Report urges agency cooperation on security

[unhappycamper]

Report urges agency cooperation on security
By William H. McMichael - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Jan 31, 2009 8:48:22 EST

Plans to redefine military roles and missions always run headlong into each service’s staunch defense of its turf. But the Pentagon, ever hopeful, is simultaneously taking on an even trickier bureaucracy: the entire government.

The Pentagon has concluded in a new report that in order to fully tackle today’s complex national security challenges, its own efforts to become more efficient must be balanced with the ability to work smoothly with the many other agencies that have a hand in national security.

In other words, the kind of civil-military cooperation that many troops and government civilians have been applying on the fly in Iraq and Afghanistan needs to become a skill set of coherent, integrated and viable capabilities that government agencies can apply from a “shared perspective” in order to make plans and conduct operations.

The Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report, released Thursday, is a precursor to the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a periodic review of capabilities aimed at defining future national defense strategy, force structure, budget requirements and risk assessment.

While that report slowly takes shape, the QRM identifies four “roles and missions focus areas” where the military can streamline its own operations, become more effective in joint and interagency operations and in which the Pentagon can “efficiently invest … to meet the asymmetric challenges” of the 21st century: irregular warfare; cyberspace; intra-theater airlift; and unmanned aircraft systems and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.


Rest of article at: http://airforcetimes.com/news/2009/01/military_qrm_gates_013009w/%2e