process that

A C-130 drops supplies during an operation intended
to prevent reemergence of terrorist activities in
Afghanistan. U.S. and partner forces remain vigilant incombating any new terrorist extremist forces.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report71Reshaping the Defense Enterprise

Department also worked to provide standing
joint force headquarters with an integrated
logistics picture and accelerated the creation anduse of logistics decision-support tools. In thepast four years, the Department has markedly
increased the integration of ﬁeld exercisesand experimentation with the processes fordetermining logistics systems, doctrine and force
structure requirements. In addition, as noted
earlier, the Department is changing its logistics
processes and procedures as dictated by the needsof current operations.
As a result of these initiatives, the Department
has made signiﬁcant strides in migrating to acapabilities-based logistics approach. In this
QDR, the Department focused on improving
visibility into supply chain logistics costs andperformance and on building a foundation forcontinuous improvements in performance. The
strategy for achieving these objectives starts bylinking resources to supply chain logistics activities
in order to understand the costs they entail. The
Department must also assess commercial supply
chain metrics as potential performance targets tobring down the costs and to speed the deliveryof needed items. Promising ongoing initiatives,
such as the single deployment process owner,must be continually improved and accelerated.
Lastly, there is a need to develop realistic anddefendable strategic performance targets forfocused logistics capabilities to guide both capital
investment and process improvement.
The Department is implementing a number of
speciﬁc initiatives aimed at meeting supply chain
objectives. For example, the use of active and72

passive Radio Frequency Identiﬁcation (RFID)
technologies will play a key role in achieving
the Department’s vision for implementing
knowledge-enabled logistics support to the
warﬁghter through automated asset visibility andmanagement. RFID is designed to enable thesharing, integration and synchronizing of datafrom the strategic to the tactical level, informing
every node in the supply chain network. This
information should provide greater insight
into the cause-and-eﬀect relationship between
resources and readiness. Such fact-based insights,
coupled with the implementation of continuous
process improvement tools like Lean, Six Sigma
and Performance Based Logistics, will help
optimize the productive output of the overall
Department of Defense supply chain.
Transforming the Medical Health System(MHS)
New breakthroughs in science and health, and
new innovations in prevention and wellness,
oﬀer the opportunity to develop a 21st century
Military Health System that will improvehealth and save both lives and money. Thistransformation in health and healthcare parallels
other transformations in the Department of
Defense. It is the Department’s goal to have alifetime relationship with the entire Departmentof Defense family which maximizes prevention,wellness and personal choices and responsibility.
As with other areas related to the Department
enterprise, the QDR recommends aligning
medical support with emerging joint force
employment concepts. Building on recent
improvements in new purchased care contracts
and the streamlining of regional TRICARE

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportReshaping the Defense Enterprisemanagement structures, the QDR recommends
continuing to shift toward a market-driven,performance-based investment program. It also
recommends improving planning processes andthe transparency of information, while leveraging
the recent launch of the Department’s electronic
health record system. This new system is needed
to eﬀectively manage MHS by adopting amore ﬂexible ﬁnancing process. Above all, theDepartment’s military and civilian senior leaders
endorse the need to modernize the TRICARE
beneﬁt structure for those customers who are noton Active Duty. The intent is to promote longer
and healthier retirement lives by encouraging
self-responsibility for their own and their family’s
health and the use of health resources to achieve
the longest, healthiest lives at the lowest cost.
Doing so will require changes in legislation andrules to adjust TRICARE cost-sharing features
so that they restore the balance Congress createdin establishing the TRICARE program in the
1990’s and also to seek authority for Health
Savings Accounts.

we emphasize agility, ﬂexibility, responsivenessand eﬀectiveness in the operational forces, so too
must the Department’s organizations, processes
and practices embody these characteristics ifthey are to support the joint warﬁghter and our
Commander in Chief.

Summary
Without a doubt, reshaping the defense
enterprise is diﬃcult. The structures andprocesses developed over the past half-century
were forged in the Cold War and strengthenedby success in it. However, the strategic landscapeof the 21st century demands excellence across amuch broader set of national security challenges.
With change comes turmoil, and achieving
a desired vision requires determination andperseverance within the Department and,
importantly, cooperation with the Congress. As
Quadrennial Defense Review Report

73

74

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Developing a 21st Century Total ForceDEVELOPING A 21st
CENTURY TOTAL FORCE

remain prepared for the new challenges of anuncertain future.

The Department of Defense is the world’s
largest employer, directly employing more than
three million people. The Department’s Total
Force – its active and reserve military components,
its civil servants, and its contractors – constitutes
its warﬁghting capability and capacity. Membersof the Total Force serve in thousands of locations
around the world, performing a vast array of
duties to accomplish critical missions.

Recent operational experiences highlightcapabilities and capacities that the Department
must instill in the Total Force to prevail in along, irregular war while deterring a broadarray of challenges. The future force must be
more ﬁnely tailored, more accessible to the jointcommander and better conﬁgured to operatewith other agencies and international partners
in complex operations. It must have far greater
endurance. It must be trained, ready to operate
and able to make decisions in traditionally nonmilitary areas, such as disaster response andstabilization. Increasing the adaptability of the
Total Force while also reducing stress on military
personnel and their families is a top priority
for the Department. These imperatives require
a new strategy for shaping the Department’s
Total Force, one that will adjust policies andauthorities while introducing education andtraining initiatives to equip civilian and military
warﬁghters to overmatch any future opponent.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class
Rebecca J. Moat, U.S. Navy.

No prudent military commander wants a fair
ﬁght, seeking instead to “overmatch” adversaries
in cunning, capability and commitment. The
selﬂess service and heroism of the men andwomen of the well-trained all-volunteer Total
Force has been a primary source of U.S. strategic
overmatch in confronting the wide range of
threats we face and a key to successful military
operations over the past several decades. The
Total Force must continue to adapt to diﬀerent
operating environments, develop new skills andrebalance its capabilities and people if it is to

An oﬃcer assigned to Navy hospital ship USNS
Mercy explains her rank insignia to Indonesian
military and civilian nurses after instructing them incardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). USNS Mercy
operated oﬀ the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, providing
assistance to international relief organizations; it hosted
medical teams operating ashore in areas aﬀected by the
Indian Ocean tsunami.

The Department and Military Services must
carefully distribute skills among the four
elements of the Total Force (Active Component,
Reserve Component, civilians and contractors)
to optimize their contributions across the rangeof military operations, from peace to war. In
a reconﬁgured Total Force, a new balance ofskills must be coupled with greater accessibility
to people so that the right forces are available
at the right time. Both uniformed and civilian
personnel must be readily available to jointcommanders.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report75Photo by Captain Dave Huxsoll, U.S. Air Force.

