Here's the first line of the Pentagon's vision for the Sea Services, as described in the 6 February 2006 document: "Joint maritime forces, including the Coast Guard, will conduct highly distributed operations with a networked fleet that is more capable of projecting power in the 'brown and green waters' of coastal areas."

The passage goes on to characterize future maritime forces as proficient in irregular warfare, armed with conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles, and able to shield vast swaths of territory from enemy missiles. The review endorses a new riverine force and new ship classes to support operations ashore. The Littoral Combat Ship gets a nod, as do attack submarines that eavesdrop on cell phones and deliver commandos.

But search the entire 113-page document, the product of more than a year's exhaustive research and intense negotiation, and you will find nary a word about the DD(X) destroyer, the only capital ship on the Navy's drawing board.

The emphasis on the littorals is neither new nor surprising; it's been Navy doctrine since 1992's ". . . From the Sea" described the post-Cold War effort to affect events ashore. But the QDR's silence on the $3-billion-plus destroyer could mean rough seas ahead for the surface warfare community's Next Big Thing.

The review itself is a self-described attempt to "operationalize" last year's update to the National Defense Strategy. It focuses on creating a more agile military to fight terrorists, defend U.S. territory, stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and "shape the choices of countries at strategic crossroads."

This requires new weapons that can strike around the globe as fast as intelligence networks can spot enemy leaders and terrorist cells. And it requires troops who can think and move independently, who wield weapons and cultural understanding with equal aplomb.

Focus on Special Operations

"Future warriors will be as proficient in irregular operations, including counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, as they are today in high-intensity combat," the QDR says.

The U.S. military already has such troops; they populate the services' various special-operations units. But more are required for the Global War on Terror, recently rebranded the "Long War"-15% more, according to the review.

So its authors call for bulking up the Navy's SEAL teams with an unspecified number of commandos. And they support the creation of a new brown-water force to "provide a Navy riverine capability for river patrol, interdiction, and tactical troop movement on inland waterways." Navy officials, who recently created the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command to better coordinate the roughly 7,000 Seabees, bomb-disposal experts, and other sailors on the ground in Iraq, say the new riverine force might eventually include 700 sailors in three units.

For the Marines, who are tackling ever more special-operations missions in Iraq, the future is more explicit. After years of resistance, the Corps recently created its own Marine Special Operations Command under the U.S. Special Operations Command. Projected to consist of 2,600 Marines and sailors, the new unit will train foreign troops, perform reconnaissance, and execute "direct action" missions. The Marines are to be shifted from, not added to, the rest of the Corps; end strength is to remain stable for five years at 175,000 active troops and 39,000 reservists.

Even Navy officers will have the chance to get into the action; the QDR recommends reinvigorating the service's Foreign Area Officer program, which provides language and cultural training.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen has bought off on this shift in focus toward special operations forces -- "SOF," in the parlance.

"I think all of us need to be thinking more SOF-like," the CNO said in remarks released to coincide with the review's publication. "We need to be more agile. We need to be light on our feet. We need to be more precise, more lethal, and it is important for the joint force that we provide that capability. We can do that at sea."

Help and expertise in these new kinds of operations will also come from outside the Navy-Marine Corps team, in increasingly closer cooperation with other federal agencies and foreign coalition members.

For starters, "Coast Guard and naval capabilities will be fully integrated," the QDR says. This dovetails with a concept Admiral Mullen has been pushing since he took the Navy's top uniformed job six months ago. He calls it the "1,000-ship fleet"­-his way of describing a team forged by the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and allies. In his 6 February remarks, the CNO called the Navy's partnership with the Coast Guard "critical" for homeland defense and coastal operations around the world.

This cooperation will also be vital for another mission noted in the review: disaster relief at home and abroad. Spurred by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the U.S. Gulf Coast, the QDR enjoins the military to stand ready to help, prepositioning forces and gear when possible and obtaining ready-to-go emergency command-control-communications equipment.

