Bottom-Up Review

In its bottom-up review of the nation's defense needs, the Defense Department (DOD) concluded that it is prudent to maintain the capability to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional wars, and it determined the forces, capability improvements, and funding necessary to do so. Because the bottom-up review is the basis for the Pentagon's planning, programming, and budgeting for the foreseeable future, GAO examined key DOD assumptions underlying the two-conflict strategy. GAO raises questions about the redeployment of forces from other operations to major regional conflicts, availability of strategic mobility assets and Army support forces, deployability of Army National Guard enhanced brigades, and planned enhancements to strategic lift and firepower. In addition, military commanders believe that DOD's concept for responding to two nearly simultaneous conflicts may not be the best approach. For example, their estimates of key characteristics of how two nearly simultaneous wars might arise and how forces should be deployed differ significantly from DOD's estimates, including the timing between the two conflicts and the timing of force deployments.

GAO found that: (1) the strategy of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous conflicts will require a significant change in military planning; (2) DOD has not fully analyzed key bottom-up review assumptions about the ability of forces to redeploy from other operations to regional conflicts or between conflicts, availability of strategic lift and support forces, or the deployability of Army National Guard combat brigades; (3) war-fighting command officials believe that the DOD plan for responding to two simultaneous major regional conflicts is questionable; (4) official estimates of the amount of warning time between the onset of each conflict, mix of combat forces needed to respond to each conflict, and timing of force deployments differ significantly from DOD estimates; (5) the military commands believe that the DOD scenario may not reflect the most effective deployment of U.S. forces and they are examining options they believe may maximize the use of U.S. capabilities; and (6) until DOD fully analyzes its bottom-up review assumptions and considers the war fighting commands' options, it will not be able to determine force size and mix, the supporting capabilities and funding needed for the two-conflict strategy, or if the strategy should be changed.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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