<html><body>The Future of the United States Army April 11, 2005 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording. <TABLE width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">9:00 a.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="85%" colSpan=2> Registration</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">9:15</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="85%" colSpan=2>Panel I: Strategy and Missions</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Discussants:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Gen. John M. Keane, U.S. Army (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Col. Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, U.S. Army (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Moderator:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Thomas Donnelly, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">10:45</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Coffee Break</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">11:00</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="85%" colSpan=2>Panel II: Force Size, Force Structure, and Force Posture</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Discussants:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Michèle Flournoy, CSIS</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Frederick W. Kagan, U.S. Military Academy at West Point</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Michael O'Hanlon, Brookings Institution</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Maj. Gen. David C. Ralston, director of force management, G-3, U.S. Army</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, U.S. Army (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Moderator:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Gary Schmitt, Project for the New American Century</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">12:30 p.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Luncheon</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">12:45</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Keynote Address:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, U.S. Army chief of staff</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">1:30</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="85%" colSpan=2>Panel III: Doctrine, Training, and Equipping</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Discussants:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Brig. Gen. David Fastabend, Futures Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Gen. Barry McCaffrey, U.S. Army (Ret.), U.S. Military Academy at West Point</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Maj. Donald Vandergriff, U.S. Army</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Michael Vickers, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Moderator:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%">Col. Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="15%">3:00</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="85%" colSpan=2> Adjournment</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. DONNELLY:  Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to get started.  Allow me to say good morning, and welcome to our discussion on the future of the Army of the United States.  My name is Tom Donnelly, and my formal pompous title here at AEI is Resident Fellow on Defense and National Security Studies.  Practically that makes me the master of ceremonies for today's proceedings.  As such, I delegate to myself a few moments to tell you what we're going to try to accomplish through the course of the day.  It's going to be a full day, and a good one. In some ways it's kind of surprising that we should be even having this discussion about the future of the Army, or land forces more broadly.  But certainly since the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and before September 11th, we Americans occasionally wondered if we needed an Army at all. Part of this was the traditional American suspicion of standing armies, to be sure.  Part of it was a desire for a peace dividend.  Also a part was a belief that war and technology were so changing that land forces and especially heavily armed land forces were something of an anachronism. In the past few years have shown us the shortcomings of such reasoning, but we're still a long way from figuring out a number of really pretty basic questions, and those are the questions we're going to try to begin to get at today. The first question is essentially, what's the mission or missions for the Army?  What do we think we want the Army to do for us?  What's the role of land power in the post-September 11th strategy of the United States? The second question is, how much is enough to successfully complete these missions?  What will it take to win?  A third question is what kind of an Army do we need?  What are the qualify of the force needs, quality use of the force needs now in the future in order to get to victory? Those are the very broad topics of our three panels.  In between that by way of an administrative announcement and I'm sure you're aware of this from your packet materials, at 12:45 we'll hear from General Peter Schoomaker, Chief of Staff of the Army, who will give his perspective on these issues. A couple of other administrative notes, the one camera in the room is a CSPAN camera which means that we're going to be on a pretty tight and dictatorial sort of schedule.  So if we add oddly up here, it's simply because of the schedule.  Every other strange act has nothing to do with the quirks of the presenters or me. So to our first panel.  As I said, we're waiting for Jack Keane to arrive, but this is something that I've been looking forward to for some time.  I've got three of my closest professional friends up here.  I'm sorry that we don't have an ex-general here to ambush just yet, but maybe we can set the trap for him before he arrives. Presenting first will be Eliot Cohen of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.  I'm sure he's well known to this audience.  Following him will be Bob Killebrew, ex-paratrooper and the man who taught me a huge amount about force projection when during my first life I was a reporter.  Batting clean-up today will be Ralph Peters, also a former soldier and now a very distinguished author, both a novelist and nonfiction essayist, again, I'm sure well known to the audience.  Anyone who wants the rest of the biographical particulars for our three panelists will find them in the packet.  There is no need for me to rehearse that any further. We're going to follow the usual AEI panel procedure.  We'll go through the presentations and then we'll have a question-and-answer period.  I'll repeat this again.  When we get to the Q-and-A period, there are three requirements for a question.  First of all, that it actually be a question and not a statement.  Second of all, that you wait for the microphone.  And third of all, you need to identify yourself and your organization for the purposes of the transcript. So that concludes my opening remarks.  Eliot, if you'll get us rolling, I'd appreciate it. MR. COHEN:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me here, Tom, and inviting me to be on a panel with three other gentlemen for whom I really do have the highest regard. Let me begin by saying it seems to me that one of the more profitable ways of thinking about the Army's future is by thinking about its past and thinking about the relevance of its past.  It seems to me in putting the Army's situation today and into the future in some sort of historical context, it does seem to me that the Army is in one of those periodic watersheds that it goes through. Those have taken different forms in its history.  Certainly the great demobilizations after the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the great transitions from the kind of constabulary military that we had before the Spanish American War to what was essentially a kind of framework Army into the period just before World War I and again in the inter-war period.  Or the transition from a framework Army to a mass Army.  The transition to an all-volunteer force was of course another great watershed.  Finally, the post-Cold War transition which is I think in part what we're talking about. Of course, today the Army is in some would say the midpoint, some would say an early stage in its war on what some have called an Islamic insurgency with some great successes but also some tremendous strains and arguably, perhaps, some failures as well. I suppose the analogy that we immediately think about is that last great transformation which is the post-Vietnam transformation where, again, there was a very mixed story of tremendous success as the Army in effect reprofessionalized itself, putting itself through all kinds of reforms which are continuing to pay off today, its investment in education and training.  But also a certain kind of historical interpretation, and I think that's the first point I want to make. The interpretation that the Army had for itself of Vietnam was this was a huge mistake, this was to be put firmly in the past.  What the Army really did was to prepare it to fight World War III, the big way, and so it's no accident that the turn the Army took was really to turn its back on the most recent conflict and to look squarely at the Cold War. I think that one point that that brings home that in each of these watershed points arguably the Army has made some judgments about the future and those have frequently turned out to be incorrect.  The United States Army, for example, in the interwar period wasn't simply inadequately resourced.  Actually, we can argue about that.  It probably was in the '30s, not in the '20s, but it made some decisions or some guesses about where it was going to fight in the future which ended up, for example, in turning money back to the United States Treasury that had been allocated to the development of armor. Similarly, I think the Army's view that it was not going to be in the unconventional warfare business, not going to be in the irregular warfare business after Vietnam, turned out to be quite profoundly incorrect.  This isn't because the Army is any more flawed than any other human institution in thinking about the future.  The fact is, the future is and always has been profoundly unpredictable, and I think where we stand today that remains the case. I think one can plausibly imagine a world where the United States Army has actually rather limited engagements after we scale down in Iraq, engagements overseas that are mainly in terms of Special Forces and limited kinds of conventional interventions, but mainly the kinds of Special Forces, development of local forces and so on.  And I think you can equally plausibly imagine a world in which the United States Army again undertakes large expeditionary commitments in various parts of the world.  And it would not be that difficult to spin scenarios for southwest Asia, for east Asia, even for south Asia, possibly for Latin America, the Middle East, even Africa. We're in a period of I believe tremendous international volatility and it's just not going to be possible to sketch out a predictable kind of future which has implications for how to structure the Army.  Just to draw a contrast, very different, say, from the situation the United States Navy found itself in the 1920s where they knew who the enemy was going to be, it was going to be Japan, they knew where they were going to fight.  They could project out what that fight was going to look like and structure and train and prepare themselves accordingly.  That's not the environment the United States Army faces. So if that's the case, what might looking back on these watershed periods in the past suggest as avenues the Army might take?  I have four thoughts which I wanted to run through very briefly. The first is it seems to me if you look at these past watersheds, the Army sometimes engages in what I called in a lecture that I gave at the Army War College a few years back the Optoniam Hunker (ph), named after Major General Emery Upton the youngest Major General of the Civil War, the author of a posthumous class, The Military Policy of the United States.  Upton reflecting on the Civil War and on the watershed of the post-Civil War demobilization made the case that basically the Army couldn't trust Congress or the politicians or the press or the militia or the citizen soldier, it could only trust itself and what Upton advocated was a kind of professional retreat into the tactical sphere and a cultivation of its excellence in a certain sort of isolation from these other spheres.  A focus, to use a phase which I have a feeling we may here again from my friend and colleague Bob Killebrew, on winning battles rather than winning wars. Arguably, I think that's probably the most dangerous thing that the Army could do.  It is to some extent what happened after Vietnam, a kind of withdrawing away from the strategic sphere into a tactical sphere, and I think to some extent, you could argue, we've paid for it although not as severely as we might. A second proposition that I throw out that it seems to me the Army has to assume a future that is both conventional and irregular or unconventional.  It may well be a mistake to say that there will be no more intense campaigns like Desert Storm or the first phase of Iraqi Freedom.  But I think it would equally be a mistake to assume that the Army will never again engage in a large-scale counterinsurgency. Certainly one mistake to avoid is the almost willful decision not to think about Vietnam that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.  The Army has got to do both, and I think that poses tremendous challenges for how the Army structures itself, who it recruits, how it recruits them, how it trains.  I think the most important desideratum here is that the Army be willing to engage in a pretty unflinching look at Iraq and at its Iraqi experience.  The successes, and there have been numerous excesses and the adaptability which was certainly shown, but also the screw-ups and the failures and the widely varied performance of different Army units in Iraq and of different Army commanders in Iraq. I think without that kind of serious, dispassionate and perhaps rather painful scrutiny of the Iraq experience, the Army could set itself up once again to again find itself fighting a war which it had fought in the past but which it willfully forgot about. The third point is that given the profound uncertainty of the international environment, there is going to be a tremendous need for versatility in particularly the Senior Officer Corps.  If that is the case, the key thing is not Stryker or any other weapon system, it's not even force structure necessarily, although as important as that is, it's the thinking and educating parts of the Army.  Frankly, that is the thing that I worry about most as I look at the Army today.  I'll just tick off a few things that have me at least concerned. We'll start with a small fact, the fact that the United States Army War College is now under the Training and Doctrine Command instead of reporting to the Chief of Staff of the Army.  