The Pentagon needs to heed this object lesson as it builds the next Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the major defense strategy that delineates how the U.S. will structure its armed forces. The QDR should outline the Pentagon's threat assessments, military strategy, force structure proposals, and budgetary plans, and it should establish a road map for defense programs that will prepare for the next 20 years. Because defense policy is subordinate to foreign policy, the strategy should take its cue from the President's National Security Strategy. A flawed QDR could be used for years to justify policies that lead to a weakened and underprepared military.

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.

This monograph offers key considerations for DoD as it works through the on-going defense review. The author outlines eight principles for a risk management defense strategy. He argues that these principles provide "measures of merit" for evaluating the new administration's defense choices. This monograph builds on two previous works-- Known unknowns: unconventional "strategic shocks" in defense strategy development and The new balance: limited armed stabilization and the future of U.S. landpower. Combined, these three works offer key insights on the most appropriate DoD responses to increasingly "unconventional" defense and national security conditions. This work in particular provides DoD leaders food for thought, as they balance mounting defense demands and declining defense resources.

" The Army plans to reduce its end strength to 980,000 active and reserve soldiers by fiscal year 2018, a reduction of nearly 12 percent since fiscal year 2011. According to the Army, this reduction will require reductions of both combat and supporting units. Army leaders reported that reducing the Army to such levels creates significant but manageable risk to executing the U.S. military strategy and that further reductions would result in unacceptable risk. The Senate report accompanying a bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 included a provision that GAO examine the factors that the Army considers and uses when it determines the size and structure of its forces. This report (1) describes the Army's priorities and planned force structure reductions and (2) evaluates the extent to which the Army comprehensively assessed mission risk associated with its planned combat and enabler force structure. GAO examined the Army's force development regulations and process, DOD and Army guidance, and Army analysis and conclusions; and interviewed DOD and Army officials. "

Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty explores and examines why and how security communities prepare purposefully for their future defence. Professor Gray argues that our understanding of human nature, of politics, and of strategic history, does allow us to make prudent choices in defence planning.

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.