Developing a 21st Century Total ForceA Department of Defense contractor (left) and U.S. Air
Force personnel (right) provide ﬁrst aid to an Afghan
girl at the Bagrami Village refugee camp in Kabul,
Afghanistan. Providing essential aid is a critical part of
the reconstruction eﬀort and employs all elements of the
Total Force.

This operational Total Force must remain
prepared for complex operations at home orabroad, including working with other U.S.
agencies, allies, partners and non-governmentalorganizations. Routine integration with foreignand domestic counterparts requires new forms ofadvanced joint training and education.
Finally, the Department must eﬀectively
compete with the civilian sector for high-quality
personnel. The transformation of the Total Forcewill require updated, appropriate authorities andtools from Congress to shape it and improve
its sustainability. Two key enablers of thistransformation will be a new Human Capital
Strategy for the Department, and the applicationof the new National Security Personnel System
to manage the Department’s civilian personnel.

Reconﬁguring the Total ForceRecent operational experiences in Iraq and
Afghanistan highlight the need to rebalance
military skills between and within the Active
76

and Reserve Components. Accordingly, overthe past several years, the Military Departments
are rebalancing – shifting, transferring or
eliminating – approximately 70,000 positions
within or between the Active and Reserve
Components. The Department plans to rebalancean additional 55,000 military personnel by 2010.
The Military Departments are applying this same
scrutiny across the Total Force to ensure that theright skills reside inside each element. The Military
Departments and Combatant Commanders willcontinually assess the force to ensure it remains
responsive to meet future demands. U.S. Joint
Forces Command (U.S. JFCOM), as the joint
force provider, is aiding the eﬀort by ensuring theappropriate global distribution of ready forces
and competencies. The Department plans to
introduce a new methodology and review process
to establish a baseline for personnel policy,
including the development of joint metrics and acommon lexicon to link the Defense Strategy toService-level rebalancing decisions. This process
will help synchronize rebalancing eﬀorts acrossthe Department.
A Continuum of Service
The traditional, visible distinction between war
and peace is less clear at the start of the 21st century.
In a long war, the United States expects to facelarge and small contingencies at unpredictableintervals. To ﬁght the long war and conduct
other future contingency operations, joint force
commanders need to have more immediate accessto the Total Force. In particular, the Reserve
Component must be operationalized, so that
select Reservists and units are more accessible
and more readily deployable than today. During

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Developing a 21st Century Total Forcethe Cold War, the Reserve Component was used,appropriately, as a “strategic reserve,” to provide
support to Active Component forces during
major combat operations. In today’s global
context, this concept is less relevant. As a result,the Department will:• Pursue authorities for increased access to theReserve Component: to increase the periodauthorized for Presidential Reserve Call-up
from 270 to 365 days.
• Better focus the use of the Reserve Components’ competencies for homeland defense
and civil support operations, and seek changes
to authorities to improve access to Guard andreserve consequence management capabilities
and capacity in support of civil authorities.
• Achieve revision of Presidential Reserve CallUp authorities to allow activation of Military
Department Reserve Components for natural
disasters in order to smooth the process formeeting speciﬁc needs without relying solely
on volunteers.
• Allow individuals who volunteer for activation on short notice to serve for long periods
on major headquarters staﬀs as individual
augmentees.
• Develop select reserve units that train more
intensively and require shorter notice for
deployment.
Additionally, the Military Departments will
explore the creation of all-volunteer reserve units
with high-demand capabilities, and the Military

Departments and Combatant Commanders will
expand the concept of contracted volunteers.

Building the Right Skills
Maintaining the capabilities required to conduct
eﬀective multi-dimensional joint operations
is fundamental to the U.S. military’s ability
to overmatch adversaries.
Both battleﬁeld
integration with interagency partners andcombined operations – the integration of thejoint force and coalition forces – will be standard
features in future operations. The combinationof joint, combined and interagency capabilities
in modern warfare represents the next step inthe evolution of joint warﬁghting and places
new demands on the Department’s training andeducation processes.
Joint Training
The QDR assessed and compared the joint
training capabilities of each of the Military
Departments.
Although the Military
Departments have established operationallyproven processes and standards, it is clear thatfurther advances in joint training and education
are urgently needed to prepare for complex,
multinational and interagency operations in the
future. Toward this end, the Department will:• Develop a Joint Training Strategy to address
new mission areas, gaps and continuous
training transformation.
• Revise its Training Transformation Plan toincorporate irregular warfare, complex stabilization operations, combating WMD and

Quadrennial Defense Review Report77Developing a 21st Century Total Force

information operations.
• Expand the Training Transformation BusinessPhoto by Staﬀ Sergeant Stacy L. Peasall, U.S. Air Force.

Model to consolidate joint training, prioritize
new and emerging missions and exploit virtualand constructive technologies.

and emerging challenges highlight the increasing
importance of Foreign Area Oﬃcers, whoprovide Combatant Commanders with politicalmilitary analysis, critical language skills andcultural adeptness. The Military Departments
will increase the number of commissioned andnon-commissioned oﬃcers seconded to foreign
military services, in part by expanding their
Foreign Area Oﬃcer programs. This action will
foster professional relationships with foreign
militaries, develop in-depth regional expertise,and increase unity of eﬀort among the UnitedStates, its allies and partners.

Foreign AreaOﬃcers will also be aligned with lower echelonsof command to apply their knowledge at thetactical level.
To further these language and culture goals, theDepartment will:
U.S. Marines conduct urban training. The numberof U.S. training facilities for urban operations and thedepth of instruction have increased signiﬁcantly since
2002.

• Increase funding for the Army’s pilot linguist
program to recruit and train native andheritage speakers to serve as translators in the
Active and Reserve Components.

Developing broader linguistic capability andcultural understanding is also critical to prevail inthe long war and to meet 21st century challenges.
The Department must dramatically increase thenumber of personnel proﬁcient in key languages
such as Arabic, Farsi and Chinese and make theselanguages available at all levels of action anddecision – from the strategic to the tactical. The
Department must foster a level of understanding
and cultural intelligence about the Middle East
and Asia comparable to that developed about
the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Current
78

DoD Photo.