And although officers will frequently pretend that there's a distinction between training and education, if you look at how the system actually operates, it frequently does not acknowledge that distinction. The possibility, depending on which rumor you believe, that the Army War College will be BRAC'd, Carlisle will be closed down and moved to Leavenworth, which I think would be a severe blow to higher-level Army education, is another sign of that, and if the Army is not fighting it, it's a sign, it seems to me, that the Army doesn't understand the educational consequences of uprooting that institution and shipping it out to Leavenworth or to a place like Fort Riley. The weakening of Leavenworth in terms of the quality of faculty and length of time that they're there, having spent some time at Leavenworth, with all respect for the officers who teach there, when you see people who are frequently less experienced than the people that they're teaching and certainly don't have that much time teaching, you can't say that that's a powerful educational institution despite the quality of the general officer who runs it. The sharp decline in officers with advanced civilian education, I draw here on my friend Major General Bob Scales (ph) who has I think been doing an enormous service by calling the attention of the public and of the Army to a drastic falloff in the number of officers getting advanced civilian degrees.  Furthermore, the tendency to limit those degrees to wonderful officers, but whose career paths are such that they cannot become general officers so that the Army will be cutting itself off from having the Jack Galvins and the John Abizaids and the David Petraeuses of the future as its most senior general officer leadership. The rage for distance education which is partly a fad of the green eyeshade folks in ODS personnel but also the kind of snake oil to which the Army is occasionally inclined to purchase and to believe in until it turns out to be foolish, you all remember Total Quality Management, that distance learning, my prediction is the TQM of the beginning of the 21st century. Finally, the decline in the quality of official narrative and history.  Compare the Army Green Books, that true monument not just to scholarship but to the willingness of the Army to accept really critical, dispassionate, thorough narratives which displeased a lot of senior officers, compare that with what the military history system can turn out now.  So that actually is the part that gives me the greatest concern about the Army's future. The final point that I want to make is the importance of maintaining the link to American society.  One might not think about this as a part of the Army's strategic future, but I think it's essential.  The United States Army is of all services the one that is most intimately linked to American civil society and that should be most intimately linked to civil society.  And here too there are worrying trends.  The tendency on the grounds of I think a kind of foolish pursuit of efficiency has consolidated the Army into a few megabases which are disproportionately centered of course in the South means that there will be less of an Army footprint around the country. New England, for example, and I'll confess I'm a Bostonian.  I want to see the United States Army in New England, and not as a force of occupation.  It means that the Army will not be present except in the form of the National Guard which is a very different kind of creature in a very, very important part of the country. Here I would lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the United States Army, the failure to seize the opportunity after September 11th to get ROTC detachments open at our elite universities.  They were ready for it.  There is no question in my mind, and I've got some pretty first-hand evidence for this, elite universities were ready to do that and if there had been a serious push it would have happened.  I think our personnel system is just--there are kinds of why they didn't take advantage of that, none of them I think very credible or certainly adequate, even when they are credible. A complete absence of thinking about what does it mean to be a citizen soldier.  We are treating the National Guard today as if it were the Army Reserve.  I worry about the long-term consequence of that is for our concept of the citizen soldier.  The idea of the citizen soldier is something that is very, very deeply rooted in American history.  It goes way back before the Revolution to our Colonial past.  It is an important part of our understanding of what the Army's role in civil society is.  I have not seen any general officer reflect on what that is and what that ought to be. Finally, an accountant's view of what happens when you end up with a lot of enlisted and junior officers flowing through the service back into civil society which is a good thing, I think.  I think we want to have lots of young Americans out there who've had the experience of doing a hitch in the military and then go on to careers in many other fields. With this I'm going to conclude and I'll stay under the 15-minute limit.  Even though the United States Army is an all-volunteer force as it ought to be, the American military is not an imperial constabulary, nor should it be.  It has a very different feel to it, as it should, than does the British military.  It is what it is in part because it is a popular institution in the most profound sense of the term, and if it stops being that, both it and the country will be poorly served. MR. DONNELLY:  Eliot, thank you very much.  There's a lot to chew on there.  The one that particularly worries me is that prospect of an Officer Corps that's educated at the University of Phoenix.  Maybe we'll return to that. Following Eliot will be General John Keane who I know best as Jack.  Again, I won't recite his entire C.V.  It's in the packets.  He is a very distinguished soldier and he concluded his more than 35-year professional career with a stint as Chief of Staff of the Army, so he has dealt directly with the fundamental question that we're trying to lay out today.  Without further ado, General Keane, the microphone is yours. GEN KEANE:  I apologize for arriving late.  I don't like doing that, and I pride myself on not being late.  But obviously I planned wrong. It's good, Tom, that you got this together.  I believe this is an important subject and one that the United States military cannot design or solve by itself.  It always needs input in a democracy society by thoughtful people because the Army is very much a part of this democracy of ours and it needs that kind of input. I also feel privileged to be on a panel with the folks here.  I know them all and all are very thoughtful people in their own right and have distinguished careers, and I'm delighted to be up here with you. A couple of comments.  In the post-Cold War but pre-9/11 era, we were moving toward advocating a new kind of war.  It leveraged our advances in information technology, particularly the microchip and was moving ever so rapidly toward more and more precision weapons.  As David Hallstrom (ph) pointed out, it was possible to paralyze the modern state by taking out its central nervous system with limited risk to ourselves and also limited risk to the host country noncombatants. Kosovo and Desert Storm were the driving examples of this model.  It was intoxicating, to say the least, and it was clearly in the room with us, the advancement of the QDR in the summer of 2001, so much so that the Army, which has been traditionally been criticized the most for its failure to shed its Cold War doctrine and formations, was facing a two-division cut in the active force and a four-division cut in the National Guard. This was an OSD staff recommendation which was defeated as clearer heads prevailed.  Once it was argued thoughtfully that we actually were short the forces that were needed to meet the realities of the 2001 QDR world that was envisioned. 9/11 fundamentally changed our world.  It changed the military transformation paradigm and has set us on a struggle with a clash of ideas and values which may last most of the 21st century.  What we learned again is that our adversaries are also capable of thoughtful innovation.  They recognize that the United States military cannot be defeated, but they fundamentally believe that our people can; and here we are today. It is a war of ideas similar to Nazism and Communism of the 20th century, but it's also different.  Nazism was defeated by brute force in less than 20 years, Communism took the better of 70, and it took a certain resolve and clearly a better idea to defeat it. In this war, there are nonstate actors that transcend boundaries of nation states, and while we are a significant external influence, the war of ideas is more within the Muslim world.  The radical Islamists have a grand strategy to transform the entire Islamic world and remake its relationship with the remainder of the globe. They want to expand the realm of Islam to human society as we know it.  They want the clash between the West and Islam.  They want it to be a clash of religions.  They want an Islamic front.  They want to overthrow the global status quo.  They fundamentally believe that they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, which they did.  They also believe, misinterpreted I believe, that they defeated the Soviet Union.  And it was logical for them to come to the United States as the arbiter of ideas, particularly democracy, capitalism, human rights, individual freedoms, et cetera, not only to stop us, but to defeat us in terms of our values and our ideas. They want to feed on local grievances and conflicts and integrate them into broader ideological strategies, and they want to control the world's energy resources and ultimately the global economy. While our grand strategy to defeat this, in my judgment, is significantly incomplete, it's not a purpose here to discuss it because we could have a panel and a whole-day discussion on our strategy to defeat this threat that we're facing, and at some point maybe we should.  But it is suffice to say that just simplistically, proactively we must engage to facilitate legitimate governments and shift those values to be compatible with our own, not necessarily identical, and we must address the underlying causes and motivations for radical Islam. To implement a grand strategy, we must do some things, relationships with Europe, U.S. debt, energy independence, reorganize the structure and decision-making process of the executive branch, major intelligence reform as we all know, strategic communications, and we must adjust the azimuth of transformation. We can no longer execute transformation just in the DOD, but in the other elements of national power as well.  We must advance even more rapidly the horizontal integration of the Department of Defense, that is, jointness.  We have made enormous progress.  We have to do it even more rapidly than we have planned. We must model this conflict with the ideas, and the values, the groups, the linkages and the cells that are out there, and we must work against it intellectually.  We have to organize the fight globally to fight this irregular threat, Eliot has used that term before, and I think it's an accurate description, and the traditional threat while also advancing capabilities to deter or to preempt the use of WMD.  I felt obligated to provide some of that context because the Army operates in that context and we just cannot isolate on the Army by itself. For the Army, we have to recognize that this a significant opportunity because change comes much more rapidly during war than it can possibly come during peace, despite the compelling intellectual arguments for change during peace.  In peace, the truth is the bureaucracy drives the process, budgets, competition; the bureaucratic motion and inertia that is there stifles innovative change. In war there is opportunity for it, and when you look in our past you can see it.  When war broke out in World War I, we were a frontier Army. We did not have a singular division construct.  One year and 9 months later we had formed 64 divisions and had trained them to some degree of competence, and put 48 of them into France.  That was absolutely transformational in our Army driven by the external threat of war and only possible because of that. World War II was much the same.  When our thinkers, thoughtful people, at Fort Leavenworth during the inner-war years heard the drumbeats of war again, they started to vision what would it take to defeat that, and they were an Army at the time of about 330,000, and they become a multimillion force very rapidly. But during that time frame, they put together a thought that led to Louisiana maneuvers to armor warfare, to the design, concept and execution of amphibious warfare because many of them realized, what happens if we do not have a foothold like we had the last time?  What happens if we have to fight our way onto the continent? The Vietnam War brought tremendous change.  A Cold War Army transitioned during the war into an Army that fought an insurgency successfully, but nonetheless lost the war.  But the transformation that took place within the Army is instructive because out of that came the use of helicopter forces no longer just for logistical and medical recovery, but to be used as an assault force.  We take it for granted now, but it was clearly innovative at the time to free us from the tyranny of terrain and develop those kind of forces.  So we have been there in the past and we should be encouraged by that kind of history that this war, more threatening than any one that we've faced in the past, we can energize ourselves to make rapid transformational change within the Army. There are a couple of things we need to do.   First, we have to change rapidly to meet the threat of this irregular warfare.  That is priority one, and it overshadows all over priorities.  We have to recognize that this form of warfare strikes at the heart of our fundamental weakness.  We have always organized ourselves to fight the large war.  You contrast ourselves with the British who spent 150 to 200 years keeping the Commonwealth stable and going around fighting irregular wars as a matter of norm.  The reality is, while you won't get many British leaders to admit it, maybe after one drink or two, you'd get them to admit that it actually holds primacy and there is a cultural and an historical heritage for it and that the large war in a sense is secondary. But in the United States military, the large, big war, the campaign development, has always been where our priorities have been, particularly in warfare throughout the 20th century, so-called modern global wars.  With the exception of our involvement in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador, we have very little experience in dealing with irregular warfare.  Since 1975, we have not been organized, we don't have the doctrine, we don't have the training, nor the education programs to deal with it.  So it fundamentally a weakness and it has to change. It's not enough to be adaptable and flexible as our troops have shown us as we prosecuted an counterinsurgency in Iraq.  The institution owes them much more than that so that there has to be some fundamental change here. Intellectual capital is really important here.  It's much more of an intellectual war than other kinds of wars that we fight.  It has considerably more ebb and flow to it.  It's chess compared to checkers.  It's considerably more sophisticated in its intellectual application and, therefore, requires lots more thought on how to deal with it. We have to move rapidly to understand the culture that we're dealing with, to understand the Muslim world, to understand radical Islam.  We have to bring in the academic communities and other peoples in the world to help us do this.  The United States Army cannot begin to deal with the magnitude of this problem. I was helping out of our Army organizations get ready for a session to get ready for operational deployment to Iraq.  It was a major headquarters.  I don't want to get into naming it.  