September 30, 2001: Pentagon Completes Quadrennial Defense Review for Transformation of Military

The Defense Department completes its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The 71-page report, mostly written before the September 11 attacks, attempts to layout a strategy for transforming the military from a cold war era model to one that can respond quickly and efficiently to a variety of symmetrical and asymmetrical threats from both state and non-state adversaries. According to the document, the US military must maintain its status as the most powerful military in the world in order to ensure global stability. “America’s political, diplomatic, and economic leadership contributes directly to global peace, freedom, and prosperity,” it states, asserting that “US military strength is essential to achieving these goals.” As part of the transformation process, the military must focus “more on how an adversary might fight rather than specifically whom the adversary might be or where a war might occur.” The military should drop its focus, the report says, on being able to win simultaneous wars in two separate theaters, in favor of a strategy that allows the US to decisively win one major war—in which it might have to topple a government and occupy the country—while retaining the capability to defend the US against multiple, overlapping threats in other regions. The report puts special emphasis on homeland security and the need to adopt “transformational” technologies in information warfare and intelligence. It also speaks of the need to further militarize space in order to “ensure the freedom of action in space for the United States and its allies and… [the capability] to deny such freedom of action to adversaries.” [US Department of Defense, 9/30/2001 ; Baltimore Sun, 10/2/2001; Washington Post, 10/5/2001; Space (.com) website, 10/8/2001]