Language and Cultural Skills

This heritage speaker receives the Purple Heart medal
after being wounded in Iraq. His commander statedthat he was essential to all his missions. He joined the
U.S. Army at 17 years of age and deployed one monthafter turning 18. His younger brother (age 17) alsoplans on enlisting to become a heritage speaker.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Developing a 21st Century Total Force• Require language training for Service Academy and Reserve Oﬃcer Training Corps
scholarship students and expand immersion
programs, semester abroad study opportunities and inter-academy foreign exchanges.
• Increase military special pay for foreign language proﬁciency.
• Increase National Security Education Program (NSEP) grants to American elementary, secondary and post-secondary education
programs to expand non-European language
instruction.
• Establish a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps,
composed of approximately 1,000 people,
as an on-call cadre of high-proﬁciency, civilian language professionals to support the
Department’s evolving operational needs.

Photo by Master Sergeant James
M. Bowman, U.S. Air Force.

• Modify tactical and operational plans toimprove language and regional training prior
to deployments and develop country and language familiarization packages and operationally-focused language instruction modules for
deploying forces.

A U.S. Army Captain from the 17th Field Artillery
Brigade reviews the Arabic language with local Iraqi
boys at the Al-Dawaya School. The Brigade restored the
Al-Dawaya School during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Training and Educating Personnel to StrengthenInteragency Operations
The ability to integrate the Total Force withpersonnel from other Federal Agencies will
be important to reach many U.S. objectives.
Accordingly, the Department supports thecreation of a National Security Oﬃcer (NSO)
corps – an interagency cadre of senior militaryand civilian professionals able to eﬀectively
integrate and orchestrate the contributions ofindividual government agencies on behalf oflarger national security interests.
Much as the Goldwater-Nichols requirementthat senior oﬃcers complete a joint duty
assignment has contributed to integrating thediﬀerent cultures of the Military Departments
into a more eﬀective joint force, the QDR
recommends creating incentives for senior
Department and non-Department personnel todevelop skills suited to the integrated interagency
environment.
The Department will also transform the
National Defense University, the Department’s
premier educational institution, into a true
National Security University. Acknowledging
the complexity of the 21st century security
environment, this new institution will be tailoredto support the educational needs of the broader
U.S. national security profession. Participationfrom interagency partners will be increased andthe curriculum will be reshaped in ways thatare consistent with a uniﬁed U.S. Government
approach to national security missions, andgreater interagency participation will be
encouraged.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report79Developing a 21st Century Total Forceto manpower, training and education.

Designing an Information Age
Human Capital Strategy
To compete eﬀectively with the civilian sector
for highly-qualiﬁed personnel to build the
Total Force, the Department must possess
both a modern Human Capital Strategy and theauthorities required to recruit, shape and sustain
the force it needs.
The new Human Capital Strategy focuses ondeveloping the right mix of people and skills
across the Total Force. The Department’s Human
Capital Strategy may be considered “competencyfocused” and “performance-based.” It is based on
an in-depth study of the competencies U.S. forces
require and the performance standards to which
they must be developed. Each of the Military
Departments will map the array of competencies
and performance criteria that constitute its
forces and also evaluate and improve personnel
development processes to achieve those standards.
Advancements, awards and compensation may
then be linked to an individual’s performance
rather than to longevity or time-in-grade. This
will better align incentives to outputs and reward
excellence.
To execute the Human Capital Strategy, theDepartment will establish a single Program
Executive Oﬃce responsible for the consolidated
Personnel Reporting/Management System andmanagement of the Strategy as a major defense
program. Once implemented, the Human Capital
Strategy will be integrated into a consolidated
personnel tracking and management systemcapable of linking all Department competencies
80

The Department also needs to ensure suitablepromotion and development opportunities
are available to attract and retain the best andbrightest military and civilian personnel. The
Department’s career advancement philosophy
should foster innovation by encouraging career
patterns that develop the unique skills needed
to meet new missions such as irregular warfare.
New career patterns might include seconding
young oﬃcers, non-commissioned oﬃcers andcivil servants to work within allied and partners’
militaries or ministries of defense or to serve on
long-term assignments in key strategic regions of
the world rather than assuming the traditional
career path of multiple, short-term assignments.
The Department will provide further incentives
and improve advancement opportunities in key
career ﬁelds, including Foreign Area Oﬃcers,
trainers, advisors and linguists, as well as inother mission areas that are taking on greater
importance, such as unmanned aerial vehicles andinformation and space operations. In addition toproviding incentives for strong performance andcontinued service, the Human Capital Strategy’s
shaping tools must also enable discrete, necessary
force reductions as well as selective accessions
when a speciﬁc skill is called for and not available
within the joint force.
National Security Personnel System
The Department’s civilians are unique in the U.S.
Government because they are an integral part ofa military organization. Consequently, like themilitary workforce, the Department’s civilians
must adapt to changing mission needs. The new

Quadrennial Defense Review Report

Developing a 21st Century Total Forcepersonnel issues the Department faces: staﬃng
the enterprise to support 21st century missions;using compensation to compete more eﬀectively
in the broader labor market; and providing
civilian support to contingency operations. The
NSPS will incorporate a labor relations systemthat recognizes the Department’s national security
mission and the need to act swiftly to execute thatmission while preserving the collective bargaining
rights of employees. The Department will begin
its transition to the new system by training
personnel to implement the new procedures.
The NSPS also recognizes the importance ofdefense civilians and the support they provide
for contingency operations. It enables civilians
to perform inherently governmental functions,
freeing military personnel to perform inherently
military functions.
Similarly, implementing the new Departmentof Defense Instruction Contractor Personnel
Authorized to Accompany U.S. Armed Forces isanother step toward integrating contractors into
the Total Force. The Department’s policy now
directs that performance of commercial activities
by contractors, including contingency contractors
and any proposed contractor logistics support
arrangements, shall be included in operational
plans and orders. By factoring contractors into
their planning, Combatant Commanders canbetter determine their mission needs.

Force, provide a continuum of service, build
the right skills and design an information-age
human capital strategy will yield a Total Forcethat is better able to meet the diverse challenges
the United States will face in coming years.

Photo by Lance Corporal Leslie J. Hewitt, U.S. Marine Corps.