But as we were going through the seminars, the last day, the very last day of the last hour, we started to deal with cultural sensitivity, and it was the last presenter.  It was some person, GS whatever, who lacked the degrees, the depth, the background to deal with something as sophisticated as this and we were going to give an hour to it. My point to them was, I said, listen, you all know how to apply kinetic solutions to this problem, and I would suggest that kinetic solutions may be the last thing in the quiver that we use, and cultural sensitivity, knowing that we lack it is where we have to spend most of our time in dealing with this so we can understand the challenge that we're operating in, the people that we have to safeguard and protect, the ideas that we cherish and the respect for the ideas that are being propagated in this world.  So, the cultural sensitivity, the language training, the involvement, has got to be a major expansion of what we're doing. Expand the size of the Army as needed.  I don't think in my time frame post-1975, I joined the Army in '66, but in post-1975 when the volunteer force began and the War in Vietnam had ended, has there ever been a time in our history during that time frame, so 30 years or so, where we have as much consensus on expanding the size of the Army as needed.  Think tanks, media, the Congress, some people in the administration, some people in the administration disagree, major parts of the Army and our sister services, thoughtful people in our sister services.  I called it that the stars are aligned for change. It should be expanded as the leaders of the Army believe it needs to be.  Obviously there is a pressing need for more Special Operations forces, military police, civil affairs, PSYOPS, human intelligence significantly, linguists significantly, all these are self-evident and well know. We must recognize that urban warfare is a reality for the future not just in irregular warfare, but also in traditional warfare.  The thing that haunted me before the takedown of Saddam Hussein's regime dealing with traditional conventional warfare was a coherent defense of Baghdad and how ill-prepared we would be for that.  Our soldiers at the tactical level know how to enter buildings and enter rooms and even deal with something as sophisticated as a combatant who is holding people hostage in those facilities and separate the two lethally and non-lethally.  We have that degree of sophistication. My concern was with the generalship, the generalship of dealing with a multimillion population city, how do you population, how do you keep them out of the fight, how do segment it?  Do you provide them utilities or do you shut them off?  Do you provide them food and other nourishment or do you shut it off?  Do you create a refugee problem and then you have to obviously be responsible for the safeguard of those refugees and also for their everyday survival, hygienically, nourishment and the rest of it? Then how do you deal militarily with the problem?  These are serious issues which we do not exercise in our war games.  I've been an advocate of this for a long time.  Our colonels and our generals do not experience these kinds of challenges and they have to experience them.  We're facing it now in Baghdad and other major cities because it is the only place in a desert where you can hide among the people.  If you had sanctuaries like mountains and jungles, they would also be there.  Make no mistake about it.  But they're not there. So it has application in irregular warfare as we're coping with it and also in traditional warfare as well.  The enemy is going to use our values to work against us in the fact that we will want to safeguard a population that is in a major city and they will want to keep its residents in hostage to be able to prosecute their aims and their objectives. We have to change the Cold War intelligence system, and I would suggest we're only playing at the margin.  It almost has to be turned upside down.  This system that currently exists, it's like a funnel, and you have huge amounts of national intelligence systems at the top of the funnel.  I tried to count it up one time when I was a three-star general and I went from agency to agency to agency, and somewhere around 140 to 150,000 is where I wound up that are involved in the national intelligence apparatus in the United States government.  It is staggering the amount of people that we have engaged in this.  Most of it is up at the national level and funneling information down at the bottom of the funnel to people at the tactical level. We have improved considerably that process.  Remember General Schwarzkopf had one profound, serious critique of Desert Storm, and it was the lack of capacity to get national and regional intelligence down to the tactical level in a timely way.  We have improved that in the ensuing 10 to 12 years.  We have made lots of progress with significant enablers and ground systems that could pull on these systems themselves, analyze it themselves and not dependent on an analyst in Washington, D.C. or an analyst up at Fort Meade or wherever.  They still contribute, make no mistake about it, but that capacity is there now, and that's a major change. That's okay, but it's ill-suited for the kind of warfare that we're involved in because this kind of warfare disarms that technology.  And it puts a premium on what?  It puts a premium on understand the culture, on understanding the cells and understanding their linkages, and understanding the financial resources that are supporting them, and understanding the transnational aspect of all of this and the regional and local aspect of it.  This is hard, deliberate work. I compare it to a homicide investigation.  It's painstaking, deliberate, methodical work that must be done at what level?  Mostly at lower tactical and operational levels because that's where most of the information is.  Unfortunately, that's not where most of the resources are.  That's the problem.  Where are all the analysts?  They're at the top of this funnel.  We need to get these analysts, these culturally aware and sensitive people, down at lower levels to help us, and we have to get more people doing human intelligence actually on the street doing this, and organizations have to reflect that increase in human intelligence to be able to deal with this problem. Working at the margin and playing around with the Cold War system that we currently have will not work.  It is ideally suited to fight other armies.  It takes pictures of them and analyzes it.  We have a sense of where that army is, where it organizes in groups.  We can see what it's doing at night and what it's doing in the daytime.  We can track its logistical system ,when it's moving it, and we an interdict it at a place in time of our choosing.  It's magnificent for that.  Even that has limitations, because it doesn't deal with intent as we are painfully aware.  But organizing for irregular warfare, it is woefully inadequate and we need some profound change. We need a new paradigm for the reserve component.  The one that we have, the Cold War system is just not going to carry us through the 21st century.  It starts even with what are the obligations, the commitments of the people that we want to be a part of this force.  We have to relook at it.  The old ones are not going to work. How we do mobilizations and demobilizations.  Essentially, I executed this system before I left active duty in the post-9/11 era and it is inadequate.  It is a Cold War system that we're using with mobilization centers.  We bring these youngsters in there, we jerk them away from their employers, and it was astonishing for Afghanistan where the enemy had achieved strategic surprise, we averaged about 30 days from alert to mobilization.  Therefore, employers would be notified, families could get ready for the absence and the psychological impact of what's going to take place as well as the emotional one, and the youngsters themselves could start to organize not just their personal lives but also the things they needed to do in their professional lives. We achieved on average 30 days.  Despite the 7-month build-up for Iraq, we averaged about 7 to 10 days.  It was just an abysmal failure because of the scale and the magnitude of what we were doing, the process was constipated and it needs to fundamentally change.  We jerked these youngsters away on a Friday, deployed them on a Sunday, I saw many of them, and then held them in mobilization centers for 60 to 90 days, sapping all their energy, draining it as we put them in one line after another and treating them like so much cattle.  With well intention, don't misunderstand.  Nobody was not well intentioned in this. What our reserve components have done for us is nothing more than heroic in my mind.  In one, we pushed them through that God-forsaken Cold War system, deployed them, and then employed them in Iraq and they have done magnificently there and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit despite the system that ill serves them and doesn't even come close to their level of motivation and dedication. We obviously have to organize in different kinds of units than we currently have, but a new paradigm for the reserve component is necessary, and it can be done now.  The American people will support it, I think the administration will support it, and I think the stars are aligned for that. The other thing is that we have to continue the transformation against the traditional challenges that we're all very much aware of in North Korea, Iran, China, a possible reemergence in Russia and other contingencies that will always flare up in the world as they have for the last 10 or 15 years. We must be credible if we're going to deter these threats.  Credible means that you have to have the capacity to compel an adversary's behavior.  They have to believe it.  We have to deliver the force responsibly and we have to employ it with speed, only do so in a joint context, and we have to be able to sustain it over time. The other services have similar challenges.  The Navy's is the easiest one, I think, to get a grip on.  The United States Navy obviously post-World War II has grown as the preeminent blue water Navy in the world.  They have to maintain that capability as a blue water Navy to be able to deter their adversaries from challenging the lines of communication, the market development that's out there, and the propagation of democracy that's taken place. The United States Navy is around the world helping to achieve national objectives and it has to have a credible deterrence against other blue water navies.  At the same time, they realize the changing nature of conflict itself, that most of their work is going to be done where?  In support of land operations, in support ground forces, strategically in support of land operations, with the additional development of precision-guided munitions, both aerial delivery, cruise missile delivery, and the development of a countermine strategy; because as they move closer and closer to the shore, our adversaries realize that's an expedient solution, and also dealing with how they employ submarines in support of this and how they employ their Special Operations forces. So the Navy realizes that where most of their time and energy will be spent, and they have to have a strategy to do that in dealing with irregular warfare or in support of land operations, they also have to have a blue water Navy.  That's where their intellectual tension is.  The same tension exists inside the Army because we have to rapidly change to cope with irregular warfare while not giving up a credible deterrence to deal with traditional threats. Usually when we do this sort of thing we overcompensate.  That's the reality of it.  We did it coming out of the Vietnam War as Eliot Cohen just eloquently recognized.  We removed irregular warfare from the lexicon of the Army and overcompensated and embraced the World War III syndrome and helped to prevent it from happening, certainly. And that deserves an awful lot of credit.  But we have to be careful in our momentum to rapidly change to fight irregular warfare that we don't lose our deterrence capability.  We have to contribute to the defense of the homeland, missile defense, force protection and consequence management. My last point is we have to sustain the volunteer force.  Secretary Rumsfeld, after we toppled the regime we had a Saturday meeting with the chiefs and I was representing the Army at that.  It was late April-May.  We were resetting the force and the Air Force and the Navy were talking about their challenges in recovery and resetting the force for another conflict.  The Marines were withdrawing from Iraq and the United States Army was still deploying to Iraq.  I only put up one challenge.  I said, can we sustain the quality of the volunteer force?  What do you mean by that, Keane?  And we had a long discussion about it. The preeminence of the United States Army in the world today I think is directly related to 1975 when we began this experiment with the volunteer force.  The quality of our people who want to be a part of this institution, who are motivated and attracted by its values, and become passionate about it because of the quality of the people they associate with in this common purpose of defending the national values of this great country of ours actually makes them much better people than they were before they joined. To have that level of dedication and motivation in the force has been inspiring to all of us.  It's been the most inspirational thing that I've been associated with in my adult life and it has changed me quite a bit as a result of seeing it. None of us who have lived with the draft military and the volunteer force want to give it up.  But we could be forced to because the sheer reality of sustaining the volunteer force may not be possible.  That's the truth of it. I believe it is, but some things have to be done if we're going to do it.  First of all, it's too much to ask the institution to do it by itself.  If we truly enunciate a grand strategy in dealing with this war with radical Islam in terms of the seriousness and the comprehensiveness of it and what it really bodes for the American people, then we can come forward and ask the American people to sacrifice. to sacrifice in terms of independence, of energy, development, to sacrifice in terms of organizing to defeat this threat both intellectually in a nonmilitary sense and maybe not in uniform, but also in a military sense. And an appeal to the adults and to the youth of America that this is in the national interest as great as anything that we did in World War II because that's what it is.  Make no mistake about it.  The threat is that serious.  In my judgment, it's actually more serious. So it has to be in the context of that.  The Army just can't spend another $10 million on advertising without a national strategy that deals with the war and recruiting volunteers to participate in it as a part of that strategy.  And the Army obviously has to help itself, which I think it is doing rather remarkably in trying to balance the burden of these conflicts and the fact that the Army has a tendency to go some place, to fight or going to enforce a peace, and it doesn't go away.  That's the reality.  Most of the other services go away.  The Army has a tendency not to go away. It's true in Korea, true in Europe to this day, obviously, in Sinai since 1982.  I don't know if any of you know it, but we're still in Honduras.  That was started by this problem in Nicaragua, but we're still there.  Now, we have other reasons for being there, but we're still there. We're painfully aware of this because these things just don't seem to go away.  