On Thursday, the United States Institute of Peace will present
its congressionally mandated, independent and bipartisan
assessment of the Defense Department’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense
Review. The National Defense Panel, or NDP, report was a
tremendous opportunity to help the Pentagon find creative ways
to address the very serious strategic and budgetary challenges
that it faces. Yet the report included few new ideas, and even
fewer useful tradeoffs. Instead, its key theme was “more”more
forces, a more expansive force construct and more dollars
for defense.  In today’s political and budgetary climate,
however, that argument is simply unrealistic. The panel’s
decision to ignore budget realities means that it lost its
opportunity to offer the Defense Department practical and
innovative recommendations for the future.  The NDP amplifies
the QDR’s main warning: that the U.S. armed forces will soon “be
at high risk of not being able to fully execute the national
defense strategy,” unless the combined trends of shri