The Pentagon's first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) focuses on saving the past at the risk of losing the future. Rather than seizing the opportunity to move quickly to a new, qualitatively superior military, the Department of Defense has again chosen to save as much of the past era's military as a flat budget will allow. Arguing there is no alternative but to maintain enough capability to fight two "major theater wars," the Pentagon has opted to keep a slightly thinned out version of today's force structure, replace the equipment that is now wearing out, add some big ticket new tactical aircraft buys--and hope that the Congress will agree to cut reserve components and the support infrastructure enough to pay for it all.

A defense program built on the QDR will keep most of the special interests inside the five-sided building from grumbling too much. The Army keeps its current number of active force divisions. The Navy hangs onto its planned level and mix of combatant ships, and gets most of the new version F/A-18s it demanded. The Air Force gets the F-22 replacement for its F-15s. The Marines keep their active duty numbers well above what even the Bush Administration once said was more than enough. The military services will maintain pretty much the same number of flag and general officers. No big changes; few significant ones.

There are some inherent problems in the path laid out by the QDR. While it assumes its course can be traversed within annual budgets of about $250 billion, this may be overly optimistic. The tactical aircraft modernization called for could turn out to be more expensive than currently estimated--a consistent historical pattern since the late 1950s. It could cost more than planned to refurbish the existing force structure after the near decade of living off the procurement largess of the 1980's. In these cases, the $250 billion a year may be too low, despite the fact that it will be more than the sum of the national defense budgets worldwide over the next seven years. It's not clear that the QDR path included the full bills for NATO expansion or for the operations in Bosnia and elsewhere, nor for the cost of closing additional bases or laying off the civil servants in the support infrastructure.

These are the kind of issues the Pentagon wrestles with every year. In a path designed to maintain the status quo, it's not surprising to find the usual road bumps.

The bigger issues are whether maintaining the status quo is in the nation's longer-term interests, and whether it's really wise, as the Pentagon apparently believes, to continue to side-step the serious, in-depth discussion demanded by the fact that we continue to hang on to a military designed twenty years ago for an era that ended nearly a decade ago. By the standards of the Cold War era, today's force is very, very good. The military professionals who now run it are rightfully proud of how far they brought it the mid-1970s after Vietnam. Today's U.S. military is clearly, demonstrably, the best military in the world.

This helps explain the Pentagon's reluctance to consider significant changes and why--from Colin Powell's "base force" assessment, through Les Aspin's "bottom-up review", the congressionally mandated "roles and missions" assessment, and now, the "QDR"--the Defense establishment has focused on keeping what existed rather than addressing, seriously, what we should move toward. "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it" prevails inside the Pentagon today, just as it has for half a century. And for most of the last fifty years, it has been a good guide, until the world changed.

Luckily, Congress suspected the Pentagon might be unwilling to think seriously about the future when it adopted the Lieberman Amendment to last year's Defense Authorization bill. The amendment, based on a proposal by the Progressive Policy Institute, set up an 18 month undertaking to get the in-depth, serious national discussion we need about U.S. military capabilities and forces. It not only supported the Pentagon's QDR, but established a "national defense panel" to review, assess, and--here's the interesting part--to provide Congress with an alternative view to that provided by the Pentagon. There's no guarantee that this will occur. The national defense panel is made up of four retired generals and five civilian members drawn from the national security establishment. But the mandate to do something more than rubber stamp the QDR is pretty clear in the law, and the bigger goal of getting a national discussion underway will be served by the panel because the press and public will watch, and root for, a clash of visions between the Pentagon and the panel. And they'll be watching, and perhaps offering suggestions, for how Congress will deal with the divergence in views it tried to stimulate.

So, it's important to see the QDR for what it is--the first step in an effort to open a debate that is overdue. The QDR is far from the final word, at least so far as the public is concerned. And it's not quite over inside the Pentagon yet, either. The Defense Department will try to convert the QDR's perspective into specifics over the summer as it hammers out the Defense program and budget for the period 1999-2005. While the QDR iterated the status quo--something promoted by the professional military that the civilians feared to challenge--there will still be the usual jostling over budget shares, the kind of ferment from which more serious issues and debate can grow. Meanwhile, the national defense panel should be trying to formulate a general alternative. Both the Pentagon's program/budget interpretation of the QDR and the panel's alternative will arrive on the congressional doorstep near the end of this year. And, if Congress takes its job seriously, it will continue to push the discussion and prompt debate until it appropriates funds late next year. We just might get the serious assessment and view of the future we need.

The alternative to the QDR is actually already formulated. And, interestingly, it stems largely from inside the Pentagon, although it remains a minority view there. The alternative to the QDR is to accelerate the American revolution in military affairs by integrating--sooner than the mainstream inside the Pentagon finds comfortable--particular technologies into the force structure and operational doctrine.

This vision is found in Chairman of the JCS, General Shalikashvili's Joint Vision 2010 which, however carefully formulated to lie outside the QDR's planning horizon by 5 years, posits such radically different ways of using military force that it would be obtainable only by making major changes very quickly over the next 10 years. Joint Vision 2010 was written over a year ago. It was a bold perspective; a strong argument for leaping ahead to a qualitatively superior military, better suited for the world of the future. In the intervening months since, however, the vision inside the Pentagon has dimmed, the focus has returned to the past, and the courage to raise the important issues has been overshadowed by the more comfortable, marginal iteration of the familiar.

The nation deserves better. In an effort to stimulate discussion, the Progressive Policy Institute published an articulation of what the force structure changes could be and when they would have to take place to meet the capabilities sketched in the Chairman's Vision. In the process, the real alternative to the QDR became clearer. It involves the following elements: