Change.

A Security Strategy We Can Afford by Bernard I. Finel:

When I taught at the National War College, an exercise required students to develop a national security strategy, then a national military strategy and finally a rough-cut at force-structure recommendations. Because the student groups all came up with similar recommendations, we then forced them to make choices by imposing increasingly draconian budgetary restrictions, which the students almost always accommodated by recommending across-the-board cuts.

It was a depressing exercise. Some of my colleagues dismissed the results by pointing out that while our students were often superb operators, their strategic thinking was still developing. Others argued that the exercise itself was flawed, with too little context and not enough time to develop genuinely novel proposals.

Unfortunately, this dreary, unimaginative approach to defense planning is what the American defense policy process has been for nearly a generation. There has not been a serious defense policy review since the Cold War. Our force structure is, as a result, increasingly incoherent given the arrays of challenges we face. The U.S. spends, by some measures, as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. And yet, fighting a low-intensity conflict in Iraq — a nation of only 23 million inhabitants — stressed the force to its limits. How is this possible? And how can we move out of this situation?

Another take on acquisition reform, and as you might expect from a former NWC professor, he provides interesting choices regarding alternative futures.

The current National Security Strategy (PDF) was developed under Gates in 2008, and with the Obama administration keeping Gates as SECDEF, this strategy essentially has a Presidential endorsement. The last National Military Strategy, which is informed by the National Security Strategy, was developed in 2004. It is a good bet a new National Military Strategy is under development and will be released soon.

The last National Military Strategy (PDF) was released in 2004. If you have not read it in awhile, it is worth the time to quickly go through the 38 PDF pages. I was struck today reading it how many changes we could potentially see in this document based on the discussions of military strategy that have developed in the last ~5 years.

In a perfect world, changes in the National Military Strategy would drive the force structure decisions looming for FY 2010. Does anyone know if it will be released before the next budget?