Pentagon Signals Shift in Mission

The Pentagon called Monday for making homeland defense as high a priority as girding for conflicts abroad, reflecting a shift in attitudes toward its mission following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

But its top-to-bottom review of the military, largely completed before the attacks but altered since then, doesn’t address specifically how to accomplish that aim.

Over the summer, Pentagon strategists preparing the document had proposed cutting the size of the military’s 1.4-million-member active duty force and moving resources away from ground forces and into air power.

But in its final form, the review largely avoids calling for specific cuts, shifts in force structure or purchases of weapon systems.

It calls for a greater role for the National Guard and Reserves in protecting U.S. interests at home, beefing up intelligence and surveillance efforts to fight terrorism, and moving carrier battle groups, ground forces, battleships and airplanes out of Europe and into the Persian Gulf and Asia to protect evolving U.S. interests abroad.

The “Quadrennial Defense Review,” mandated by Congress, is not what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had promised when he came into office--a fundamental reassessment of the use of U.S. military might.

The Pentagon says that since the attacks, it faces a new mission. Its job now is to fight a new, palpable and menacing threat of terrorism in the U.S., and a detailed reassessment of America’s military--and the hard decisions such a review implies--must wait.

Rumsfeld instead ordered more than 20 studies to be completed next year.

Critics charge that even as it mobilizes the largest U.S. force since the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon is doing little to address the fundamental challenge of shifting its long-term response to a radically and frighteningly altered strategic world.

“The key issue is whether the [terrorist] attacks are going to lead to a fundamental reassessment by the United States of its defense structure,” said Mike Brown, director of the National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. “That sort of reassessment has been needed for 10 years, and it is needed even more now. It still hasn’t taken place, and it doesn’t look like we are going to find it in this review.”

Earlier this summer, Rumsfeld was said to be looking at eliminating two of the Army’s 10 active duty divisions, one of the Navy’s 12 carrier battle groups and one of the Air Force’s 12 active fighter wings.

But now, the terrorist attacks preclude any “substantial reductions in forces,” the document says.

The review does propose certain changes in the way the military deploys its forces and in the equipment it uses. Included in the recommendations are more money for intelligence satellites, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, spies and Special Forces troops to seek out terrorists in their sanctuaries.

It calls for putting more aircraft carriers, guided cruise missile submarines and battleships in the Pacific and shifting the Marine Corps amphibious fleet from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. It recommends augmenting both ground forces in the Persian Gulf and the Air Force’s ability to refuel and maintain aircraft operating in the Mideast. It does not confront the potential political problems of increasing the U.S. military presence in regions where that might not be welcome.

On the issue of homeland security, the report says the Pentagon must place “new emphasis on the unique operational demands associated with the defense of the United States” and that such efforts should be the Defense Department’s “primary mission.”

The report defers most specifics on accomplishing this to the Office of Homeland Security, the Cabinet-level agency recently created by President Bush that will be headed by Pennsylvania Gov. Thomas J. Ridge. But the report does call for better ways to protect the nation’s oil and gas supply and its communications system.

It also says the Pentagon’s most useful role in protecting the homeland will be to combat threats before they reach American shores. To that end, it proposes a heightened role for special operations and for increased intelligence to ferret out foes who try to offset America’s advantages in high-tech weaponry with low-tech improvisation, such as the use of box cutters to hijack airplanes used in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, commended Rumsfeld for the report’s “emphasis on homeland defense.”

Warner said: “Given the uncertainties of the time, I think he had no alternative but to keep in place certain portions of the [military’s] structure. But [the report] clearly lays the structure for transitioning to new concepts for the training and equipping of our armed forces.”

Overall, the report echoes Rumsfeld’s concept of a more nimble, agile military. It says the United States is a global power with “important geopolitical interests” everywhere.

As expected, the report drops the requirement adopted in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, that the military be able to conduct two major wars at the same time.

Instead, it aims for a military able to fight two “overlapping wars” and a multitude of smaller conflicts.

The campaign against terrorism is “one of those regional conflicts, and one which we are bound and determined to win,” a senior Pentagon official said Monday.

The report provides little of the detail contained in the last such review, released in 1997. In part, that’s because before the attacks, such questions as how many troops the Pentagon would have, where they would operate and what new weapons the military could develop became ensnarled in budget fights.

Since the attacks, the Pentagon has been given far more money to spend in the short term and has found Capitol Hill far more receptive to its pleas for more money down the road.