STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rumsfeld Speeds Push Toward New Military Strategy by Charles Aldinger Thursday, June 14, 2001 4:09 p.m. EDT http://news.lycos.com/news/story.asp?section=Politics&storyId=185210 E-mail or Print this story - - - - - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has launched a "forced march" at the Pentagon to speed preliminary development of a new U.S. military strategy by the end of July, a senior defense official said on Thursday. The official also told reporters in a briefing that the ability to fight and win two major wars at once -- the centerpiece of American security strategy for the past decade deliberations. Rumsfeld has held talks with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military leaders for nearly three weeks on how to conduct the Quadrennial Defense Review and hopes to have the QDR completed far ahead of the previous Sept. 30 deadline, said the official, who asked not to be identified. "What it produced was an agreement with the chiefs that we would start working on a forced-march pace to produce a preliminary QDR by the middle to end of July," the official told reporters. The official stressed that the overriding U.S. military tasks defined in the talks between Rumsfeld and the brass were to assure friends and allies, dissuade future adversaries, deter threats and countercoercion, and "defeat adversaries if deterrence fails." President Bush has vowed to modernize the cumbersome Cold War U.S. military for the 21st century. Published reports this year have speculated that the so-called "two-war" strategy could be abandoned because U.S. forces are stretched too thin around the world on peacekeeping and other noncombat missions. TWO-WAR ISSUE "ON THE TABLE" "It is definitely an issue that is on the table," the official said in response to questions. "I don't think we have decided even whether to discard it or what the replacement would be," he added. "It sort of underlies this whole issue of how do you define the force structure that you want to have." The official said that the ability to fight and win two virtually simultaneous major conflicts at once was a good idea when it was formulated during the 1991 Gulf War at a time when war on the Korean peninsula was also a prospect. But it "tends to focus you on that one dimension of ability to carry out the current war plans," the official said. "It doesn't really at all take account of either the present requirements of the force -- the Kosovos, the missions all over the world -- and only handles the future in, I would say, a fairly clumsy way." But the official also noted that "it is easy to point out the defects." He added: "It is a lot harder to come up with an alternative construct. And that is one of the things we are wrestling with." Rumsfeld has conducted more than a dozen studies of current defense strategy, troop quality of life and weaponry under orders from Bush. Defense officials have said privately that Washington is likely to place more security emphasis on Asia and China in the future. But the defense official declined to speculate on what the strategy might entail other than to stress that it would be designed to propose a "strategy-driven" defense budget for 2003 rather than a budget-driven strategy. He said that no decisions on new weaponry would be made until final decisions were made on strategy for war, terrorist attack, cyberwarfare, peacekeeping and other issues. The QDR process will "be trying to tackle the question of how our forces should be sized and shaped, what tasks we want them to be ready for, how we should handle risks -- which may be the most important question -- and what is the rate of change and rate of transformation we want to see on the force," the official said. Copyright � 2001 Reuters Limited. Have a comment on this article? Send it. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
