Barry Pavel, Atlantic Council vice president and director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, writes in RealClearDefense on the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal:
With the FY2015 defense budget and the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) both due out next month along within a range of upcoming congressional hearings, how should we assess whether our defense establishment is preparing strategically to meet the key security challenges looming in our future?
There are two kinds of Secretaries of Defense: “coasters” who let the very strong, otherwise autonomous Pentagon bureaucracy drive their priorities to a least-common-denominator set of outcomes, the secretaries who do not prepare our defenses effectively for future challenges. And then there’s the “head knockers” who bear down hard on DOD components and produce creative friction and high tension to drive their own agenda and stark priorities.