More than money, defense needs compelling narrative.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

* Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once chided top brass for overindulging in "next-war-itis," a term he coined to describe the generals obsessive preoccupation with planning for hypothetical future enemies instead of focusing on the wars at hand.

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The fighting in Afghanistan is still raging, but the Pentagon already has been instructed to dust off the crystal ball.

"The time has come, is here now ... to look out to what the world will need next, to the security challenges that will define our future after Iraq and Afghanistan," says Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

Although the Defense Department remains hugely distracted by the current budget standoff and looming spending cuts, it needs to begin to think about how forces will be organized and equipped for the post-Afghanistan world, Carter says. "We need to make this transition no matter what the fiscal situation."

Details on what that transition might look like will begin to trickle out next year as the Pentagon begins drafting the congressionally mandated quadrennial defense review (QDR) that must be completed by February 2014.

As the review gets under way, one of the trending topics inside the beltway intelligentsia will be whether the QDR brain trust can weave a cogent narrative for the future of the nation's military.

Pentagon watchers already are warning that this is no time for business as usual, considering the domestic political climate and the fiscal crunch that could put defense spending in the cross hairs of a future deficit-reduction deal.

Experts contend that the Pentagon needs to do a better job articulating how military forces will be employed in the future--in war or peacetime--and why the United States should continue to invest in the large force it currently has.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, already has hinted that the military expects to be on a permanent war footing. Defense officials do not see the end of the Afghanistan war as the beginning of a peaceful era. They view the Arab Spring and Iran's nuclear ambitions as ticking time bombs. Although the odds of a large-scale war are low, the "chance of violence for ideological and other purposes is exponentially greater," according to Dempsey.

Staying ready for a possible crisis in the Middle East will have to be balanced against the Pentagon's ambitions in Asia. The widely publicized plan to shift U.S. forces to the Pacific already has drawn...