New Ships

The QDR offers some broad-brush recommendations on shipbuilding: add ships to sustain a fleet of 11 carrier strike groups, devise ways to buy them more cheaply, and "provide stability for the shipbuilding industry."

But the most specific directives are all about vessels for use near the shoreline. The review wants more littoral combat ships-and faster; current plans call for 55 of the reconfigurable ships being built into the 2020s.

The review's authors also want more and cheaper submarines: two new subs a year by 2012, at a cost of no more than $2 billion apiece.

To serve the need to put troops ashore and support them with minimal exposure, the QDR recommends the Navy act on its tentative plans to launch a new family of ships called the Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future), starting with eight new prepositioning ships. Special forces units would operate from a new kind of vessel called the Afloat Forward Staging Base.

Striking Globally

The QDR's authors believe the nation's war against terrorism will soon become a truly global fight, spilling away from even the barely constrained theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stopping the enemy, they say, will require global reconnaissance-surveillance-intelligence networks that can find and fix a target in minutes, and weapons that can reach out and hammer it from halfway around the world.

In the QDR's vision, the watchkeeping networks that provide the necessary "maritime domain awareness" will tie Navy systems to ones run by other federal agencies and even other countries. The review specifically recommends spending more money on the Automatic Identification System, which uses soon-to-be-mandatory shipboard transponders to help track the world's vessels, and the Multinational Information Sharing standards promulgated by a two-year-old program advanced in a 6 February 2004 DoD instruction.

As for weapons, the QDR's authors propose to refit a Cold War chestnut: the D-5 Trident intercontinental ballistic missile. Tipped with a conventional warhead, launched from either of two altered tubes on each of the fleet's dozen remaining Ohio (SSBN-726)-class ballistic-missile subs, the new weapon could be deployed within two years, the review said.

Global strike might include stealthy, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, as well. The QDR mentions one such program by name: the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program recently split to allow the Navy to build a carrier-based version that can refuel in flight and loiter until needed.

The China Situation

Most of the QDR is about new wars and threats and the new kinds of troops and weapons needed to fight them and meet them. But the review also addresses the need to retain the Pentagon's world-beating dominance in more conventional warfare-and to meet one potential enemy in particular.

"Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States," the review says. "Chinese military modernization has accelerated since the mid-to-late 1990s in response to central leadership demands to develop military options against Taiwan scenarios . . . China is likely to continue making large investments in high-end, asymmetric military capabilities, emphasizing electronic and cyber-warfare; counter-space operations; ballistic and cruise missiles; advanced integrated air defense systems; next generation torpedoes; advanced submarines; strategic nuclear strike from modern, sophisticated land and sea-based systems; and theater unmanned aerial vehicles for Employment by the Chinese military and for global export."

Keeping the upper hand will require weapons and systems that can support operations deep into the Chinese interior, the QDR says. It is also part of the reason the Navy plans to shift ships and bases to put at least six carriers and 60% of its submarines in the world's biggest ocean.

Wrap-Up

If the QDR exhibits no evident enthusiasm for DD(X), it contains no discouraging word about it, either. Admiral Mullen told reporters on 7 February that the destroyer has the Bush administration's support, and "has withstood as much criticism and as much laser light as any program I've seen." But critics of the QDR have argued that the philosophical shift toward irregular and unconventional warfare demands cuts to expensive programs with less apparent relevance: the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, the Army's Future Combat Systems, and DD(X). The money to pay for the QDR's prescriptions is going to have to come from somewhere, they say.

And even one advisor to the review's authors said nearly as much in an article published just before the QDR itself. According to Michael Vickers, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Affairs, in the February 2006 Armed Forces Journal, "Large surface combatant modernization should receive close scrutiny during the 2008-13 defense program review."

Mr. Peniston is managing editor of Defense News. He is the author of the Naval Institute Press books Around the World with the U.S. Navy (1999) and No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf, due out in June.