Instead of shoehorning its current force structure within a confined budget, the U.S. military should decide what it wants to be able to accomplish in the future and then design an affordable force to achieve those goals, a new study on the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review contends.

“We have a very capable force today. But the QDR is supposed to look out into the future, 20 years in the future and detect trends in the threats, trends in technology and where we should put our resources to be prepared for those future threats.,” Mark Gunzinger, author of “Shaping America’s Military: Toward a New Force Planning Construct, said June 13 during a presentation of the report.

“We need to decide what capabilities we need for the future, before we decide what cuts we’re going to make today,” added Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank that published the report.

Gunzinger’s concern is that the QDR that is scheduled to be published in 2014 will simply cut the current military down to a size that is affordable based on the current constrained fiscal environment. Mandated by law, next year’s QDR is the first in 11 years that will be drafted without a seemingly endless pot of money to fund its objectives. In fact, this and the next QDR fall squarely into a timeframe when Pentagon officials can count on shrinking budgets.

“The QDR could become another budget-dominated drill, which could lead the U.S. military to cut force structure, personnel and programs resulting in a force structure that is a smaller version of what we have today — a force structure that is, frankly, best prepared for fading threats,” Gunzinger said. “You should invest in the future first, before you balance the budget.”

Gunzinger contended that the Defense Department’s 1993 Bottom-Up Review may have been the “last time the Pentagon created a new vision for how the U.S. military should prepare to meet the nation’s security challenges.”

Conducted at the end of the Cold War, that review replaced preparing for all-out war against the Soviet Union with the ability to defeat two major cross-border ground invasions similar to the first Gulf War.