Some more good stuff from yesterday’s conference call with Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Gen. James Cartwright, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman. Noah Shachtman from Danger Room asked a passel of good questions about why the new defense budget keeps certain troubled or criticized programs and cuts others, and in answering that, Cartwright made an intriguing point about further reorganizations that the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review — the Pentagon’s big kahuna of institutionalized review documents — will advise. Since Noah asked the question, it’s only fair to quote him:

Marine General [and] Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright says the Review will handle all kinds of tradeoffs. For instance: "If you have bombers in the Pacific, do you also have to have aircraft carriers?" he asks. "Do we always have to have every thing in every service? How much of this do we really need, especially given the situation we face which is a much broader spectrum of conflict over a much great geographic dispersal than we’ve had in the past?"

That sounds a lot like the Pentagon will start asking why duplicative functions exist between the armed services when they’re supposed to complement each other under the concept of "jointness." If that’s the case, then if the services and Congress don’t like the fiscal 2010 budget, they’ll absolutely hate the QDR and the fiscal 2011 budget that the QDR informs. Reform is starting to seem like the new normal at the Pentagon under Gates.

Crossposted to The Streak.