We're still in Bosnia, which was a 1-year experiment if you can recall, and we're still in Kosovo. I had that discussion with Secretary Rumsfeld about maintaining the quality of the volunteer force, not understanding we were going to fight an insurgency in Iraq.  All I thought we would do is a very robust stability operation centered around the political and physical reconstruction of a nation, a much larger commitment than we had experienced in Bosnia and Kosovo.  I thought that would be enough to challenge the volunteer force, certainly not the addition of 1,500 killed in action and thousands more wounded and maimed.  That also puts additional burdens on that force. So those are my thoughts about this.  I think General Schoomaker has put the Army on the right course to do this.  Some of that can certainly be debated, as it should.  And this much I know, his leadership which I certainly applaud in having him step forward and the people that are helping him, the intellectual fountainhead that he has around him, are people that are not wedded to the thoughts that they're already enunciated.  They're willing to make change, and that's why things like this are important because these are thoughtful people who can accommodate different ideas and make substantive change based on those thoughtful ideas.  Thank you. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, General Keane.  Bob, I'm now a man in search of clarity.  Eliot has laid out an historical framework for understanding the challenges the Army faces today.  Jack Keane has eloquently laid out the wide array of particular challenges that are before us to the point where my head is nearly bursting.  So I'm going to call on you, please, to try do a little clarifying for us.  I know I can count on you to do that, so without further ado. COL KILLEBREW:  I just want to pick up on something General Keane said to start my remarks with, and that is that the institution can't do it alone.  There is a sense in this town and in the press and in the public at large that the Army has a real recruiting problem and that it's the Army's problem.  In fact, this nation is at war and the Army's success is the nation's success. Bob Scales and I had breakfast together this morning which is always a dangerous thing, and we remembered a comment by Marshal Wellington who said that a great nation can't fight a small war.  This country is now in a war, not an insurgency, not a limited contingency, not any of the other terms that we intellectuals or those of us who try anyway refer to conflict.  The United States is fighting a war right now with measurable consequences for either winning or losing. It is my contention that we no longer know how to fight and win wars.  We have become very good at campaign planning.  We are an excellent battle force.  But in terms of linking the battles to strategic victory, tying it up in a bow with an outcome that totally satisfies our commitment and then moving on, I don't think that we as the defense establishment anymore understand how to do that. There are probably four reasons for it.  One is there is nobody left in the defense establishment who remembers the last war we truly won in 1945.  Second, since the Cold War put  us in a posture of containment against the Soviet Union, we deliberately limited our conflicts and our resources in the wars that went from 1945 so as not to antagonize our chief rival, or our two chief rivals. Third, the Defense Department, since the day it was founded and possibly before has had an infatuation with technology that would limit the damage of war and limit the human cost.  It's a totally American phenomenon and absolutely admirable.  I remember reading a 1942 Reader's Digest that I found in my mother's attic, by the way, not the day it came out, by Seversky (ph) that talked about why the United States should build bombers and not infantry divisions. So the technology problem is an old one, but since 1945 the Revolt of the Admirals, the B-36 conflict and all that, the Army has been batting cleanup on concepts for fighting war because land power, land warfare is inherently costly and it leads you inexorably to total commitment, which was not something we were prepared to do in the post-Cold War period. My last argument is that there was an incomplete military reform in the 1980s.  Most of us are familiar with what came out of Leavenworth in the early '80s in terms of revitalized appreciation for the art of war, and what came out of that was campaign planning, and a whole lexicon of military terms that we military people could now use to describe our profession and the way we did it:  campaign planning, centers of gravity, decisive points, exit strategies, all those things addressed theater-level campaign planning and stopped. If you read the Army's doctrine since that time, and I'll look to General Keane for confirmation, we generally talk about excellence in campaign planning, but the terms migrated up to the academic community and out to DOD and became the words even the president used to describe the way the United States makes war. I would argue that since 1945 we have steadily decreased our appreciation for the broader impacts of winning wars and focused more and more on limited wars, wars of single campaigns, and now we find ourselves in a war in Iraq in which multiple campaigns are required, a decisive outcome is certainly necessary, incalculable consequences, and we're learning to deal with that problem I might add on the sacrifices of some very excellent young soldiers and commanders over in Iraq at this moment who are repairing some of the blunders we made in the initial attack. This focus on small warfare has put the Army at a disadvantage since 1945.  I mentioned previously that one of the reasons is land combat is kind of an unlimited liability that most defense thinkers don't like to be pushed into.  So there was a feeling that we could solve the unlimited liability of land combat with more technology, and with more technology, less cost.  I'm sure we all remember Les Aspin.  He wasn't the first, there were many, many other Secretaries of Defense before that, who self-consciously tried to limit our liability in warfare and the Army was the bill payer for it. One of the small things that's happened in the push to jointness for which I am a fervent believer was that the argument to be made for land power within the Army has come to be seen as a sort of betrayal of jointness.  Pushing our own agenda when it pushes in on one of the other services would have been okay in the '50s and '60s, but in the current climate of jointness and kumbaya is seen, certainly by officers I know, in the Army as a sort of betrayal of some of our fundamental principles.  The voice for land power has become I believe muted. Where does this take us?  I'll give you Killebrew's quick framework of how I think conflicts in the future are going to be formed, and then we'll talk about the Army's role in that. First of all, as General Keane has said, as Eliot Cohen has said, as many of you have said, we're in a new era of social transformation that's spawning irregular warfare.  Religious war is what we're facing today.  I would argue to you if it weren't religious war it would be some other kind of war.  The real revolution in military affairs of the 21st century is the effect on the general population, and on the have-nots in particular, of communications technology. Many people have written about that, The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a perfect example.  The revolution that's happening out there is the have-nots now have a voice and a grievance.  And as long as I would argue the 21st century spins on, we're going to deal with dissatisfied minorities in society, many of whom will turn to irregular warfare because it's their only armed option to go up against us and the developed powers.  Irregular warfare is in the Army's future from now through the foreseeable future. Second, great power competition has not gone away.  As General Keane says, the Army can't forget that there are other tank armies out there and other high-tech armies.  The Chinese, I don't have to tell this audience, are modernizing as rapidly as their budget can stand it.  And eventually some time in the future on a battlefield we can't now envision, the Army is going to fight another conventional war, conventional in the terms of the time. Last, nuclear weapons haven't gone away, fellows.  Nuclear weapons are going to be on the battlefields of the future either in irregular warfare or in conventional warfare.  In spite of the best attempts of the IAEA to restrict the distribution or the theft of nuclear materials, at some point in the future in our lifetimes the United States Army is going to face nuclear weapons on the battlefield and we better by that time have figured out what we as a country and we as an Army are going to do about it. This gives us two patterns of conflict.  One is what I call and Ralph Peterson has called the you break it, you buy it kind of war.  When we enter someone else's country to replace their government, we're going to buy that country for as long as it takes to fight and win a decisive war, install a government that's friendly to us, raise an army that's friendly to us, do whatever social engineering is possible or is required and leave.  The textbook case of that is South Korea, and how long have we been in South Korea? The other kind of war the Army may fight will be what I would call a geographic raid.  That will be a quick in-and-out operation of the kind beloved by war gamers in which the civil population just stands back and lets us do it.  A typical example could be to take out somebody's nuclear weapons sites which could be distributed over a very large area. I would argue to you, though, that the prevalent model is probably going to be you break it, you buy it model, and that comes back to the thesis of we'd better understand what it takes to win that kind of a war. So what can the Army do about this?  General Keane has some excellent suggestions.  I'm not a very good force structure guy.  I would just argue a couple of things.  First of all, we need to understand budget reality.  The budget reality today is squeezing the Army and squeezing the R&D effort to the point that military Army transformation as planned last year is probably not going to happen.  It's probably not going to happen. The future combat systems will give the Army some useful tools.  God knows we need better intelligence on the battlefield.  We need better precision weapons.  We'll get those things.  But military transformation, not just in the Army, but everywhere else is going to be stopped dead in its tracks by the budget deficit and by the war in Iraq and if that fundamental fact hasn't percolated down, it needs to percolate now. The second thing we need to do, I believe, in the Army is turn to those things we do well and enlarge on the intellectual capital that we have to confront the 21st century wars that we're going to confront.  Eliot has already made the case for intellectual transformation in the Army.  I would argue that this is the time for the Army to intellectually step up to the challenge of 21st century war, of winning 21st century wars, and restore balance to defense thinking in this country that has been heretofore been tilted toward technology and unreasonable expectations for technology to quickly end wars. Iraq is the wake-up call for us, but most of those technological dreamlands are not going to work against a determined and skilled enemy as we are encountering there. So with that, I think I think I'll cut my talk off.  I have wonderful suggestions here for the total transformation of the Army, the rebuilding of the school system and all those other things that colonels like to do when they're retired and sitting on their front porch.  But let me stop and pass over to Ralph Peters who probably will have more detailed advice than I can give. LTC PETERS:  I want to start off by addressing something that really pissed me off.  I'm usually more amused by Washington than angered. I've been in a running gunfight with the Air Force about the F/A-22.  About a month ago the Air Force sent a couple generals out to my home in Warrenton and spent 2-1/2 with me to persuade that if we buy nothing else, if the Army and Marines rot away, as long as we have the F/A-22, America will be safe throughout the 21st century.  I was not persuaded.  It was listening to Buddhist monks, air dominance, air dominance, air dominance, this sort of chanting. But at the same time, the Air Force is putting something around town, the Air Force, those Jesuits without God.  They're putting something really despicable around town.  I'm in favor of jointness, but I'm also in favor of self-defense and intelligence and the Air Force story around town was the Navy and the Air Force can dominate their battle space.  Why can't the Army and Marines do that, implying that our soldiers and Marines who were fighting and dying in Iraq are somehow incompetent.  Well, my answer is, when you don't have an enemy, it's easy to dominate your battle space. But more importantly, we certainly need a strong Air Force--got the wrong Air Force, we need a strong one, and we need a strong Navy.  But there is a fundamental difference in how forces work what they do.  Naval and air warfare, while courage is required, is essentially an engineering problem.  It's a matter of geometries and technologies.  In our technical services, the Navy and the Air Force, people support systems.  It gives you a very different mentality.  In the Army and Marines, systems support people. One of the many paradoxes, and I agree with virtually everything that's been said this morning and I'll repeat some of it with different words, but a paradox of this high-tech 21st century is our security problems are fundamentally, intractably, implacably human problems, and you can't do that kind of work from 25,000 feet. The Air Force and the Navy will be involved at different times and the Navy may have a much more important future than it currently realizes, but the Army and Marines are going to be gainfully employed for a very long time to come.  Unless we start thinking, rethinking fundamentally about warfare and avoiding the traditional wisdom of the kind that Bob Killebrew alluded to, we're going to remain in trouble. The fundamental problem I see, and again Bob raised this, we are constantly trying to narrow our definition of war, of what is acceptable.  We went into Operation Iraqi Freedom wanting to take down a regime without breaking windows.  Does anybody remember shock and awe?  In other words, we were going to persuade Saddam to surrender.  Well, it's a great think tank theory except it didn't take the enemy into account.  Partly that's because our intelligence system is indeed, utterly, profoundly broken and wasteful. But what incentive would Saddam and his cronies have had to surrender?  It was a zero sum gain for them, thus, they were not very impressed by a sound and light show over Baghdad and the war had to be won the old-fashioned way. But even so, we won a TKO.  But the enemy was never persuaded of their defeat.  The Sunni Triangle never felt the war.  We were so concerned about hurting Iraqi feelings during the war that we just didn't inflict a feeling of catastrophic defeat upon the true enemies. There is no formula for what it takes to inflict a catastrophic defeat.  Sometimes it takes Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I certainly don't think it would have taken that in Iraq because it was a hated regime.  