DOD launches strategic review
Top Pentagon officials will reassess military priorities in light of sequestration.
Top Pentagon officials, under orders from Secretary Chuck Hagel, will reassess military priorities in light of sequestration. (File photo)
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered Pentagon leaders to launch a strategic review that will reassess military priorities as fiscal pressures settle in for the long term.
Hagel charged Ashton Carter, deputy defense secretary, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with conducting the review; they have a May 31 deadline.
The sweeping, forward-looking reassessment will scrutinize the Defense Department's most central strategies, including the "Asia pivot" that former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta outlined last year in the 2012 defense strategic guidance. The officials also will examine force posture, investments and institutional management, according to a DOD release.
"This strategic choices and management review will define the major decisions that must be made in the decade ahead to preserve and adapt our defense strategy, our force and our institutions under a range of future budgetary scenarios," George Little, DOD spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon. "The results of this review will frame the secretary’s guidance for the fiscal 2015 budget and will ultimately be the foundation for the Quadrennial Defense Review due to Congress in February 2014."
The review comes as DOD officials seek to make $46 billion in cuts by the end of September under sequestration. On March 18 officials released a timeline for civilian furloughs, one of the cost-cutting measures being implemented as part of the across-the-board budget cuts.
Last month, Carter and other top military brass warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill that if sequestration went into effect, it could render obsolete the current strategies underpinning DOD operations.