A comprehensive military strategy review conducted by the U.S. Defense Department eliminates no major weapons systems and calls for only incremental change in other priorities, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The review, known formally as the Quadrennial Defense Review and due to be made public next week along with the White House's fiscal 2007 budget, does contain some significant shifts, like calls for training thousands of additional special operations troops and for building futuristic weapons to defeat terror groups and potential new adversaries, Pentagon officials, outside advisers and independent analysts were quoted as saying.

Initial hopes by Defense Department civilians to use the year-long assessment, which takes place every four years, to force far-reaching changes in spending priorities have not materialized, in part because of resistance by the military services, the newspaper quoted analysts as saying.

Some of the Pentagon civilian leadership's more innovative ideas were rejected because they were judged too expensive or ineffective by the many teams of officers and analysts preparing the blueprints over the past year, the report said.

One of the reasons this year's review did not make more far-reaching changes seems to be that the conflict in Iraq prevented Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from devoting much attention to this review as he did in the past. He delegated much of the decision-making to aides and to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, the report said.

The essence of Rumsfeld's agenda for the military is to make the armed services more mobile and lethal, more capable of dealing with emerging threats from terror groups and insurgents, while still able to dominate conventional battlefields, according to the report.

The review keeps alive some programs whose projected costs have soared in recent years, like the F/A-22 fighter, the Army's Future Combat Systems, and Navy's DD(X) destroyer, and calls for doubling the procurement of attack submarines, from one a year to two, by 2012 and arming submarine-carried Trident missiles with conventional warheads, the report said.
 
(Source: Xinhua)