But we're got to get back to looking fundamentally about what warfare is about, and the Army and Marines especially have to take an educational mission of persuading people that bad things happen in wartime.  People get hurt.  Casualties are inevitable.  They can't be reduced beyond a certain point.  So I see us living in a fantasyland because the Army and Marines have not articulated the case about what warfare is about. At the same time, our enemies and potential enemies are ever expanding their definition of what warfare is about.  Certainly for the Islamist terrorists we face today there are virtually no limits on what's acceptable.  We're worried about giving somebody a bloody nose as we push a prisoner into a Humvee, and they're decapitating people on video, which, by the way, did ultimately backfire. But nonetheless, you look at Chinese officers writing in open-source publications talking about a new form of total war, and we want to measure war out by teaspoons, to fight with good manners. Again, there is no formula, but we had best return to some sense of realism about what warfare is; and warfare is about convincing your enemy that he is defeated whether that takes destroying a regime utterly or planting your flag in the dead enemy's eye socket.  It'll take different requirements at different times, but what does it take to convince the enemy they're defeated? What we achieved in Iraq, the Sunni Arabs had a sense of betrayal somehow, that they weren't really beat.  Sunni Arab towns and villages didn't see a U.S. or coalition soldier for months when they saw a convoy driving by quickly. Occupation is another theme.  The administration didn't go to occupation 101.  Occupations aren't hard if you do them right.  They're really not.  They're checklist affairs, one of the few checklist affairs the military gets to do. This is building onto something Bob said and I'll just expand it a bit, what kind of wars will we fight?  Certainly the range of Army missions is going to continue to expand.  It will not shrink.  We're not going to be able to abjure any of them.  We'll still be doing peacekeeping, we'll be doing disaster relief, we'll do some internal defense in relief matters, a wide panoply of missions. When it comes to combat, I cast future wars into three subcategories and it goes from A up to full strategic engagement.  But they're all expeditionary, except of course homeland defense missions.  I would start talking about strategic raids.  That's the low level.  You go in, you do the job and you get out. The second level that's missing from our doctrine is punitive expeditions.  God knows we will need a politically more correct name for it, but as the British belatedly came to realize, you can't occupy and reform every country.  The whole notion of if you break it, you fix it, if anywhere the United States goes you have to stay is absolutely ludicrous.  We've talked ourselves into that.  Sometimes punishment is the right thing. Were we to have to go back to Somalia to deal with al Qaeda training camps which do exist there, do we really want to try again to build a Somali society?  And so much of this is just fundamentally rethinking about the realities of war.  It's the emperor's new clothes stuff.  So, punitive expeditions.  Find me a nice, pretty name for them so you can sell them to Congress, but we've got to do them. The other thing of course is full-scale invasion some of which will be followed by occupation.  Certainly, the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq were worthwhile.  Other efforts will not be worthwhile.  But we've got to break ourselves of this habit of thinking that if we break something, we've got to not only repair the windows, but repaint the house and give everybody a pension.  You just can't always do it.  Of course our Army and Marines are vastly too small. So a couple of things to think about.  In the 1970s and '80s, the Soviets formulated an interesting operational concept, the Operational Maneuver Group.  The idea of the Operational Maneuver Group which could be a reinforced brigade up to a reinforced division would punch through enemy lines into Germany in Europe and they'd just push deep, an autonomous unit and disrupt the defense.  It wasn't doable with the technology of 1985.  It would not be doable with the technology of 2005, I'm just having these autonomous units rolling around, because of the logistics challenges. I really think that our military challenge is logistics.  It's not the weapons.  Our soldiers are good.  We could fight for another 30 years with the weapons we've got.  Certainly we'd have to replace some of them, but I mean the type of weapons we have. But what we've got to do is be able to be much more agile and much more mobile.  For me as an aside, the number-one strategic priority for the United States over all, not just the military, should be alternative fuels and miniaturization.  But you've got to get that logistics scaled down to the point where when you go to a country, whether it's an A team or a reinforced corps, you're not tied to fixed bases. This is out-years stuff.  It'll take a long time to get there, but we're Americans.  We can get there if we want to.  As soon as you're tied to fixed bases, you create an atmosphere of permanence, and also you create targets.  So I think we really need to return to the image of the frontier cavalry where you're always on the move, where that footprint large or small is a roaming footprint. Again, this is an ambitious out-years goal, but we've got to be able to move with much more agility and not create an atmosphere of permanence where we don't want to be permanent.  Also, if you want to do more with less, and sad to say we're continually being forced to do more with less even though at some point less is just less, you're going to have to be more mobile and agile. So just to jump down to a last few points so we can get some questions in, another point, the Army and Marines and the Army especially pay lip service to the importance of the media.  We still don't get it.  The United States Army will never again be engaged in a conflict where there is only one opponent.  There will always be a third combatant at which we cannot shoot back, the media. The media won the first battle of Fallujah.  Al Jazeera won the first battle of Fallujah.  We used to talk in the 1980s about operating inside the enemy's decision cycle.  We can do that.  The problem now is operating inside the media cycle before media propaganda can defeat U.S. forces by reaching right up to the decision makers. Intelligence.  General Keane raised this.  It is so profoundly broken, and it goes back to Don Vandergriff's specialty, the personnel system.  In intelligence you're an expert by virtue of duty position.  The United States Army still has an industrial era personnel system suited to 1944, not to 2005. The thing that used to make me roll my eyes in the Army, anybody saying to anybody, You know, lieutenant or captain or major, you can be replaced.   Try that in civilian industry.  Some of the experts we have cannot be replaced, and we need to take better care of human beings, identify the special breed of cat that it takes to be an intelligence interrogator or analyst and preserve them. And military intelligence in the Army, Army intelligence, needs to be shaken from top to bottom.  General Keane said turn it upside down.  I'm not sure even that is enough.  It's so expensive and so nearly useless that we've just got to fix that very, very soon. Avoid permanence, media combatants, alternative fuels, and the last thing is we've got to also avoid the Army and national obsession of the crisis de jure or the crisis of the year or, for that matter, the crisis of the decade.  We've got to think beyond the Middle East.  We're going to be messing around in there for a long time to come.  Not fully predictable where, but my God, there are so many potential opportunities and crises and threats elsewhere in the world that we'd better be thinking.  And I'm not just talking about the defense contractors' love affair with China.  If we want a war with China, we can have one.  If we and the Chinese are both very stupid, we can have a war with China. But for God's sakes, look at the Indian Ocean.  Look at Africa.  Look at areas of opportunity such as Latin America.  And I see the Marines to their credit are doing this.  I do not see the Army taking a global perspective.  It's got to take a global perspective, be a true strategic Army.  And you can't just pay lip service by having an occasional tank briefing on U.N. peacekeepers in Congo.  We are a global Army and must have a global perspective and a global view, and I, frankly, do not see it. The last thing I'll say, for all the criticism, we also have the greatest Army we've ever had.  With our veterans coming back from Iraq in the Army and Marines, we will be the envy of the world.  Nobody has our experience, except of course some of our Anglo allies who served with us, Australians, Brits and others.  But it's really incredible, and my great personal fear is that Donald Rumsfeld's dream of reducing the Army hasn't gone away, that in order to provide more dollars for legacy systems, that he will still try to reduce the Army.  The biggest worry that I have is what looks to an outsider like an utter lack of coordination between BRAC, pulling troops back from Europe or redeploying them, strategy, force structure, acquisition programs, I don't see them meshing. Are we going to thank our soldiers?  The only reason Iraq worked was because of the quality of our soldiers and Marines.  The planning was absurdly inadequate, criminally inadequate.  Carefully chosen word, criminally inadequate, verging on treason.  Our soldiers and Marines pulled it off.  Will we reward them by bringing them home and bringing divisions home from Europe, and I support getting out of Germany, by putting them in Fort Polk-minus, in crummy living conditions, utterly inadequate, without preparing for them? Quality of life is a strategic issue.  It is a volunteer force.  They have families, and we owe it to them to take decent care of them.  And I see no interest, none, none in the Rumsfeld Pentagon in taking adequate care of our veterans.  A few, wink-wink, nod-nod PR visits to Walter Reed are not an adequate substitute for wise policies to protect soldiers and Marines in the first place.  And I m in a mild mood this morning.  MR. DONNELLY:  Ralph, you have the perfect qualities for the clean-up hitter, and that is to swing hard. I'm not going to exercise my moderator's prerogative particularly at this point except to try to run the Q and A session as best we can.  We have a huge crowd, so let's begin here.  We have two microphones, so I'll try to get around them as best I can, but please wait for the microphone and observe the three AEI rules. MR. WHITTLE:  I'm Rick Whittle with the Dallas Morning News.  Thank you for a really fascinating opening session here. General Keane, I wanted to ask you to elaborate on the statement you made that we need a new paradigm for the Guard and Reserve.  You left me wondering what could it be?  How do you see the Guard and Reserve being reorganized or restructured? GEN KEANE:  What I said is that we have to relook the obligations that they have to begin with.  Most of those obligations really centered around full mobilization and then something less than that in a selective presidential call-up. That whole issue has to be revisited because it was clearly built around a World War III concept and I think we have to bring into reality more realistic expectations of what's going to take place with the deployment and the duration of these deployments and organize around that. The other thing in terms of the organizations themselves, they need to be looked at because they're not right for the war that we're engaged in, the big war against radical Islam, and quite frankly, they're not even right for the more traditional challenges that we're facing. We've gone to far too much dependence on the reserve component for our early deployment.  Secretary Rumsfeld rightly, I think, was surprised that we couldn't do a small-scale contingency in Afghanistan without some dependency on the reserve component. We should be able to initiate strategic surprise, to be able to do some level of preemption and prevention with military forces, and not involve a presidential call-up and rely totally and completely on active component forces to do that. The current model that we have strains that, and we have to make adjustments to that model. As I said before, this mobilization and demobilization issue having lived it before I left active duty service is fundamentally flawed.  An Air Force colonel at Camp Swampy some place on an Air Force base can organize and mobilize his forces.  We bring them to a mobilization center.  We travel through various states to do it.  We organize in very large groups.  When they get there, they're there by the tens of thousands and it's predictable what happens to them.  We sap them of their energy by the bureaucratic processes that we're putting them through because that was the model that we used for World War II.  That was the Cold War model, and it just doesn't reflect the reality of what we're doing here today. We have to decentralize this process considerably more than what it is and stop centralizing it to the degree that is because it just constipates it rather significantly. Those are the headliners that I would get at.  As I said before, I think their performance is nothing less than heroic because the bureaucracy that's serving them is not nearly as good as the people who are in it who are serving us. MR. DONNELLY:  I'd like to follow-on really briefly to that and try to push it a little father, and if anybody else wants to make a comment, they're welcome to. I just don't see that you can reform the Reserve system and still keep it as a genuine Reserve citizen soldier model.  The kinds of wars that everybody on the panel has described are long, large, irregular wars, whether it's multiple theaters, multiple places.  I mean, traditionally, historically that's a job for regulars, and we've turned our reserve components from a strategic reserve into an operational reserve.  Not surprisingly, in addition to the internal problems of the mobilization system, the overall Army is inadequate to respond to what we're asking it to do today. I just don't see that you can fix the Reserve system without addressing the over all question of the size, shape, mission, et cetera. MR. COHEN:  I'd say from a purely historical point of view, you're absolutely right.  There has always been not just in the United States but in most developed countries a sense that you don't take your kind of militia, guard kinds of formations and use them for protracted, limited conflicts. What's amazing to me is how well it's worked despite everything in Afghanistan and Iraq and I attribute a lot of that to the national mood after September 11th.  That may continue and that may decline. I also think there are a lot of people who are worried about the strains that the Army is under right now.  If I had to guess, the long-term strains and cracks in the Guard are probably going to be even worse than on the regular side of the house and may well be harder to repair. The final thing I would say is we are peculiar in having the National Guard the heritage of which is very much in the militia mold as opposed to the Army Reserve which is a much more traditional kind of Reserve formation.  