What do we mean by "transformation"? An exchange - defense policy, United States

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2002 by Andrew L. Ross, Michele A. Flournoy, Cindy Williams, David Mosher

For both these reasons, I prefer to talk about spurring the military to solve specific problems that it will face in the future. I look for innovation or change to meet concrete needs, rather than lists of technologies and top-down efforts to find ways to use them--which often seem to be the unspoken goal of "transformation."

Strategy and Resources

When the Quadrennial Defense Review for 2001 began, the services did not want to repeat the method used during the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997, a process they called "budget driven" or "cost driven." They wanted instead a "strategy-driven" review process. I agree completely that reviews should be driven by strategy. But my understanding of strategy is quite different from the concept those advocates have in mind. Proponents of a "strategy-driven review" say they want first to look at what the nation needs to do in the world, and second to make a list of everything the military should be capable of doing. Next they would decide what forces are needed to do all those things. Finally, they would figure out the cost of those forces in the future, add up the bill, and present it to the American public in the expectation that taxpayers will pay it in full.

That is not strategy. If the military has all the resources in the world, if it can bring all the forces in the world to bear at every point, it does not need a strategy. The whole point of strategy is to set priorities and make choices among competing alternatives when resources are constrained. What the proponents of the laundry-list approach have derided as a "budget-driven process" is the essence of strategy itself.

Setting a top line for defense and working within it is fundamental to devising a strategy. The Defense Department needs to know how much money it will have, in order to know how deeply it will have to cut into the areas where, as Michele Flournoy likes to say, it can accept greater risk. But that does not apply when setting the top line for the individual services. In the 1997 quadrennial review, the defense budget "pie" was divided up among the services using the same formula as was used year after year during the Cold War.

That is counter-strategic. The department needs not only a joint process to determine its requirements but a joint view to determine its strategy. We must decide priorities not on the basis of what is best for the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, but on the basis of what is best for the nation. If this means that the Navy's share of the defense budget grows while the Army's shrinks, so be it.

Allowing the services' budget shares to shift from year to year may benefit innovation. As I discussed earlier, bringing about innovation in a large institution that is already the best is not easy. Unless the military faces substantial competition from the outside or fails in war, it is not predisposed to change. But one way to promote change is to reward it, not only in individuals but in services. A service that has more innovative ideas, that looks to the future rather than back to the Cold War, might be rewarded with a larger share of the budget. It is possible to set up an incentive structure that could at least reward and thereby encourage innovation, if not the more ambitious goals of sweeping transformation.