WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- Pentagon planners say they need to reshape U.S. armed forces to provide more flexibility in combating a wide range of conflicts.
How to do that is one of the questions involved in the Quadrennial Defense Review now under way at the Pentagon, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The congressionally mandated review is trying to prepare for counterinsurgency wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, while focusing on potentially well-equipped conventional adversaries, Russia or China for example, that could mean naval battles, Defense Department sources told the Times.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left troops and equipment so strained it would be difficult to carry out a significant operation elsewhere, the sources said.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believes the Obama administration wants "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."
"We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security," Donnelly said.
