National Defense University: We’re going to do downsizing right: That’s the essence of the pledge made today by the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy, Michèle Flournoy. It won’t be an easy one to keep.

Flournoy talked to reporters here after she spoke to an NDU conference on “grand strategy. While the military’s top civilian strategist stayed cagey on specifics -– “I don’t want to get ahead of the decisions the Secretary and the President have made,” she said –- she painted a broad-stroke picture of how the Obama administration is approaching the more-than $450 billion in required cuts to the defense budget.

Her high-minded highlights: a systematic review of strategic priorities instead of engaging in the traditional and widely loathed and feared process of “salami slicing” every program equally; adequate funding for non-military aspects of foreign policy like the State Department and USAID; and a willingness to take on even such sacred cows as the current division of the Pentagon budget among the four armed services.

“What we have is an opportunity to go back to first principles,” Flournoy said. “In periods of plenty, you’re not forced to make the hard decisions…. When you’re in a period of extreme budgetary austerity, which could get even worse, those questions become front and center.”

Flournoy went on: “The easy way is to just cut, salami-slice; it’s to get to budget targets by subtraction off the current baseline. The harder but more valuable approach is to think your way through it from the beginning.”

Asked specifically about the traditional division of the defense budget into rough thirds, one each for the Air Force, for the Army, and for the Navy and Marines, Flournoy replied: “If you take a strategy-driven perspective, there are no going in assumptions about the division of the pie, or what the proportional shares will be.” That may send shivers down the backs of service chiefs and their budget experts.

The problem with all this, of course, is that every previous budget review started with similar and equally noble pledges to put strategy first but all ended up shaped primarily by bureaucratic politics. The horse-trading among the services, each backed by its own associated defense contractors and members of Congress, tends to keep the budget looking roughly the same, only smaller. Flournoy knows this first-hand, having first worked at the Pentagon during the Clinton downsizing, and she admitted that after all the no-holds-barred brainstorming, “you may return to and re-embrace some of the elements of the original strategy.”

At least one part of the institutional politics genuinely has changed since the 1990s, however: The Department of Defense is now lobbying for the Department of State. Ten years of painful experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has taught the military they don’t want to go it alone in stabilizing foreign countries, and they need diplomats and aid workers to have the money to help. But Congressional Republicans have generally preferred to fund the armed forces instead of what the late Senator Jesse Helms called “striped-pants bureaucrats” at State. The Tea Partiers now on the Hill look likely to continue that tradition.

“One of the things I’m worried about is that imbalance growing ever more severe in the current climate,” Flournoy said. “When those other, non-military pieces are just starved of resources, it doesn’t give the president the options he needs to really safeguard national security. So it’s one of the reasons why you see secretaries of defense, four-star military generals up on Capitol Hill encouraging Congress to fully fund” State, USAID, and the rest.

How optimistic is Flournoy that that funding will actually materialize? She laughed and said, “I’m the eternal optimist.”