Changing the Guard: The Challenges to the New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and New Secretary of Defense
May 31, 2011
WASHINGTON, May 31, 2011 – The Center for Strategic & International Studies’ (CSIS) Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, has written a new commentary on the newly announced nominees for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense.
Please find a link to the full commentary below:
https://csis.org/files/publication/110531_Changing_the_Guard.pdf
Please find a summary below prepared by Dr. Cordesman:
Selecting a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff involves far more than a matter of personalities and pentagon politics. Both General Dempsey and Leon Panetta, the president’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, must come to grips with major challenges in restructuring U.S. forces and U.S. strategy after a decade in which the Department of Defense could count on steadily rising defense spending and a focus on ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The media may love wallowing in personalities, and Washington loves wallowing in the politics of personalities, but this is scarcely the real area of concern in President Obama’s changing of the guard. The nation faces massive strategic challenges coupled to the need for far more realistic and better managed strategies, planning, programming, and budgeting. These are the areas we need to focus on, these are the key areas for confirmation and budget hearing, and these should be the key areas of focus for think tanks and the media.
Above all, we need a new kind of top-level leadership that will show an urgent focus on reality rather than concepts. These are the areas where Panetta and Dempsey need to be judged, and where they will succeed or fail.
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