National Security Personnel System (NSPS) is
designed to facilitate the eﬀective management of
the Department’s 650,000 civilian personnel inthe 21st century. The NSPS addresses three major

Homecoming for pilots from Marine All Weather
Fighter Attack Squadron 533 after participating in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Taken together, measures to reconﬁgure the Total
Quadrennial Defense Review Report

81

82

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportAchieving Unity of Eﬀort

The Department of Defense cannot meet today’scomplex challenges alone. Success requires uniﬁedstatecraft: the ability of the U.S. Government
to bring to bear all elements of national power
at home and to work in close cooperation withallies and partners abroad. During the QDR,
senior leaders considered the changes needed toenable the Department to contribute better tosuch uniﬁed eﬀorts. Just as the Second World
War posed immense challenges that spurred joint
and combined operations within the military,
today’s environment demands that all agenciesof government become adept at integrating theireﬀorts into a uniﬁed strategy.
This requires much more than mere coordination:
the Department must work hand in glove withother agencies to execute the National Security
Strategy. Interagency and international combined
operations truly are the new Joint operations.
Supporting and enabling other agencies, working
toward common objectives, and building thecapacity of partners are indispensable elements of
the Department’s new missions.

large-scale warﬁghting against the regular,
uniformed armed forces of hostile states.
Today, warfare is increasingly characterized byintra-state violence rather than conﬂict between
states. Many of the United States’ principal
adversaries are informal networks of non-state
actors that are less vulnerable to Cold War-style
approaches. At the same time, many partner
nations face internal rather than external threats.
Defeating unconventional enemies requires
unconventional approaches. The ability to wage
irregular and unconventional warfare and theskills needed for counterinsurgency, stabilization
and reconstruction, “military diplomacy” andcomplex interagency coalition operations are
essential – but in many cases require new andmore ﬂexible authorities from the Congress.
Authorities developed before the age of theInternet and globalization have not kept pacewith trans-national threats from geographically

Photo by Staﬀ Sergeant Alfred Johnson, U.S. Army.

ACHIEVING UNITY OF EFFORT

Why a New Approach is Essential
The United States’ experience in the Cold
War still profoundly inﬂuences the way thatthe Department of Defense is organized andexecutes its mission. But, the Cold War was astruggle between nation-states, requiring statebased responses to most political problems andkinetic responses to most military problems. The
Department was optimized for conventional,

From left, Honorable Zalmay Khalizad, Americanambassador to Iraq; U.S. Army General George Casey
Jr., commanding general Multi-National Force-Iraq;
and an Iraqi dignitary gather for the formal transfer ofauthority of Forward Operating Base Danger from U.S.
forces to the Iraqi government in 2005. All elements of
the U.S. Government are working in concert to bringstability to Iraq.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report83Achieving Unity of Eﬀort

dispersed non-state terrorist and criminal
networks. Authorities designed during the Cold
War unduly limit the ability to assist police forces
or interior ministries and are now less applicable.
Adversaries’ use of new technologies andmethods has outstripped traditional concepts ofnational and international security. Traditional
mechanisms for creating and sustaining
international cooperation are not suﬃciently
agile to disaggregate and defeat adversary
networks at the global, regional and local levels
simultaneously.
Supporting the rule of law and building civilsocieties where they do not exist today, or
where they are in their infancy, is fundamental
to winning the long war. In this sense, today’senvironment resembles a challenge that is
diﬀerent in kind, but similar in scale, to the Cold
War – a challenge so immense that it requires
major shifts in strategic concepts for national
security and the role of military power. Therefore,
the United States needs to develop new concepts
and methods for interagency and international
cooperation.
Strategic and Operational Frameworks
Unity of eﬀort requires that strategies, plans andoperations be closely coordinated with partners.
At the operational level, the United States must
be able to prevent or disrupt adversaries’ ability
to plan and execute operations rather than being
forced to respond to attacks after they haveoccurred. Adversaries using asymmetric tactics
are global, adaptive and ﬂeeting, thus analyses,
decisions and actions to defeat them must also
be swift. But for swift action to be fashioned and84

eﬀective, it must occur within well-coordinatedstrategic
andoperationalframeworks.
Authorities, procedures and practices must
permit the seamless integration of Federal, stateand local capabilities at home and among allies,
partners and non-governmental organizations
abroad.
Drawing on operational experience andlessons learned over the last four years, theQDR examined changes within and beyond
the Department to strengthen unity of eﬀort.
Improved interagency and international planning,
preparation and execution will allow faster andmore eﬀective action in dealing with 21st century
challenges. New modes of cooperation canenhance agility and eﬀectiveness with traditional
allies and engage new partners in a common
cause. Initiating eﬀorts to better understandand engage those who support the murderous
ideology of terrorists and the evolution of statesat strategic crossroads will be critical.

Strengthening Interagency Operations
Increasing unity of eﬀort to achieve the nation’s
security policy priorities across the agenciesof the Federal Government is essential. Only
with coherent, leveraged U.S. Government
action can the nation achieve true unity ofeﬀort with international partners. To address
more eﬀectively many security challenges, theDepartment is continuing to shift its emphasis
from Department-centric approaches toward
interagency solutions. Cooperation across theFederal Government begins in the ﬁeld withthe development of shared perspectives andQuadrennial Defense Review ReportAchieving Unity of Eﬀort

The QDR recommends the creation of National
Security Planning Guidance to direct thedevelopment of both military and non-militaryplans and institutional capabilities. The planningguidance would set priorities and clarify national
security roles and responsibilities to reduce
capability gaps and eliminate redundancies. It
would help Federal Departments and Agencies
better align their strategy, budget and planning
functions with national objectives. Stronger
linkages among planners in the Military
Departments, the Combatant Commands andthe Joint Staﬀ, with the Oﬃce of the Secretaryof Defense and with other Departments should
ensure that operations better reﬂect the President’s
National Security Strategy and country’s policy
goals.

seamlessly to achieve team objectives.
For the Department, joint warﬁghters – theCombatant Commanders and leaders of
deployed joint task forces – are the primary levelat which unity of eﬀort develops. For most otheragencies, the U.S. Chief of Mission in a speciﬁccountry, leading an interagency Country Team,
has an important ﬁeld leadership role. Creating
opportunities to help enable CombatantCommanders (whose purview extends across
many countries) to work more collaboratively
with Chiefs of Mission (who focus on only one
country) is one objective. Currently, personnel
in the Department of State and Department of
Defense must expend considerable eﬀort, on acase-by-case basis, to act together in support ofoperations. The result is that Commanders andChiefs of Mission lose agility in the face of an
adaptive adversary, ﬂeeting targets are missed,
and risks to U.S. interests and those of ourpartners increase.

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 1stClass Robert McRill, U.S. Navy.

a better understanding of each agency’s role,
missions and capabilities. This will complement
better understanding and closer cooperationin Washington, and will extend to execution ofcomplex operations. To that end, the Department
supports improvements to strategy development
and planning within the Department and with
its interagency partners.

