Defense budget cuts compel military transformation

[The Straight Story]

Defense budget cuts compel military transformation

By James Kitfield, National Journal
The Bush administration's much-touted "transformation" of the United States military has always been something of a faith-based initiative.

It is founded on an unshakable belief in the transformative powers of Information Age technology and best business practices, and a conviction that emerging dangers to U.S. security are too unpredictable to be identified by the armed services' traditional "threat-based" analyses.

The traditional approach, the transformation advocates said, left the U.S. military merely a smaller, outdated mirror image of its Cold War self, based primarily on Air Force fighter wings, Navy aircraft carrier battle groups, and conventional Army divisions.

From the outset, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense pushed instead a "capabilities-based" approach to defense planning. The capabilities that OSD very much preferred were space-based, precision-guided, rapidly deployable, joint service, modular, and unconventional.

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