DoD report out

Every four years the U.S. Department of Defense presents to Congress an extensive review of the security threats and challenges to America. The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a legislatively mandated review of Department of Defense strategy and priorities. The QDR, according to
www.defense.gov, will “set a long-term course for the Department of Defense as it assesses the threats and challenges that the nation faces and re-balances the Department of Defense’s strategies, capabilities, and forces to address today’s conflicts and tomorrow’s threats.”
The QDR is meant to be a non-partisan strategic document free of any political affiliations. Ideally, the QDR is aimed at giving some indication of the United States’ spending goals for defense for the next four years. The QDR is an exceptional document. The 2010 QDR, made public on Feb. 1, lays out the goal to maintain the U.S. military’s technological lead over current as well as potential adversaries, and discusses the need to counter terrorism, the big threat to western cyber systems, as well as the threat of Russian high-tech anti-aircraft missiles. The document itself, as broad as it was, left much to be desired.

In the mid- to long-term, U.S. military forces must plan and prepare to prevail in a broad range of operations that may occur in multiple theaters in overlapping time frames. This includes maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors, but we must take seriously the need to plan for the broadest possible range of operations — from homeland defense and defense support to civil authorities, to deterrence and preparedness missions — occurring in multiple and unpredictable combinations. Operations over the past eight years have stressed the ground forces disproportionately, but the future operational landscape could also portend significant long-duration air and maritime campaigns for which the U.S. Armed Forces must be prepared.
This passage from the QDR is vague and disproportionate. It is saying that we still need the ability to fight and win two present and ongoing wars, as well as be prepared to deal with any and every other possible form of conflict that can be thought up. The QDR has declared national security spending exempt from cuts — and the wording allows one to infer that, on just about anything, spending can be justified via this document.
If the QDR is meant to epitomize our current defense policy, the 2010 QDR basically states that we have no defense policy — unless you count the eight-page manifesto on global warming — which has no real bearing on the actual defense of the U.S.
If the vague and seemingly all-inclusive wording of the QDR as well as the sheer disregard for America’s fiscal situation wasn’t enough to worry U.S. citizens, what about its lack of acknowledgement of threats like Islamic radicalism or the Iranian bomb? Islamic radicalism was not acknowledged as a threat whatsoever in the QDR, and nuclear Iran is only mentioned briefly. These two topics should be at the forefront of the minds at the Department of Defense, and should have been reflected in the QDR. These two entities alone are developing as a serious and real threat to the U.S. (look at the recent December bombing attempt by a radical Muslim from Yemen). Why, then, was the QDR vague enough in regard to every section that had anything to do with spending, and ignorant to the real threats more tangible and imminent than the vaudeville of mere potential threats Obama decided to acknowledge?
Either Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen are simply ignorant to the real threats facing America (which is doubtful), or they are deliberately depreciating security threats to please the Obama administration.