Learning from the Field
Closer relationships between parent agencies in
Washington and elsewhere support increased
collaboration in the ﬁeld. Solutions developed in
the ﬁeld often have applicability to interagency
cooperation at the strategic and policy levels.
Long experience shows that operators, regardlessof parent agency, collaborate closely when facedwith common challenges in the ﬁeld: theyoften resolve interagency concerns quickly andRescue personnel from the Los Angeles, California Fire
Department, working with U.S. Coast Guard and U.S.
Army personnel, search for victims of Hurricane Katrina
in ﬂooded neighborhoods in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Complex Interagency Operations Abroad
The President’s National Security Presidential
Directive designating the Secretary of State to

Quadrennial Defense Review Report85

Achieving Unity of Eﬀort

improve overall U.S. Government stabilization
and reconstruction eﬀorts recognizes thechallenges of achieving unity of eﬀort for complex
overseas contingencies. Although many U.S.
Government organizations possess knowledge
and skills needed to perform tasks critical tocomplex operations, they are often not charteredor resourced to maintain deployable capabilities.
Thus, the Department has tended to become thedefault responder during many contingencies.
This is a short-term necessity, but the Defense
Department supports legislation to enable
other agencies to strengthen their capabilities
so that balanced interagency operations become
more feasible – recognizing that other agencies’
capabilities and performance often play a criticalrole in allowing the Department of Defense toachieve its mission.
Recognizing that stability, security and transition
operations can be critical to the long war on
terrorism, the Department issued guidance in2005 to place stability operations on par withmajor combat operations within the Department.
The directive calls for improving the Department’s
ability to work with interagency partners,
international organizations, non-governmentalorganizations and others to increase capacities
to participate in complex operations abroad.
When implemented, the Department will beable to provide better support to civilian-led
missions, or to lead stabilization operations whenappropriate.
The QDR supports eﬀorts to expand the
expeditionary capacity of agency partners. In
addition, increased coordination between
86

geographic Combatant Commands andinteragency partners in the ﬁeld will increase
overall eﬀectiveness. The Department proposesa number of policy and legislative initiatives toimprove unity of eﬀort for complex interagency
operations abroad, providing greater Presidential
ﬂexibility in responding to security challenges.
The Department will:• Support substantially increased resources forthe Department of State’s Coordinator for
Reconstruction and Stability and State’s associated proposal to establish a deployable Civilian Reserve Corps and a Conﬂict Response
Fund.
• Support broader Presidential authorities toredirect resources and task the best-situatedagencies to respond, recognizing that othergovernment agencies may be best suited toprovide necessary support in overseas emergencies. This new authority would enable theU.S. Government to capitalize on inherent
competencies of individual agencies to tailor amore eﬀective immediate response.
• Strengthen internal Department mechanisms
for interagency coordination.
• Improve the Department’s ability to assess
the relative beneﬁts of security cooperation
activities to enable better resource allocation
decisions.
• Strengthen the Department’s regional centers
to become U.S. Government assets in supportof government outreach to regional opinionmakers.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportAchieving Unity of Eﬀort

Uniﬁed interagency eﬀorts are no less important
at home. The Department must work as part ofa uniﬁed interagency eﬀort with the Departmentof Homeland Security and other Federal, stateand local agencies to address threats to the U.S.
homeland. Moreover, the response to Hurricane
Katrina vividly illustrated the need for the
Department to support other agencies in thecontext of complex interagency operations at
home.
The QDR recommends several actions to improve
unity of eﬀort with other Federal agencies, stateand local governments to improve homeland
defense and homeland security. The Department
will:• In partnership with Department of Homeland
Security, develop a National Homeland Security Plan clarifying the optimum distributionof eﬀort among Federal agencies for prevention, preparation and response.
• Expand training programs to accommodate
planners from other agencies and, working
with the Department of Homeland Security
and other interagency partners, oﬀer assistance to develop new courses on developing
and implementing strategic-level plans fordisaster assistance, consequence management
and catastrophic events.
• Partner with the Department of Homeland
Security to design and facilitate full-scope interagency homeland defense and civil support
exercises, leveraging the Defense Department’s

experience in planning and training. The
exercises will be conducted in near-real-world
conditions, with civilian and military participation from national, state and local government agencies. These exercises should help
to yield common understandings of assigned
roles and responsibilities, and shared practicein complex planning and operations.
• At the request of the Department of Homeland Security, organize and sponsor homeland
defense tabletop exercises, in which seniorleaders from civilian and military agencies
practice responses to disaster scenarios.
• Continue consultations with our neighbors toaddress security and defense issues of common
concern, while ensuring coordination with the
Department of Homeland Security.

Working with International
Allies and Partners
Long-standing alliance relationships willcontinue to underpin uniﬁed eﬀorts to address
21st century security challenges. These establishedrelationships continue to evolve, ensuring their
Photo by Journalist 3rd Class Chris Gethings.

Complex Interagency Operations at Home

U.S. and Mexican forces worked together distributing
relief supplies at D’Iberville Elementary School in
Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina.

Quadrennial Defense Review Report87relevance even as new challenges emerge. The
ability of the United States and its allies to work
together to inﬂuence the global environment isfundamental to defeating terrorist networks.
Wherever possible, the United States works
with or through others: enabling allied andpartner capabilities, building their capacity anddeveloping mechanisms to share the risks andresponsibilities of today’s complex challenges.
The nation’s alliances provide a foundation
for working to address common security
challenges. NATO remains the cornerstoneof transatlantic security and makes manifest
the strategic solidarity of democratic states in
Europe and North America. NATO is evolving
through the addition of seven new allies, thePartnership for Peace Program, the creation of
the NATO Response Force, the establishment of
the new Allied Command Transformation, theAlliance’s leadership of the International Security
Assistance Force in Afghanistan and the NATO
Training Mission in Iraq. In many European
allied states, however, aging and shrinking
populations are curbing defense spending on
capabilities they need for conducting operationseﬀectively alongside U.S. forces. In the Paciﬁc,alliances with Japan, Australia, Korea and others
promote bilateral and multi-lateral engagementin the region and cooperative actions to addresscommon security threats. India is also emerging
as a great power and a key strategic partner.
Close cooperation with these partners in the long
war on terrorism, as well as in eﬀorts to counter
WMD proliferation and other non-traditional
threats, ensures the continuing need for these
alliances and for improving their capabilities.
88

Photo by Technical Sergeant
Cherie A. Thurlby, U.S. Air Force.

Achieving Unity of Eﬀort

Defense Ministers attend a NATO-Ukraine Commission
meeting during a NATO conference in Brussels,
Belgium. NATO remains a key alliance as the UnitedStates faces traditional and emerging challenges.

