Reviews of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review are pouring in from Washington’s defense cognoscenti and so far they come with a strong tilt towards disappointed. The lack of any real news or major program or policy shifts has led a number of defense wonks to question the value of the whole QDR process.

The Obama administration’s engagement policy and Defense Department budget cuts portend “an America in decline,” an approach the country must not accept, one of the top defense Republican lawmakers said today in a speech billed as a major policy address. “A defense budget in decline portends an America in decline,” Rep. Buck McKeon, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee says in a speech written for delivery at the conservative Heritage Foundation this morning.

Defense Secretary Gates slammed the F136 in his testimony yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Today, GE tackled his arguments, offering what they take to be a point by point refutation. The most interesting point is that GE says costs for the program should be “far less” than the $2.5 billion investment over the next five years that Gates cited.

The Air Force looks as if it has punted the establishment of a COIN Wing (though we’ll see when the authorization process starts) based on its budget submission yesterday. Air Force budget officials said the so-​​called “light attack aircraft” would not have any significant funding until the 2012 submission, where the service will allot $172 million for the so-​​called COIN plane.

The Missile Defense Agency is struggling with lousy quality control among its contractors, its executive director said today. David Altwegg told reporters that he and his colleagues stood watching a recent THAAD test. A drogue parachute pulled the target out of a C-17. “We all stood there and watched it fall into the water,” said an obviously disgusted Altweg. A failure review board was convened and found the test failed due to “a quality control problem.”

UPDATED: Vice Adm. David Venlet, NAVAIR commander, Likely New JSF Program Manager; LM Issues Statement

The bombshell of budget day: Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the prpgram manager of the Joint Strike Fighter program was being canned and would be replaced by a three- star general. “One cannot absorb the additional costs in this program and the delays without people being held accountable,” Gates said during the question and answer period of his budget briefing today.

UPDATED: With Obama Calling C-17 Adds “Waste, Pure and Simple”

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee has signaled that Democrats will search high and low for ways to “cut wasteful spending” in the Defense Department. Rep. Ike Skelton, known for his temperance on most matters military, put out a short statement saying that the HASC “will be watching closely as the administration implements last year’s reforms and will continue to look for ways to cut wasteful spending as we review this year’s budget.”

UPDATED: With Gates Comments on How Old Strategy Was “Too Confining”

Clearly continuing his Augean task of reshaping the U.S. military to win the wars it is fighting, Defense Secretary Robert Gates commits the Defense Department to institutionalizing his focus in the final, official version of the Quadrennial Defense Review. “This is truly a wartime QDR. For the first time, it places the current conflicts at the top of our budgeting, policy, and program priorities, thus ensuring that those fighting America’s wars and their families – on the battlefield, in the hospital, or on the home front – receive the support they need and deserve,” Gates says in his opening note to the QDR.

Jim Jones, president Obama’s national security advisor, didn’t break any big news today at the Center for Strategic and International Study. But he did highlight that this year will be tough and he offered some of the reasons why, like Iran. His comments on Iran came closest to news, when he said that Iran, facing increased pressure from the international community over its apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons might well strike out at Israel as a result. His reasoning was simple: a “pressured country often lashes out through its surrogates,” he said.

It is official. The two major theater war strategy — blueprint for American power for almost a quarter century — is no more. In the long run, that is likely to be the most significant change outlined by the Quadrennial Defense Review. This QDR acknowledges the need for a robust force capable of protecting U.S. interests against a multiplicity of threats. But it is “no longer appropriate to speak of major regional conflicts as the sole or even the primary template for sizing, shaping and evaluating US forces.”

He’s affable, writes well, is sharp as a tack and he’s unemployed. He’s also Norm Augustine, about as close as you get these days to the giants of the aerospace business like Curtiss, Hughes, Tripp and the guys who used their initials to start a cool company called TRW. When this former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and recent head of the Augustine Commission charged with reviewing America’s manned space flight plans, says a treaty on space debris is a good idea and that we have a “window” in which he thinks one can be cobbled together, it’s worth listening.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, coping with two wars and terrorism, has sent analysts to Haiti to help SouthCom and the State Department plan and deploy trrops and aid. We got an email from NGA spokeswoman Sue Meisner telling us of the deployment. Given the enormous strains on the intelligence community’s analysts, pouring through huge quantities of pictures, human intelligence, multi-spectral imagery and signals intelligence data, this deployment sends a clear signal of the depth of the Obama administration’s commitment to Haitian relief.

In a fabulous concurrence of conflicting signals, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said he doesn’t expect the Joint Strike Fighter program to incur cost overruns large enough for it to breach the Nunn-McCurdy threshold, which could have meant disastrous publicity for the plane. Schwartz also said the Pentagon has a plan to aggressively reduce program risk, increasing testing and slowing the move to production. But the director of Operational Test and Evaluation paints a very different picture, saying the program faces “substantial risk” over the next two years.

Editor’s note: After speaking with an Air Force official, I’ve changed the headline on this story to better reflect Gen. Schwartz’s focus on finding alternatives to GPS to be used when operating in denied environments.

In the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Indian navy turned the tide in India’s favor when it bombed the Karachi oil refineries and proved the strategic importance of maintaining a dominant water force. While the Air Force and Army complain about procurement procedures, the Indian navy has, in the face of the same obstacles, managed to keep building more warships, most of them in India. It is working towards becoming a modern, networked-force with capabilities to protect its interests in the entire Indian Ocean.

The Marines are sending the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with three large amphibious assault ships loaded with heavy lift helicopters, trucks and earth movers to support relief efforts in Haiti. The Bataan, one of the largest amphibious ships in the world, left its berth at Norfolk, Va., yesterday, accompanied by the landing ship dock vessels Carter Hall and Fort McHenry, and will pass by Camp Lajeune on the way to Haiti and take on around 2,000 Marines along with their helicopters and equipment.

The Pentagon will probably send the U-2 to Haiti so its unique multi-spectral imagery capabilities can be put to use spotting breaks in water and gas lines, chemical spills and similar problems. “My expectation is that we hope to get that deployed soon,” Col. Bradley Butz, vice commander of the Air Force’s 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Va., told reporters this morning. The U-2 contains unique multi-spectral imagery equipment (the seven-band SYERS 2) that Global Hawk and Predator don’t possess.

Our partner and aerospace consultant Addison Schonland has an excellent podcast on the A400M saga. EADS, Europe’s largest defense company, has threatened to shut down the airlift program unless its European government partners come up with money to pay for the plane’s enormous cost overruns. The company’s CEO, Louis Gallois, set a Jan. 31 deadline for a funding agreement. Gallois said Jan. 12 that the company would not risk its future for the sake of the troubled plane.

Less than four months after China resumed military to military talks with the United States, the people’s republic failed to alert the U.S. or anyone else before it conducted its most recent missile defense test. At least one influential lawmaker urging the Chinese to do more to open up. “Most major countries alert the international community when conducting similar missile tests, but China chose not to do so. If ever there was a time for openness, transparency, and military-to-military dialogue, now is it,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, co-chair of the Congressional US-China Working Group.

The U.S. bombing campaign targeting Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other extremist groups in Pakistan, continues to escalate, according to a a data rich analysis put together by the invaluable Long War Journal. The U.S. carried out 53 drone strikes in Pakistan last year, compared to 36 in 2008, a 47 percent increase. With multiple bombing runs already in 2010, LWJ says to expect the intensity of the campaign to match or beat least year’s pace.