One of the solutions may be to switch certain kinds of units to the Reserves of the kind that actually you end up using a lot, which might be easier to handle. But it does need to be addressed, and I think it's right to sort of fault the Defense Department more broadly for just thinking of these people as kind of part-time regulars with wrestling with the question, what exactly do you expect a citizen soldier to do? COL KILLEBREW:  Just on a very philosophical point, I'd point out that if you're going to involve the country in a protracted war, the Reserves and the Guard are the closest thing to citizen soldiers we have, and the political support the president gets for a war may come in part from the fact that citizen units from small towns around the United States are going off to fight it and not regulars that nobody ever sees. That can play two ways, of course.  That can restrict the executive a little bit, but it can also make sure that the executive is right that the country is behind him in the war. MR. DONNELLY:  I think we have a rebuttal over here.  MR. COHEN:  I'm not sure I agree with that.  I also think we have to face the unpleasant fact which is there are National Guard units and there are National Guard units, and that their performance has been profoundly uneven in Iraq, and really uneven.  That's not been very well reported and I think we need to be aware of that. The second point is the Army had a tradition of planning for expansion.  That was so much of its history in the first part of the 20th century and even in the late 19th century, and Upton was part of it, thinking through if we go into an emergency, how do we expand the Army.  The way that we've dealt with that now is we call up the National Regard and Reserves.  Maybe there is a lot of thinking about how you create an Army that you can expand and then contract again, but it seems to me that vein of organization thinking in the Army has pretty much dried up. MR. DONNELLY:  As Bob can tell you, it was one of the six imperatives once upon a time.  We'll come back to this with the second panel.  I don't want to preempt that.  I think Dan Goure is next.  MR. GOURE:  Dan Goure with the Lexington Institute.  Only my profound respect for Tom Donnelly keeps me from making a comment rather than a question, so I'll keep it real narrow here. It seems to me Bob Killebrew had the seminal point of all the great points here which is the statement that the use of the Army leads to a total commitment.  I may be paraphrasing a bit here.  That seems to me to be the political crux of the problem. My question is, I think that Ralph Peters disagrees or says it ought to be different, that s where you re punitive, but I'm wondering what the rest of the panel thinks about that statement, whether they agree or disagree.  And if they agree, doesn't this rise to the level of a national executive political issue and not one that the Army can solve no matter how you reorganize it? GEN KEANE:  My own reaction to that is that it has the potential for that.  We were heavily dependent on the Army when we did Just Cause which was really a forerunner I think for the kinds of wars how we would organize jointly to do that and it was quickly overshadowed by the war that we always wanted to fight 9 months later when Saddam came across the border.  It robbed us I think of our intellectual momentum in the right direction. The commitment of the Army in and of itself to a conflict I don't think involves total commitment in and of itself.  The implication is certainly there for that.  Once you put boots on the ground whatever their numbers are, it's very challenging to disengage them unless you're able to achieve victory and victory in a timely fashion. So I agree in part with that because certainly the commitment of soldiers and Marines to direct combat is very different than the employment of weapons systems and the employment of air power. LTC PETERS:  Bob s always speaking of one of our two military traditions in the Army, the big war tradition, but we also have a much longer and I think more immediately relevant frontier tradition and not just within our country. In the 19th century we fought on the western frontier.  Today the U.S. Army is engaged on the human frontier, on the frontier where the arguments are about God and man and what is humanity's proper role, what are proper forms of government.  We've always been at the cutting edge of the human frontier and we're now facing those who want to roll the frontier back.  Now, that's something of an oversimplification, but certainly true in the Middle East. I think we need to war against the idea that commitment of the Army always means you're in the long haul and you're going to fix the place after you leave.  That's why I go back to that strategic maneuver group or whatever you want to call it, just the idea that we've got to be able to be agile on the ground, move, not put down the tent pegs unless we really, really want to stay in that country, and sometimes we will. The Army and Marines have a very similar history.  The Marines didn't do the big wars, they did the little stuff, but the Army did little stuff, too.  I see the Marines embracing their traditional mission and the Army still clinging to that big war tradition which we have to be able to do, but you got to be able to do the frontier stuff, too, as the Brits had to. COL KILLEBREW:  Can I do a clarification here?  What Killebrew meant to say was that we need to win our wars.  You can win those wars with a strike if you do it right, maybe if you do it right.  You can win those wars with a multidivision commitment.  I'm not arguing for big wars or little wars.  I'm arguing for winning wars, for finishing up with a satisfactory conclusion that means, as in the case of Desert Storm, we don't have to go back in 10 years and do it again. The appreciation of how to do that, whether it's a small war or a big war, has generally been lost on us now, and I think partly because military people are very good at campaign planning and campaign objectives, but the delineation of objectives to win wars is a political problem and it involves the political leadership as much as the military. MR. DONNELLY:  Eliot? MR. COHEN:  I'll pick a fight with Bob over something else. MR. DONNELLY:  And I'll refrain from giving my history of Indian wars, extending over 250 years.  I'm sorry, we can only do one more because of time constraints.  I'm reminded that we have two more panels and the Chief speaking. Actually, just because I see a foreign uniform.  LT.COL BRAITHWAIT:  Lieutenant Colonel Bob Braithwait (ph).  I'm privileged to be a British liaison officer with the U.S. Army Future Center. I'd like to ask the panel, assuming that we can now see our way to an end game in Iraq, notwithstanding mistakes that have been made at the beginning, what they think the next operation that the U.S. Army is likely to be involved in in the war against, as you've described it, radical Islam? MR. DONNELLY:  We'll make this the summation and it's a good one to end with. GEN KEANE:  In terms of Iraq, I just got back from there last week.  I did an assessment for the military command there and it's the second time I've done it for them.  It took a couple of weeks to do it. Clearly, in Iraq there is some profound change driven by the success of the struggling political process, but equally important with that is the psychological momentum that that was created in the country itself which cannot be understated.  Political and psychological success dealing with an insurgency are always more important than military success with that insurgency because it's so much about legitimate government, people's support for it and providing some confidence in that government.  After all, that's why the insurgency exists.  So that is not to be understated, and we have not had that in the past. All that said, there is a very viable, resilient civilian insurgency there that is well organized.  It's extremely well financed, being directly supported by Syria in my judgment.  And that still continues.  What we should be encouraged by is the remarkable development of the Iraqi security forces--not to be forces like America; we're not fighting American-like forces there. But what has been achieved in such a short period of time and General Dave Petreus deserves a lion's share of the credit here because it's been remarkable what they have done; it's almost doing the impossible--is the formation of so many battalions and brigades, and now divisions.  Clearly, establishing competent brigade headquarters and competent division headquarters capable of organizing an effort in a unifying fashion against this insurgency is a much longer challenge than developing soldiers with individual techniques and companies and effective platoons and squads.  And that will take time, but I think we can see in the future a gradual transition of responsibility from the coalition forces to the Iraqi security forces. So I was about as down on this as I could be in the November-December time frame knowing what I knew about the intel situation and where the insurgency was and how they were committed to winning.  They felt the American people would probably run out of patience and support in about five years, which I think is an accurate statement, and they believe they can keep up some level of violence that creates a nonpermissive environment at least for 10 years.  Remarkably close to the challenges that we faced in a protracted war in Vietnam. But nonetheless, with a legitimate government in place and, hopefully now, a sophisticated engagement strategy with the Sunnis, that will create some positive change.  I mean, there have been some major defeats that the insurgency has suffered. They have not been able to protect Fallujah.  And they drew a stake in the ground and wanted to protect that sanctuary, to the expense of serious casualties for us to take it down. They have not been able to stop the political process, which they clearly intended to do and thought they could. They have not been able to stop the development and growth of the Iraqi security forces, despite the wholesale killing of many recruits and members of that force.  Every time that there's 100 to 150 killed in the course of two or three weeks, there are manifold more who are trying to become members of that force.  It's pretty inspiring to see it. And the fourth thing they tried to do is to stop the production and distribution of oil.  They came close, but it's unsuccessful. They failed at those four things.  But they have succeeded in stopping the Sunnis from participating in the political process and in any form, shape, or way in the governmental bureaucracies.  That has to change, and that's why we need a Sunni engagement strategy that really makes some sense. I think these insurgents have had to rethink post-January, either to participate in the political process to be obstructionist, to participate in the political process to get the best deal they can, or continue to sow the seeds of destruction and create the mayhem that they want because they know that there's no future for them whatsoever in a coalition government in Iraq.  And I don't think we know that answer yet.  I think we'll have to watch it a little closer to see which course of actions they choose. MR. DONNELLY:  Eliot, very quickly, please? MR. COHEN:  I guess first, you know, obviously there's going to be a background level of operations going on in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and then some other things we won't read about that much, I hope, in other parts of the Middle East.  I think it's too hard to predict where the next big thing is going to happen. There are--part of the purpose, I think, of Iraqi Freedom was to give the Middle East a giant whack on the side of the head and shake lots of things loose.  And that's happened.  I mean, and that's yielded some very positive things in places like Lebanon, which we couldn't have anticipated.  There may be all kinds of negative things that we can't anticipate and that will end up driving a commitment.  It just seems to me we're in a very volatile period. The third thing I just wanted to throw in as well, it seems to me one of the most consequential outcomes of Iraq is going to be what's going to happen with a generation of field grade officers coming back from Iraq with Iraq experience, and how they reshape the United States Army.  I think it's going to be really--if you want to sort of figure out what's going to happen to the army over the next 20 years, the thing to do will be to watch those careers.  There will be few general officers, I think, to track, like Petreus--it will be interesting to see what happens to him--Major General Peter Corelli (ph), and a few others.  But particularly what happens to that generation of field grade officers and what sort of imprint they decide to put on the army.  Because I think they are the most important generation since the, sort of, Gorman-Story generation after Vietnam. COL KILLEBREW:  Twenty years ago, when I knew everything, I could have answered that question.  I think right now I'll just have to say we don't know.  Eliot said that.  Much depends on what happens in the so-called Arab Spring that's underway right now, and we won't see the consequences of that for several more years.  So I'll pass, if you don't mind. LTC PETERS:  More than 10 years ago now, when Samuel Huntington raised the concept of the clash of civilizations, you all remember there was a great fuss.  I didn't get it.  Why the fuss?  Clashing is what civilizations do.  It's their mission statement.  There is no example in human history of civilizations getting along and cooperating over an extended period of time. Now, perhaps in our enlightened age we will get past that.  And whether or not you subscribe to the idea of clash of civilizations, it is indisputable that we are witnessing a historical anomaly before our eyes, the crash of a once mighty civilization, that of Middle Eastern Islam. Now, where that's going to go, I don't know.  I absolutely agree with Eliot, you know, the Middle East needed a whack in the head.  Iraq, I'm soberly optimistic; support it.  But we can predict that we will be involved somewhere in the Middle East, North Africa, the greater Islamic world centered on the Middle East, for some time to come.  What we cannot predict is exactly which countries or the scale.  You know, will it be Operation Iraqi Freedom, will it be DomRep.  We just don't know.  I mean, you'd better worry about Pakistan.  We don't know nearly enough about Turkey.  As much of the Middle East starts to shake off its arthritis and move forward, other parts--and again, specifically Turkey--are tumbling backward in some respects. So I think there's a great deal of concern.  We don't know where we're going to be fighting.  But we can be pretty damn sure the Army and Marines will be fighting. MR. DONNELLY:  I'd like to agree radically with everyone and add, apropos the question, just two cents' worth.  I think particularly Ralph's analysis that this is going to go on for a long time is important.  But, look, I would suggest that we have one sort of grand strategic initiative over these two exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It behooves us to actually continue to exploit that initiative.  So I would take some slight issue with--obviously we're going to have to react to exogenous events all around this broader Islamic world.  But one thing that we very much ought to do, and particularly one thing the Army ought to contemplate, is what is our active strategy to make this thing come out the way we want to decades and decades from now. I hope you will very briefly and very enthusiastically join me in appreciation for the first panel.  But before we do, there will be no formal break between the second panel.  This is going to be more like a passage of lines, I hope.  Since we haven't rehearsed it, it will go relatively well.  