The Department will continue to strengthen
traditional allied operations, with increased
emphasis on collective capabilities to plan andconduct stabilization, security, transition andreconstruction operations. In particular, theDepartment supports eﬀorts to create a NATOstabilization and reconstruction capability and aEuropean constabulary force. The United States
will work to strengthen allied capabilities for thelong war and countering WMD. The UnitedStates, in concert with allies, will promote theaim of tailoring national military contributions
to best employ the unique capabilities andcharacteristics of each ally, achieving a uniﬁed
eﬀort greater than the sum of its parts.
Consistent with the President’s emphasis on theneed to prevent, rather than be forced to respondto, attacks, the Department recommends that
the United States continue to work with its allies
to develop approaches, consistent with theirdomestic laws and applicable international law,
to disrupt and defeat transnational threats before
they mature. Concepts and constructs enabling
unity of eﬀort with more than 70 supporting

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportAchieving Unity of Eﬀort

nations under the Proliferation Security Initiative
should be extended to domains other than WMD
proliferation, including cyberspace, as a priority.

Photo by Lance Corporal
Mark Morrow Jr., U.S. Marine Corps.

To prevent terrorist attacks or disrupt their
networks, to deny them sanctuary anywherein the world, to separate terrorists from hostpopulations and ultimately to defeat them,
the United States must also work with newinternational partners in less familiar areas of theworld.

U.S. civil aﬀairs oﬃcers assist residents of Ramadi withregistering to vote in Anbar Province, Iraq, in August
2005. Iraqis have exercised their right to democracy inincreasing numbers throughout 2004 and 2005.

This means the Department must be prepared todevelop a new team of leaders and operators whoare comfortable working in remote regions of theworld, dealing with local and tribal communities,
adapting to foreign languages and cultures andworking with local networks to further U.S. andpartner interests through personal engagement,
persuasion and quiet inﬂuence – rather than
through military force alone. To support thiseﬀort, new authorities are needed. During
the Cold War the legal authorities for military
action, intelligence, foreign military assistanceand cooperation with foreign police and security
services were separately deﬁned and segregatedfrom each other. Today, there is a need for U.S.
forces to transition rapidly between these types
of authorities in an agile and ﬂexible manner, tomeet the challenges of the 21st century.
Based on operational experiences of the last four
years, the QDR recommends that Congressprovide considerably greater ﬂexibility in the
U.S. Government’s ability to partner directlywith nations in ﬁghting terrorists. For somenations, this begins with training, equipping andadvising their security forces to generate stability
and security within their own borders. For
others, it may entail providing some assistancewith logistics support, equipment, training andtransport to allow them to participate as membersof coalitions with the United States or its allies instability, security, transition and reconstruction
operations around the globe.
Recent legislative changes remove some of the
impediments to helping partners engaged in theirown defense, but greater ﬂexibility is urgently
needed. The Department will seek to:• Establish a Defense Coalition Support Account to fund and, as appropriate, stockpile
routine defense articles such as helmets, bodyarmor and night vision devices for use bycoalition partners.
• Expand Department authority to provide
logistics support, supplies and services toallies and coalition partners, without reimbursement as necessary, to enable coalition

Quadrennial Defense Review Report89Achieving Unity of Eﬀort• Expand Department authority to lease or lend
equipment to allies and coalition partners foruse in military operations in which they areparticipating with U.S. forces.
• Expand the authorities of the Departments ofState and Defense to train and equip foreign
security forces best suited to internal counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations.
These may be non-military law enforcement
or other security forces of the government insome nations.
The Department will continue to support
initiatives, such as the Global Peace Operations
Initiative, to increase the capacity of internationalorganizations so that they can contribute more
eﬀectively to the improvement of governance andthe expansion of civil society in the world. In
this regard, the Department supports the African
Union’s development of a humanitarian crisis
intervention capability, which is a good example
of an international organization stepping up to
the challenge of regional stabilization missions.
The Department stands ready to increase its
assistance to the United Nations Departmentof Peacekeeping Operations in areas of the
Department’s expertise such as doctrine, training,strategic planning and management.

themselves eﬀectively. Assistance in today’senvironment relies on the ability to improvestates’ governance, administration, internal
security and the rule of law in order to build
partner governments’ legitimacy in the eyes of
their own people and thereby inoculate societies
against terrorism, insurgency and non-state
threats. In partnership with the State Department
and others, the Department must become as
adept at working with foreign constabularies as
it is with externally-focused armed forces, andas adept at working with interior ministries as it
is with defense ministries – a substantial shift ofemphasis that demands broader and more ﬂexible
legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms.
Bringing all the elements of U.S. power tobear to win the long war requires overhaulingtraditional foreign assistance and export control
activities and laws. These include foreignaid, humanitarian assistance, post-conﬂict
stabilization and reconstruction, foreign police
training, International Military Education andTraining (IMET) and, where necessary, providing
advanced military technologies to foreign allies
and partners. In particular, winning the long war
Photo by Chief Master Sergeant
Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force.

operations with U.S. forces.

Transforming Foreign Assistance
Foreign military assistance missions during theCold War were largely designed to shore up
friendly regimes against external threats. Today,
the aim is for partners to govern and police
90

U.S. Captain John Hart (right) instructs members of theRoyal Thai Air Force on the instrument panel of an F16 Fighting Falcon as part of the International Military
Education and Training program.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportAchieving Unity of Eﬀort

requires strengthening the Department’s ability
to train and educate current and future foreign
military leaders at institutions in the UnitedStates. Doing so is critical to strengthening
partnerships and building personal relationships.
In all cases, they are integral to successful irregularwarfare operations.
For example, quick action to relieve civilian
suﬀering, train security forces to maintain civil
order and restore critical civilian infrastructure
denies the enemy opportunities to capitalizeon the disorder immediately following military
operations and sets more favorable conditions
for longer term stabilization, transition andreconstruction. Full integration of allied andcoalition capabilities ensures unity of eﬀort for
rapidly evolving counterinsurgency operations.
Similarly, foreign leaders who receive U.S.
education and training help their governments
understand U.S. values and interests, fostering
willingness to unite in a common cause.
The QDR found that, with the exception oflegislation applicable only to operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq, existing authorities
governing planning, ﬁnancing and use of
these instruments for shaping international
partnerships do not accommodate the dynamic
foreign policy demands of the 21st century.
Based on recent operational experience, theDepartment seeks a continuum of authorities
from Congress balancing the need to act quickly
in the war on terrorism with the need to integrate
military power to meet long-term, enduring
foreign policy objectives.

