The Department of Defense (DoD) has gone through some monumental changes in the last two decades, and it faces some enormous future challenges. The changes include the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act of 1986, which realigned authorities and responsibilities in the defense establishment, and the end of the Cold War, which brought about significant reductions in force structure. The challenges encompass the rise of new commitments and missions, the problem of adapting revolutionary information technology, and the evident need to reshape DoD's support systems, processes, and infrastructure. Both the changes and the challenges have made the need for defense reform evident. Numerous studies, commissions, panels, and Congressional reports have revolved around the single issue of transforming the Department to cope with the security needs of the 21st century. This Addendum offers recommendations that focus on structure and process, but here the NSSG also clearly states a vision--a set of desired outcomes--if the Department is to implement these recommendations. Thus, this summary aims to avoid a stovepiped examination of individual recommendations. Rather it offers an overview of the major recommendations and how they mutually reinforce each other to create excellence. This effort suggests seven future DoD outcome-oriented objectives worthy of pursuit that, if implemented, would make a remarkable difference in America's national security posture.

This is the pilot in a series of reports on strategic planning conducted within the U.S. Department of Defense. It focuses on the strategic planning responsibilities of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because planning at that level provides the critical nexus between the strategic direction provided by the National Command Authorities and its implementation by the unified combatant commands and military departments. The authors' thorough understanding of the statutory requirements for strategic planning and the interactions between the Chairman's complex strategic planning process and other key DOD planning systems enables them to explicate today's strategic planning challenges and offer insightful recommendations. Strategic planning in the post-Cold War era has proven to be exceptionally problematic. The plethora of national and international tensions that the east-west confrontation of the Cold War in large measure subdued combine now to create a world replete with diverse challenges to U.S. interests. Equally disturbing is the fact that these challenges are not as clearly defined and easily articulated as was the monolithic Soviet threat. The authors point out that the Cold War provided inherent stability in U.S. strategic planning and that the basic elements of a strategic military plan evolved over time. They go on to argue that the elimination of the National Military Strategy Document and the abandonment of the Base Case Global Family of Operation Plans amounted to recision of the Chairman's strategic plan, and that nothing has been developed to take its place.

Superior defense plans fuse political, economic, military, technological, and sociological power in ways that cover state interests, while conserving resources to the greatest prudent extent. Poor products can increase costs without reducing risks, because forces and funds that support slipshod schemes often fail to furnish security. This critical appraisal of the U.5. defense planning system seeks to serve a five-fold purpose: set assessment standards, appraise U.S. planning in principle, appraise U.5. planning in practice, identify U.S. planning problems and present optional courses of corrective action. The study shows how domestic and foreign policy inputs from the White House, National 5ecurity Council, and State Department affect defense planning.

This report identifies key lessons from the first National Defense Panel (NDP) and makes recommendations to the Congress, the administration, and future NDP management teams about how the process can be made more effective. The NDP was established by the 1996 Military Force Structure Review Act as an independent effort to provide guidance to the Secretary of Defense and the Congress on long-term defense strategies and force structure requirements. This report reviews the motivations for creating the NDP, its administrative and logistical experience, the NDP's relationship to the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and the final NDP report. Some of the principal recommendations are that (1) the NDP should maintain its focus on defense issues, but do more to integrate its recommendations into the broader national security agenda; (2) future NDPs should be better coordinated with the defense planning cycle (i.e., the next NDP, preceding the next QDR, should complete its work before the new administration comes into office in 2001); and (3) future NDPs should deal more systematically with resource constraints than the first NDP.

Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force. The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies – that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention. As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.

This report presents an approach to strengthening the U.S. defense planning process. The approach centers on a simple but rigorous framework that links official statements of national security and national military strategy and the operational capabilities of force elements to programs for developing and procuring military systems and services. The author recommends adopting a force-planning procedure that includes the following elements: (1) an operational focus, (2) guidance to Department of Defense components in operational terms, (3) discussion at the level of force elements rather than systems and hardware, (4) outlines of capability goals, (5) allocation of resources to best overall effect, (6) a better process for decisionmaking, (7) streamlined process for upgrading basic systems, (8) determination of performance features of new basic systems, and (9) reduction of turmoil and paralysis.