But again, thanks to the first panel very much. - - - Panel II: MR. SCHMITT:  Good morning, and welcome to our second panel on the Future of the U.S. Army.  The title of this panel is Force Size, Force Structure, and Force Posture.  If you're complaining about not having enough time to get coffee and donuts, it's not my fault.  It's my former colleague, Tom Donnelly's. My name is Gary Schmitt.  I'm Executive Director of the Project for the New American Century.  I'm your moderator which is probably the first time in a long time that the root word moderate has been associated with my name.  I plan to be rather ruthless here on time lines because I know we've got a lot of questions and our panel is more than capable of not only raising issues but also addressing them and so we'll move quite quickly. The first panelist is Michele Flournoy who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington.  Prior to that she was a Distinguished Research Professor at the National Defense University where she led a study on the QDR for the Joint Chiefs.  Prior to that, and actually quite strikingly, while some of us used to complain about the fact that the Clinton administration didn't spend enough on defense and that there were real shortcomings that resulted from that lack of defense spending, one of the great things was that they forced Michele to war two hats.  She was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Threat Reduction and also for Strategy. MS. FLOURNOY:  Thank you very much.  First I want to thank the organizers at AEI for holding this conference at this time.  I think we are addressing today one of the most critical issues to our national security and one that's not, frankly, being given adequate attention inside the Pentagon at the moment. I want to start the discussion of force structure with three starting propositions, key considerations we have to have in mind in the discussion.  The first is that future demand for U.S. forces and U.S. Army forces in particular is likely to remain quite high in the future.  It's tempting to believe that Afghanistan and Iraq are somehow anomalous, a one-time spike in demand rather than symptomatic of a new level of demand that's going to continue into the future. Indeed, some would argue that the primary lesson of Iraq is not to undertake such operations again.  But whether you agree with this view or not, I think it's a very dangerous basis for U.S. force planning.  It assumes away a multitude of plausible future scenarios in which a U.S. president will feel compelled to intervene to protect and advance U.S. interests; not all wars are optional. In the future as in the past, some military interventions will be necessary, even unavoidable, and although we don't know who we will fight or when we will fight or where we will fight as the last panel suggested, given the global nature of our interests and the range of challenges we face, we do know that we will fight.  The United States military will be used to protect and advance our interests in the 21st century. We are in a global war on terrorism that is likely to last for decades, and fighting terrorists abroad and protecting Americans at home will be enduring missions. Now there is also a clear connection between failed or failing states like Afghanistan and terrorists with global reach like al Qaeda.  So our strategy much place greater emphasis on preventing these kinds of areas from emerging and becoming safe havens for terrorists.  That will require an integrated and proactive use of all the instruments of our national power, and for the military it will mean greater involvement in things like assistance to build the capacity of other nations, counterinsurgency operations to shore up friendly and weak governments, and possibly stability operations to prevent states from failing or to prevent a dangerous vacuum from developing. The presence of weapons of mass destruction and materials in some of these cases are going to only heighten the likelihood of U.S. involvement.  It's hard to imagine a U.S. president not responding to the implosion or hostile or takeover of a state with nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, there a number of pretty nightmarish scenarios that we could imagine in this regard. Plus the U.S. will continue to face more traditional threats, conflicts with rogue states hostile to our interests or states who threaten our allies.  As we have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, if such a war involves regime change, it will require extensive postconflict stabilization and reconstruction operations usually of many years' duration. So the bottom line is the demand for U.S. at home and abroad is not going away anytime soon.  It's likely to remain high for the foreseeable future and it's likely to cover the full spectrum of conflict.  Gone are the days when we can treat missions like homeland security stability operations, counterterrorism, combatting WMD as lesser included cases of war fighting.  These focus unique requirements and they're going to influence the way we size and shape the force.  So that's the first point, high demand into the future. The second key proposition I believe is that we have to look at the supply side of the equation, our forces as the total force, not only the active Army, for the Army Reserves and the Army National Guard.  We cannot size or shape the active component and the reserve component separately.  They have to be treated as part of an integrated whole, and we must take into account the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the different types of forces. For example, there are skill areas and areas of expertise that it's actually easier to cultivate in the reserve component, drawing on people's civilian occupations than in the active duty.  You can think of civil affairs, information and operations specialists, medical, linguists and so forth.  The reserve component historically has had a cost advantage over the active duty component, but the most we use them operationally as a reserve, the narrower that cost advantage will become. Plus parts of the reserve component are deeply embedded in local communities around the country, the National Guard in particular, and this gives them comparative advantage in missions like homeland security. On the other hand, there are very real limits on how often you can deploy people and still retain them in service, and this constraint is even greater for the reserve component than the active component given people's expectations and their other professional commitments.  So we have to take the full range of factors into account in redesigning the force. The central issue in my mind is one that Tom mentioned in the first panel and that is whether we treat the reserve component as an operational reserve or as a strategic reserve. Whereas we've historically structured the Army Reserves to be integrated into almost everything the Army does, being a pool of combat support and combat service support units and capabilities for the active Army, the Army National Guard was historically structured to be more of a strategic reserve that would only be called on for the big one, the war abroad that would be longer in duration or more difficult than originally expected.  Although we began to use the National Guard in the 1990s more as an operational reserve covering rotations for long duration stability operations like in the Balkans, we didn't restructure them for that purpose. With the increased demands of Afghanistan and Iraq and steady state demands for homeland security here in the United States, both the Army Reserves and the National Guard have become fully a part of the Army's rotation base.  The question is, is that an appropriate use for the reserve component?  What changes need to be made to make an operational reserve model work?  Can it work?  Can it be sustained over time?  And if it can't be sustained, what does that mean for the Army as a whole? How we answer these questions will have huge impacts not only on the Army's overall force structure, but on the future of the all volunteer force, and I'm going to come back to this questions. The third key proposition is, as we all know, the current force is under enormous strain and planned forces cannot mean projected demand within reasonable tempo constraints.  There is a profound imbalance between demand and supply, and that imbalance is having highly corrosive effects on the force. No one questions that the Army is under enormous strain.  We've all heard the statistics, elements of all 10 active Army divisions coming and going from theater, people being redeployed without time to recover, retrain and so forth, unprecedented portions of the National Guard and Reserves being used in current operations at home and aboard.  This high tempo of operations is already having substantial negative effects for the Army's ability to recruit and retain people.  Let's start with recruitment. The active duty Army is forecast to miss its April recruitment target, and that's a continuation of a trend that began in February when the Army missed its monthly goal for the first time since 2000, and they missed that goal by about 27 percent.  So far, this year's Army National Guard enlistment is about 25 percent lower than expected. On the retention side there is less hard data, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that some are voting with their feet, that is, as they come home from operations, they are leaving the force rather than reenlisting to avoid being deployed again in the near term.  We will know more on this as stop-loss restrictions are lifted and people start making those decisions.  The key question is, is the situation likely to get better or worse over time, and unfortunately, I believe the answer is it's going to get worse. As part of a total force study that my colleague Christine Wormuth is leading at CSIS, we've looked at several alternative demand futures for the U.S. military in general and for the Army in particular.  For the high and medium demand futures which we think are the most plausible, the planned force simply cannot meet operational requirements and stay within minimum tempo constraints.  That is, the no more than 1 year out of 6 deployed for the reserve component and 2 years at home between deployments for the active duty side. In other words, the planned force can't meet projected demand without incurring unacceptable risk operationally, and it can't meet that projected demand without unacceptable levels of risk in terms of sustaining the force long term.  We cannot square the circle not doing anything more than what we're doing now.  That's why people are saying that we are at risk of breaking the force. So what's to be done?  Let me put four options on the table for your consideration.  I'm going to start speaking faster here.  Option one is staying the course.  Let's assume that the demand is going to go away or drop substantially and we're going to muddle through and we'll deal with the implications of the current strains.  We'll continue to use the reserve component as an operational reserve but we'll try to make its deployments more predictable and more manageable. We're going to rebalance the force somewhat where there low-hanging fruit, turning artillery bridges into MB battalions, for example.  We're going to transform modularize the force and so on.  The risk, again, that operationally that's not a recipe for being able to meet future demand, and by our analysis we're about seven brigades' worth of capability or more short. That leaves no residual force ready and able to deal with other contingencies or available for deterrence.  Also, the high op tempo/pers tempo that this would involve and the unpredictability of how the force is being used will continue to leave the force, leading to persistent recruitment and retention problems.  That's option one. Option two is a radical rebalancing of the planned force.  This is premised on the belief that runaway personnel costs within the military are creating a looming budgetary and manpower crisis.  This would involve a tabla rasa, detailed, specialty by specialty scrub of the U.S. military, particularly the reserve component, to say who actually has to wear a uniform?  Do we really need finance people in uniform in active duty or Reserves or is some function that can be given to civilians, either U.S. government civilians or contractors?  We need to get rid of as much of that nonmilitary capability as possible, export it or outsource it, and convert the remaining end strength billets and so forth to combat and combat support type capabilities. We also need to move some of the capabilities in the Reserves that are used early in conflict or chronically high demand in operations from the reserve component into the active duty force.  That's going to be a bit more expensive, but it will take away some of the corrosive wear and tear on the reserve component.  This option makes a lot of sense, but it's not enough.  It's not going to free up enough capability through conversion to actually solve the problem. Option three is rebalancing the force in this way, but also increasing the size of the force, keeping the reserve component as an operational reserve.  So rebalance the force in a more radical way than is currently planned, expand the active duty Army by at least another seven brigades' worth, about 30,000, and substantially increase the readiness of the reserve component forces as they are in the box and it's their turn to be ready for rotation to operations either at home or aborad. This would likely reduce operational risk to an acceptable level, but the question is, could this larger force be recruited and sustained?  Would it require lowering quality standards, and what that have?  What would be the cost?  The cost is likely to be substantial, at least $10 billion for building the new structure, an estimated $40 billion for additional training and equipment to maintain the reserve component at sufficient readiness as a true operational reserve, plus recurring personnel costs associated with the additional end strength. Option four is rebalancing the force and increasing the size of the active Army to a much greater degree and returning the reserve component to its traditional role as a strategic reserve.  This would require an even larger increase to the Army's end strength, even higher costs and even higher recruiting challenges.  It would also scale back the reserve component to a much smaller part of the force and substantially reduce its day-to-day relevance. It would also certainly break the DOD top line and require revisiting much broader policy issues like tax cuts and fiscal policy. So in sum, you can see there are very few palatable and no easy choices here.  Option one, the current course, risks breaking the force.  Option two is appealing but it's not enough.  Option three probably makes the most sense in principle but will be very challenging to actually make it work in practice.  And option four would require heroic increases in both recruiting and defense spending. Defense planning is the business of making hard choices, and on balance I would favor pursuing option three which is radically rebalancing the Army, increasing the size of the force, and resourcing and managing the reserve component as more of an operational reserve. Let me conclude with some thoughts on implications.  All of this argues for fundamentally rethinking the basic contract between the U.S. and its citizen soldiers.  We need to start by clarifying what is it we are asking of our citizen soldiers post-9/11.  What is their role?  My answer to that question is that post-9/11 we're asking men and women to join the reserves for a different but compelling reason.  