House Armed Services Committee: Skelton on the Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report

House Armed Services Committee: Skelton on the Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report

Ike Skelton, Chairman
For Immediate Release: January 29, 2009

Washington, DC – House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) released a statement on the Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report, which was required by the Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act:

“The Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report demonstrates that the Department of Defense’s understanding of its mission and the core competencies required to achieve it has expanded quite substantially since the attacks of 9/11. The scope of the mission the Department is preparing to tackle is daunting and will require careful scrutiny.

“This report represents an advance by organizing in one place a host of ideas about new or newly emphasized missions for the Department – from the need to provide support to civil authorities, to cyber warfare, to training and mentoring foreign security forces. It raises significant issues about the appropriate role of the Department in these areas that will be heavily debated in the national security community in the coming years.

“At the same time, this report shows the Department still has a lot of work ahead to reform its organization, budgets, and processes to execute this mission. The report makes only a small contribution to the difficult task of challenging the allocation of treasured turf and changing deeply held cultures within the Department which will be required to actually fulfill such a far reaching mission set.

“I am reminded that the last time this task was seriously tackled, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it took several years and the personal intervention of President Harry Truman to reach a workable consensus. I very much appreciate the work of Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates in kicking off a similar cycle of reevaluation of these issues in this report. As Congress anticipated when it established this review as a continuing requirement every four years, there remains much work to do.”

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The Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report is available online.

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