The Department recommends a number ofimportant legislative changes in the near term,
while also working in close partnership with
the Department of State and the Congress toenable better alignment of the Foreign Assistance
Act and the Arms Export Control Act withtoday’s security challenges. In addition to
expanding coalition management authorities, theDepartment seeks to:• Institutionalize OIF/OEF authorities to conduct Humanitarian Assistance and Stability
Operations.
• Signiﬁcantly improve and increase IMET-like
opportunities targeted at shaping relationships
and developing future foreign leaders.
• Consider whether the restrictions on theAmerican Service Members Protection Act(ASPA) on IMET and other foreign assistanceprograms pertaining to security and the war
on terror necessitate adjustment as we continue to advance the aims of the ASPA.
• Expand the Counter Terrorism Fellowship
Program beyond its current focus on senior-level government oﬃcials and national
strategic issues. Combatant Commanders andU.S. Chiefs of Mission, in consultation with
regional partners, will develop education programs to improve regional counter-terrorism
campaigns and crisis response planning at theoperational level.

Strategic Communication
Victory in the long war ultimately depends

Quadrennial Defense Review Report91

Achieving Unity of Eﬀort

Responsibility for strategic communication must
be government-wide and the QDR supports
eﬀorts led by the Department of State to improve
integration of this vital element of national power
into strategies across the Federal Government.
The Department must instill communicationassessments and processes into its culture,developing programs, plans, policy, informationand themes to support Combatant Commanders
that reﬂect the U.S. Government’s overall strategic
objectives. To this end, the Department will work
to integrate communications eﬀorts horizontally
across the enterprise to link information andcommunication issues with broader policies,
plans and actions.
The QDR identiﬁed capability gaps in each of the
primary supporting capabilities of Public Aﬀairs,
Defense Support to Public Diplomacy, Military
Diplomacy and Information Operations,
including Psychological Operations. To close
those gaps, the Department will focus on properlyorganizing, training, equipping and resourcing the
key communication capabilities. This eﬀort will
include developing new tools and processes forassessing, analyzing and delivering information
to key audiences as well as improving linguistic
92

skills and cultural competence. These primary
supporting communication capabilities will be
developed with the goal of achieving a seamless
communication across the U.S. Government.
Photo by Sergeant Michael Abney, U.S. Army.

on strategic communication by the UnitedStates and its international partners. Eﬀective
communication must build and maintaincredibility and trust with friends and foes alike,through an emphasis on consistency, veracity
and transparency both in words and deeds.
Such credibility is essential to building trusted
networks that counter ideological support for
terrorism.

U.S. soldiers with the Parwan Provincial Reconstruction
Team discuss future quality of life improvements withvillage elders during a humanitarian aid mission to
Jegdalek, Afghanistan.

Summary
The United States will not win the war on
terrorism or achieve other crucial national
security objectives discussed in this Report by
military means alone. Instead, the applicationof uniﬁed statecraft, at the Federal level and inconcert with allies and international partners, iscritical. In addition to coalition- and partnersupported combat and preventive operations,
simultaneous eﬀective interaction with civilian
populations will be essential to achieve success.
Authorities that permit nimble and adaptive
policies, processes and institutions – domestic
and international – are essential adjuncts to themilitary capability needed to address the rapidly
evolving security challenges around the globe.

Quadrennial Defense Review ReportChairman’s Assessment

Chairman’s Assessment

A-1

A-2

Chairman’s Assessment

Chairman’s Assessment of the2006 Quadrennial Defense Review
Introduction
The Department of Defense conducted the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) during ademanding time for our Armed Forces. We are ﬁghting a War on Terrorism of long duration while
helping to foster ﬂedgling democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, we are engaging
nations around the world to build relationships, enhance regional stability, and strengthen deterrence– all while fundamentally transforming our military forces to defeat dangerous threats that may emerge
in the decades ahead.
These concurrent challenges shaped a QDR process that balanced the needs of the ongoing struggle
with longer term requirements to enhance security in a rapidly changing world. The report provides
speciﬁc recommendations to transform the Department, its processes, and its forces, to meet thischallenge. Success in this eﬀort was due to the sustained leadership of senior civilians and uniformed
oﬃcers, and the hard work of thousands of men and women in the Department of Defense, whotogether created an open, collaborative environment that permitted diversity of input, discussion, andanalysis.

The QDR Process
The 2006 QDR was the ﬁrst contemporary defense review to coincide with an ongoing major conﬂict.
This compelled the Department to recast its view of future warfare through the lens of long duration
conﬂict with its extended stabilization campaign. As a consequence, this review required a judicious
balance between present needs and future capabilities. The aim was a review that was strategy driven,capabilities focused, and budget disciplined.
Beneﬁting from legislative relief granted by the Congress, the Department enjoyed additional time toorganize, deliberate on, and craft the review. The Secretary, recognizing the opportunity for a broader
spectrum of participation, directed an open and collaborative review from the beginning, soliciting
input from across the Department and the interagency, as well as diverse perspectives from a variety of
independent study groups. Consequently, the thoroughness, the scope of issues considered, and thelevel of senior leader involvement proved unprecedented.

Chairman’s Assessment

A-3

Assessment
Any attempt to predict the future security environment of 2025 is inherently diﬃcult. Consider thechallenge in 1985 of trying to characterize the security environment that would exist in 2006. Given
the dynamics of change over time, we must develop a mix of agile and ﬂexible capabilities to mitigate
uncertainty.
This review articulates a vision for the transformed force fully consistent with the demands of the
anticipated security environment in 2025. To meet the key challenges in this period, we must: shapeand sustain our Armed Forces to most eﬀectively ﬁght the War on Terrorism, transform “in stride”
during wartime, strengthen our joint warﬁghting, and improve the quality of life of our Service
members and their families.
The varied recommendations of the QDR promise to more eﬀectively and eﬃciently align strategy
and resources. The report outlines a force more capable of engaging in irregular warfare, and special
operations forces more focused on those tasks they are best suited to perform. It foresees the need toestablish long range and long loiter capabilities for strike and surveillance as well as increased littoraland undersea warfare capabilities. Finally, it strengthens deterrence options and enhances the capability
to respond to catastrophic events in the homeland, whether man made or natural.

