Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is summoning his top military and civilian leaders from around the world to Washington next week to discuss the final shape of the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Rumsfeld is scheduled to assemble the Strategic Planning Council -- which includes his Senior Level Review Group plus the combatant commanders -- on Jan. 11 to discuss "QDR outputs," according to briefing slides used by Ryan Henry, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, in a Dec. 9 speech to Wall Street analysts.

These "outputs" include budget decisions reflected in the nearly complete fiscal year 2007 Pentagon spending request as well as a raft of new policy positions that will be spelled out in a QDR report that is being drafted by Henry's office. It is due to Congress next month.

The assessment will feature a new concept for "tailored deterrence" and a modified strategy for preparing to fight two major wars, as InsideDefense.com reported last month.

Next week's meeting will be part of a larger convention of senior U.S. military leaders from around the globe that Rumsfeld calls together roughly three times each year. The assembly, previously called a "combatant commanders conference," is now referred to as a "senior leaders conference," according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner.

"There is a senior leaders conference scheduled for the second week in January," Skinner said today. "While we don't discuss the agenda for such conferences ahead of time, clearly the Quadrennial Defense Review is important and that will be an item of discussion, as well as many other things."

The congressionally mandated QDR has wide-ranging ramifications for the military services' modernization programs, but the final report -- like previous QDR reports in 1997 and 2001 -- will not itemize changes to the Pentagon's weapon system procurement accounts, Henry said in early December.

Instead, a detailed accounting of near-term alterations to aircraft, ship and ground vehicle acquisition accounts stemming from the Quadrennial Defense Review is embodied in a series of classified budget documents issued last month. Those documents give shape to the Pentagon's fiscal year 2007 spending request.

When complete, the QDR also will provide a blueprint for investment decisions this spring, when the Defense Department begins constructing its fiscal year 2008 to 2013 spending plan.

Still, Rumsfeld has directed that compelling insights from the nearly complete QDR be used to adjust select elements of the Pentagon's FY-07 budget request, which is in the final days of being assembled.

For the duration of the 10-month review, participants and observers were bracing for dramatic changes to the military's modernization accounts. Specifically, many Defense Department insiders and defense analysts expected the QDR to serve up significant cuts to weapon systems optimized to fighting conventional adversaries in order to harvest resources to invest in new capabilities to deal with irregular, catastrophic and disruptive challenges. However, the budget decisions issued last month contain few deep cuts to the services' major modernization programs, according to Pentagon officials.

Along with these investment actions, Pentagon officials in recent weeks have begun drawing back the curtain on new policies to be detailed in the Quadrennial Defense Review. These are the building blocks for future U.S. war plans, modernization decisions and force structure changes.

Among the most fundamental is a plan to advance a new war planning strategy that retains the requirement to fight two major conflicts but includes refinements designed to prepare the military to deal with homeland defense and the global war on terrorism, said Pentagon officials involved in the review.

This will reflect a modest adjustment to the force planning construct established in the 2001 QDR -- including fewer changes than some senior Pentagon officials leading the review sought last summer.

"The new construct will just be a refinement of '1-4-2-1,'" said a Pentagon official involved in the review on Dec. 19.

The "1-4-2-1" force planning construct called for the Defense Department to defend the United States (1); maintain forces capable of deterring aggression in Europe, Northeast Asia, the East Asian littoral, and Southwest Asia and the Middle East (4); be ready to simultaneously combat aggression in two of these regions (2); and maintain a capability to "win decisively" in one of these two conflicts (1).

The Defense Department intends to retain the ability to wage two simultaneous major combat operations, a bedrock of U.S. military planning since the 1990s, while retaining the ability to conduct a "regime change" against one of these enemies.

It will call for the Defense Department to maintain enough forces and equipment to conduct "steady state" operations in each category, as well as to surge forces to respond to crisis in each category.

Last spring, during a series of high-level roundtable discussions central to the QDR, senior officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense questioned the relevance of "1-4-2-1" to the current challenges facing the military. Decisions regarding the force planning construct have wide-ranging implications for the entire defense enterprise. It forms a core justification for the composition of the armed forces as well as the number -- and types -- of ships, aircraft, trucks and tanks the services require.  

Sources said the new force planning construct to be spelled out next month is designed to better account for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, strategic landscape by focusing on three areas: homeland defense, the global war on terrorism and conventional campaigns.

Another elemental component of defense policy that will be updated in the QDR is the U.S. approach to deterrence, Henry said.  

The Defense Department will develop new capabilities to tailor its decades-old deterrence tools -- namely the threat of nuclear and conventional military force -- to deal effectively with new threats facing the United States, including violent extremists and terrorist networks.  

Henry spoke of the new thinking on deterrence on Dec. 14, at a conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Tufts University Fletcher School. He said the Quadrennial Defense Review will roll out the concept of "tailored deterrence" to guide policy and investment decisions related to the military's strategic and conventional forces.

Specifically, the QDR will call for new efforts to better understand what motivates terrorist networks and violent extremists -- the type of adversaries that are vexing U.S. forces and Pentagon war planners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The key thing here is understanding an alien culture, and an alien way of thinking, an alien value system," Henry said last month.

Similar efforts to understand Soviet leaders and organizations during the Cold War were fraught with flaws, Henry acknowledged.  

"When we look to the future, these alien [terrorist] networks will be even more difficult" challenges, he said, adding that the concept of "tailored deterrence" is still evolving.

Despite these challenges, he said deterrence would remain a cornerstone of the U.S. defense posture.

"We think deterrence is still viable," Henry said. "It is much more effective and efficient than the actual exercising of power."

Deterrence is used to keep adversaries from acting against U.S. interests by denying them benefits or imposing great costs, elements that Henry said are relevant in dealing with current challenges facing the United States.

The QDR will organize threats requiring deterrence into three categories, Henry said: near-peer military challengers, such as a future China; regional challengers like a nuclear-armed North Korea; and terrorist networks and violent extremists.

Conventional and nuclear capabilities in the U.S. arsenal are well suited to dealing with the first two categories, Henry said. However, deterring transnational actors with the means to harm the United States, its allies or interests is the "hardest nut" to crack.

"Can we come up with deterrent capabilities that span that spectrum of threats?" he asked. "That is something that we are embarking on coming out of the QDR, and developing the capability sets to be able to look at that."

The Defense Department will work to develop three capabilities to put in place an effective deterrent against these three threats: the means to determine what assets an adversary holds dear and wants to protect; an ability to identify which military tools can be used to threaten those assets; and an effective means of communicating to adversaries that the military can target their most important assets and destroy them.

"Many people say they can't be deterred," Henry said of suicide bombers, one weapon in the arsenal of some extremists. "But if you deconstruct what a terrorist network is and what they need to successfully accomplish their mission, then we can see that there might be points of access to their value chain that we can impact. We, along with some other folks, are trying to think this through."