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The House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) rejected the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) for 2014. DoD is required to submit a QDR every 4 years to Congress. It is supposed to make recommendations that are “fully independent of the budget submitted to Congress by the president”. It is also required to create a 20 year plan. This is the first quadrennial report that has been rejected in recent history.
The following is a statement by the Chairman rejecting the QDR, and rightly so:
"I appreciate the work that has gone into this QDR. A rigorous analysis and debate that takes place every .four years as the review is put together should be immensely valuable to planners and senior commanders. Unfortunately, the product the process produced this time has more to do with politics than policy and is of little value to decision makers. For that reason, I will require the Department to re-write and re-submit a compliant report. In defiance of the law, this QDR provides no insight into what a moderate-to-low risk strategy would be, is clearly budget driven, and is shortsighted. it allows the President to duck the consequences of the deep defense cuts he has advocated and leaves us all wondering what the true future costs of those cuts will be. No QDR is perfect, but I have been disturbed that the review has become less compliant as time goes on. The QDR has legal standards to meet for a reason. They were designed to guide Congress and the Commander-in-Chief as we make tough choices about resources and security. The information produced by the review process could be immensely valuable, but is often withheld from those who need to understand it most. In the coming days, I will introduce legislation intended to reverse this trend. The legislation will require DoD to re-write and re-submit a compliant QDR for FY14, and could be considered on its own or incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act. In the coming days, 1 will consider what measures could be added to such legislation to ensure a prompt and compliant rewrite."
This information was made available to El Zorro in an armed services bi-monthly report made available to active military and veterans. Some information in the bulletin is prohibited from being reprinted without permission; however, the above is a public statement by the Chairman.
The President and the Senate have become a renegade collaboration that have to be brought under control. The only foreseeable way to do that is to get rid of them, preferably through election. Unfortunately, we cannot wait for elections. Other measures have to at least be considered. The House of Representatives passed the "Executive Needs to Faithfully Observe and Respect Congressional Enactments of the Law Act" (Bill: H.R. 4138 copy) which is step in the right direction. This bill still needs to be approved by the Senate and that seems highly unlikely with Harry Reid in the hen house.
| El Zorro |