Winning the War on Terrorism
The QDR properly focuses on the War on Terrorism as our ﬁrst priority. We will enhance our
expeditionary combat power and shape the Services to be lighter, yet more lethal, more sustainable andmore agile. We will train additional Special Operations Forces and enable traditional ground forces
to conduct foreign training and security missions in addition to combat operations. This expansion
allows SOF to undertake longer duration, high intensity tasks and augments the irregular warfare
capability of the entire force.
A renewed emphasis on Human Intelligence, increased airborne surveillance and airlift capacity, andspecialized naval forces conﬁgured for coastal and riverine operations further complement irregularwarfare capacity. Additionally, the QDR recognizes Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction(SSTR) as a U.S. government wide mission of increasing importance and identiﬁes military support to
SSTR as a core mission.
Finally, by emphasizing greater cultural awareness and language skills, the QDR acknowledges that
victory in this long war depends on information, perception, and how and what we communicate
A-4

Chairman’s Assessment

as much as application of kinetic eﬀects. These cultural and language capabilities also enhance
eﬀectiveness in a coalition setting during conventional operations.

Accelerating Transformation
The QDR identiﬁes many areas and technologies that promise to revolutionize the future force.
However, transformation is as much a mindset and culture as it is a technology or a platform. The
QDR recognizes that we maximize the impact of our military power through closer coordination
within the Department of Defense and with our interagency and international partners. Building partnership capacity invigorates our eﬀorts and acknowledges that future challenges can be met only through the
integrated use of all of the instruments of national power and through the relevant contributions of ourinternational partners. The proposed National Security Planning Guidance promises to signiﬁcantly
improve national and international eﬀorts to prevent, as well as respond to, crises at home and abroad.
The QDR takes positive steps to posture the Department’s contribution to our national Homeland
Defense eﬀort. For example, several QDR initiatives dramatically improve our ability to detect threatsin the approaches and interdict them at a distance. Moreover, military assistance to civil authorities,
such as the response to a natural disaster, proved instrumental in shaping several QDR decisions.
Finally, the QDR envisions a wide range of initiatives that augment our capacity to shape the behaviorof potential adversaries and to react to dangerous WMD related contingencies. These initiatives
include acquiring more ﬂexible conventional deterrence capabilities, solidifying the Department’s
WMD command and control structure, increasing the number of forces available for overseas nuclear
render safe operations, and shortening their response time.

Strengthening Joint Warﬁghting
Integrating advanced capabilities to improve joint war ﬁghting is at the heart of the QDR eﬀort. We
will measure resource related decisions against that goal, as we transition from an interoperable to aninterdependent force, whose diverse capabilities are rapidly integrated to achieve desired eﬀects. Thisapplies to the full range of combat tasks as well as to evolving roles and missions in Homeland Defense,
Humanitarian Assistance, and military support to Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction
operations.
Change must extend beyond the forces in the ﬁeld to include command and control headquarters.
Key is the initiative to organize, man, train, and equip selected Service headquarters to make them
Joint Task Force (JTF) capable, available and ready to command and control designated Joint force
Chairman’s Assessment

A-5

missions. The existence of a trained and ready pool of JTF capable headquarters will assure a wider
range of military response options.
Finally, the Defense enterprise must be reformed to create and leverage the same agility as the force itenables. QDR recommendations to implement a comprehensive Human Capital Strategy, develop
more integrated and streamlined acquisition processes, and improve Strategic Communication reﬂect
the necessary enterprise approach to building a more eﬀective and eﬃcient organization, freeing
resources for other transformational eﬀorts.

Improve the Quality of Life of our Service Members and our Families
Superbly trained, equipped, and highly dedicated people have always been America’s ultimate
advantage. Our foremost duty, and that which this QDR acknowledged in every recommendation,is the imperative of supporting our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines by giving them the ﬁnest
equipment and training, so that they can achieve victory and return home safely.
Achieving that goal requires the proper shaping of the Total Force to sustain the Global War on Terrorism
with enough force depth and critical skills to allow suﬃcient time for rest and reﬁt between combat
assignments. It also means more fully integrating support systems to deliver ﬁrst class administrative
services, supplies, and support programs for our professionals and their families.
Finally, improving the quality of life of our service members means that we will provide educational
opportunities to our people, to help them realize their professional goals and personal aspirations.
When their time of uniformed service is over, they will return home as outstanding citizens and rolemodels, ready to serve our society in new and diﬀerent ways.

Assessment of Risk
We cannot accurately characterize the security environment of 2025; therefore, we must hedge against
this uncertainty by identifying and developing a broad range of capabilities. Further, we must organize
and arrange our forces to create the agility and ﬂexibility to deal with unknowns and surprises in the
coming decades. This review has carefully balanced those areas where risk might best be taken in orderto provide the needed resources for areas requiring new or additional investment.
Today, the Armed Forces of the United States stand fully capable of accomplishing all the objectives of
the National Defense Strategy: securing the United States from direct attack, securing strategic accessand retaining global freedom of action, strengthening alliances and partnerships, and establishing
A-6

Chairman’s Assessment

favorable security conditions. The recommendations contained in this report provide future capability,
capacity, and ﬂexibility to execute these assigned missions, while hedging against the unknown threatsof 2025.

Assessment of Roles and Missions
The Department continues to reﬁne and improve the way capabilities are developed, ﬁelded, and integrated, in order to execute the full range of missions the Armed Forces may be called on to perform. The
2006 QDR stresses an integrated approach with interagency and international partners. This review
examined the challenges of the 21st century and the responsibilities of our Armed Forces in meeting
them, and found roles and missions to be fundamentally sound. I concur with this assessment.

Moving Forward
We are at a critical time in the history of this great country and ﬁnd ourselves challenged in ways we
did not expect. We face a ruthless enemy intent on destroying our way of life and an uncertain future
security environment. The War on Terrorism – a war of long duration – diﬀers from the kind of
conﬂict for which the Department traditionally prepared. Our focus is increasingly on the search forsmall cells of terrorists and on building the capacity of our partners. However, we must also retain thecapability to conduct sustained conventional combat operations and to protect the homeland.
We must prevail now while we prepare for the future. This demands a wide range of military capabilities,
superbly trained forces, and increased Joint, interagency, and coalition integration.
The recommendations of this report address the current ﬁght and the full range of missions prescribedin the National Defense Strategy, while hedging against an uncertain future. The 2006 QDR tackles
the most pressing needs of the Department in a strategically sound and ﬁscally responsible manner. As
a result our Armed Forces stand ready to protect the United States, prevent conﬂict and surprise attack,and prevail against adversaries wherever they may be found.
I appreciate the eﬀorts of all who were involved in this process. I endorse the 2006 QDR and its
vision of a future force – more agile and more ﬂexible, better prepared to deal with a dynamic security
environment. Our challenges are many, but the course is clear.

Chairman’s Assessment

A-7