| 结论 | - Few officials believe that any of the dozen major defense reviews in the past quarter century produced a satisfactory answer to questions on national security.
- The process behind writing and staffing defense reviews gives these documents a powerful status quo bias that often leads to recommendations of incremental, rather than dramatic, changes.
- Reviews often failed to anticipate major geopolitical events just a few years out. Even when the reviews did anticipate correctly, policymakers were often disinclined to make major budgetary or programmatic shifts until months, if not years, into a crisis.
- A senior leadership's level of interest often correlates with a review's significance.
- Reviews produced early in an administration tend to matter more than those produced later on because new administrations often are more inclined to use these reviews as ways to signal a new course.
- Outside reviews tend to be more hawkish, both because of the members who are chosen to sit on these reviews and because these reviews are typically not constrained by budgets.
- A review's impact depends as much on the political climate as it does on its analysis. Some of the most impactful reviews were both politically useful and analytically correct.
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| 摘要 | Defense reviews are political documents, as much as they are analytical ones. This report examines three main questions. First, why has the defense strategy process evolved in the way it has? Second, why, despite so much time and effort, do strategies so often come up short? Finally, and most importantly, how can the process change to make for better strategy? Using a mixture of primary and secondary sources and firsthand interviews, this report first traces the history of major defense reviews in the post–Cold War period from the Base Force through the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. The report then explores the politics behind these reviews to explain the structural, personnel, and political reasons why these defense reviews often embrace the status quo, and predicts what factors — from budgets to timing to senior-level involvement — may allow a review to develop more-innovative findings. The report concludes with a series of recommendations for the services, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. government at large to get the most out of these defense reviews. Ultimately, this report argues that defense reviews at their core are as much the product of political compromises as they are objective analysis. Consequently, understanding the politics behind defense reviews can help explain how they evolve, what their limitations are, and how to maximize the process in the future. |