First and foremost, to help the United States fight and win the global war on terrorism both at home and aborad in all of us dimensions.  In this sense, supporting homeland security and participating in overseas missions really aren't competing missions for the reserve component, but two different sides of the same coin. Second, I believe we need to consider a more diverse array of contracts to accommodate a broader range of people who are willing and able to serve in the reserve component.  There will be looking for people in units who are willing to be deployed once or every 5 or 6 years.  We should also look for people who are willing to be deployed more often than that and accommodate them.  We should also expect there may be people we want to have in service who are only willing to be called up in a time of national emergency such as a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland or the big war abroad. Then there may be people in units with critical skills who are unable or unwilling to deploy but are critical assets such as the Silicon Valley unit of computer hackers who may be the best in the world but don't need to actually go any place to make a vital contribution to the U.S. military. Third, the U.S. government needs to do a better job of upholding its end of the bargain providing reserve component personnel and units with the training and equipment they need to be successful in their missions, providing them with the compensation and benefits commensurate with their services, providing more of a safety net for families for whom a deployment has devastating consequences, and so on. Finally, I believe that our national leaders, the president, the Secretary of Defense and others, need to use their bully pulpits to ask every American to contribute some way to the defense of this nation, and that's really not something that's been done effectively since 9/11. The bottom line is the stakes are high not only for the Army but for the nation.  We are at risk of breaking one of our most treasured national institutions with great risk to our national security.  We need to think creatively and we need to act urgently, and my hope is that this conference will contribute to the discussion that makes those choices possible. MR. SCHMITT:  Thanks, Michele.  Now we know why they gave you two jobs in the Pentagon.  Yours was an extremely useful opening presentation to the panel. The next panelist is Fred Kagan who is a Professor of History at West Point.  He is the coauthor with another Kagan of While America Slept and he frequently contributes to The Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and other journals and magazines.  The good news for Washington is that he'll be soon joining the American Enterprise Institute here this summer. MR. KAGAN:  Thank you, Gary.  Since I see a lot of Army officers in the audience, I want to say my presence here is entirely unofficial and I'm not pretending to speak on behalf of West Point.  I'm much more likely to speak on behalf of AEI when I'm in this setting. I would love to come and give you a very coherent, detailed, articulate presentation, but I'm afraid it's going to turn into a little bit of sound bites.  So many things have been said here that I want to pick up on that I'm going to throw the coherence of my presentation a little bit to the wind and try to pick up on a few of those things. The first thing that I want to say is we are not a national at war.  You've heard that phrase a lot, but we are absolutely not a nation at war.  The president in the aftermath of 9/11 got up as we all know and told the nation to go shopping.  At no point did he get up and ask for more volunteers for the service, which the service desperately didn't want at the time.  And he has not been calling on the American people to make major sacrifices for this war since then.  We regard it as an enormous position to have to go through security lines at airports, and that is in fact the sum total of the contribution most Americans are making these days other than paying their taxes to the global war on terror.  That is not the picture of a nation at war. Furthermore, we have not reoriented defense spending or defense priorities in the aftermath of this attack and in this war.  A nation at war focuses its efforts on defense and it raises its defense spending ceiling dramatically and not just in supplementals to pay for whatever it has to be paying for in terms of ongoing operations, but in order to develop as it needs to develop in order to succeed in the war.  We haven't done that.  We've fought like the devil to keep the defense top line as close as possible to where it had been before, and we need to remember, and I'll mention more about this in a minute, that that was a defense top line that resulted from about three peace dividends after the end of the Cold War.  That was in no way a war fighting or a crisis or a tension defense top line that we went into this with and we have tried like hell to stick with it.  That's not what a nation at war does. Furthermore, a notion at war is willing to defer the development of technological and other systems that are designed to fight wars 20 years hence in order to make sure that it has the capabilities to fight the war that it does now.  We have done the exact opposite.  The Defense Department and the administration have done everything in their power to protect transformation at the expense of making it possible to accomplish current missions.  That's not what a nation at war does either. In addition to that, even when you look at the armed forces, we're not an armed forces at war.  The Air Force is not at war.  The Navy is not at war.  Parts of the Marine Corps are at war, but parts of them are not.  Parts of the Army are at war.  And I'm not going to get up here and exculpate the Army and paint the Army as a victim here.  I've heard hair-raising stories from commanders preparing to go overseas to Iraq who have run into every manner of bureaucratic idiocy a they're tried to prepare their units.  The Army doesn't fully understand that it's at war, and even if you look at the priority that is still being given in the Army to developing transformational systems to fight wars 30 years from now, that's not what an Army at war does either. I think the first thing that we need to do if we're going to actually address this problem is recognize that we need to be at war.  If we're going to keep saying that this is a war and we're going to be engaged in it for a long time, we need to act that way, we need to act that way from top to bottom, and we need to rethink what we're doing very fundamentally. The next point that I'd like to make is that it's important to understand the lineage of the current Army as it came out of the Cold War.  The Cold War force was never designed to defeat the Soviet Union or stop the Soviet Union in Europe.  In fact, there was no expectation that that would happen.  At best, if you took the optimistic scenarios, the active Army would get to Europe as quickly as possible, slow up the Soviets and be the shield behind which the nation mobilized.  It was never intended to fight and win that war.  We forgot that when we started to downsize, and we also in the '90s forgot that a lot of the critical assumptions that had underlaid that structure no longer applied. The active force is not the shield behind which the nation is going to mobilize, not in this kind of conflict.  The active force is the force that's going to be doing the work.  I think that we need to recognize that and I associate myself with a number of statements that previous speakers have said in this regard, that we need to fundamentally change the way the Reserves forces are structured, the way the National Guard forces are structured, but it needs to begin with the recognition that the active force is going to be bearing the primary burden for these operations now and well into the future.  That's just the way that it is.  Reserves are not going to be deployable for long periods of time or you will destroy the reserves, you will cause all kinds of hardships, and you will generate political backlash that will make it much harder to do the things that we need to do.  We need to recognize that the active force has to be the primary force that's going to be doing this and it has to be able to do that largely on its own. Another thing that we need to recognize is that bureaucracies are by their nature inefficient.  They are not efficient, and the American Army is one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.  We have been searching for efficiency in the Army since Robert McNamara took office as the Secretary of Defense, and we've been doing it consistently ever since. In the '90s, we were saying that we would achieve efficiency within the defense establishment and use the money saved thereby in order to fund transformation.  When that didn't happen, either transformation didn't happen or, more commonly, the money was taken out of O&M and other funding sources that were vitally necessary for ongoing operations and training that was incredibly shortsighted. It rests on a fundamental misconception in which we continue to persist, you are not going to go through the force and find out all of the inefficiencies, root them out and somehow maximize the capability of the force and still have a fighting force at the end of that. When you constrain an organization to function maximally efficiently in order to survive, what you will do it make it tremendously defensive, conservative and ineffective because on the whole there is an inverse relationship between efficiency and effectiveness in bureaucratic organizations and I think it's very important that we understand that.  We're not going to make this go away by finding the fat and trimming it.  We should do that.  I'm not in favor of fat any more than anybody else is, but we shouldn't imagine that that is going to solve the problem in any fundamental way. I think as we proceed thinking about what the Army is going to have to do, and I say this especially to my friends in the Army, we need to remember that the Army's unique and most important contribution is that it brings human beings into the theater to interact with other human beings.  That's what the Army does, and it can keep them there for a long time.  That's what makes them different from the Marines who also bring human beings in. That is an invaluable contribution especially, and I'll say this also to my friends in the Army, if we remember or rather if we go back and fix a mistake that we made especially starting in the '90s when we started talking about how the Army existed to fight and win the nation's wars, that is not the purpose of the United States Army.  The purpose of the United States Army is to provide  land power to support the nation's pursuit of its interests and if those are wars, then the mission is to fight and win the wars, if there those are peacekeeping operations, then the mission is to succeed in those peacekeeping operations, if it's presence sustainment, then that's what it should do. Part of the problem the Army has had all along, and this is not just the Vietnam syndrome, has been the determination to focus on war fighting to the exclusion of other things and the consequent willingness to separate war fighting from the other  aspects of dealing with crises, especially postwar operations, peace operations, stabilization operations and so forth.  That's one of the reasons the Army doesn't like to plan for those sorts of things.  It's one of the reasons why we don't think about what the resource requirements for those sorts of things are.  We need to get away from this fight-and-win-the-nation's-war stuff because that's only part of the Army's job, and the Army has to be able to do that and a lot of other things as well. I agree completely with the general assessment here that this is not the problem, that current strains are not going to go away quickly.  I'd like to point out as we think to the future that Iraq is not that hard when it comes to stabilization operations and counterinsurgency and so forth. I looked this up last night on a very informative CIA website.  The CIA does do some helpful things for you.  Iraq is the forty-forth largest country in the world in terms of population.  That means there are 43 countries ahead of it, many of which are in the Muslim world and would be significantly more challenging for us to control.  Iraq has two major ethnic groups and two major religious groups.  Together they form three regions.  There are very populous, large countries in Africa that have over 200 ethnic groups and multiple religious groups and so forth. This is by no means that this is the most challenging mission that we could possibly imagine, and if we think we're going to have to conduct operations like this in the future, we should expect them to be rather harder. I would point out in addition the insurgency that we're facing in Iraq for all of its challenges is far less challenging that the Vietnamese insurgency.  The external sources of support for this insurgency are trivial compared to the external sources of support that we faced in Vietnam.  The indigenous support for this insurgency is trivial compared to that. We're fighting insurgents who are absolutely capable of ever standing up to us conventionally.  That means that it should be easier.  I recognize that we don't see it that way because we like to conventional operations, but that means that you're dealing with a very low-level insurgency indeed.  There are many cases in the world where we might be looking at much more serious threats than this. As you look out into the future and pursue the if-you-break-it-you-buy-it principle to war fighting which I thoroughly agree with, buying it is likely to be much more expensive in a lot of different cases than it is in Iraq.  We can point out Iraq is a desert.  We knew it very well.  There are a variety of other things that made this fairly easy, and we're still having a hard time with it. The Army has undertaken some measures to try to deal with this problem.  I'm thinking here especially of modularity.  Modularity is not going to do the job.  It doesn't really matter from the standpoint of the insurgency how many brigades you have.  What matters is how many soldiers you have.  And as long as the Army is operating under the same manpower top line or a similar one, it is not going to have sufficient resources, and it doesn't matter how they're organized. I would associate myself with option four of the four options that were laid out before.  I personally think we probably need another 100,000 or so soldiers in the active force, and not just in brigades.  We have used the TDA Army, especially the military educational establishment, as bill payers for the inadequacy of the active force, and the education and intellectual side of the Army has suffered very, very badly. We need to increase the size of the institutional Army, not decrease it.  If you want to make finance officers civilians, I don't have a problem with that.  If you want to try to outsource and civilianize the intellectual functions of the Army, I have an enormous problem with that.  Unfortunately, that's the trend that we've been on coupled with the trend of simply destroying the intellectual functions of the Army and not replacing them at all which is incredibly dangerous and damaging.  It's not just combat forces that we need.  We need to redress the damage that we've already done. This is going to be very expensive.  It's going to be hard.  Recruiting is going to be hard.  I've just been doing reading about the institution of the all volunteer force in the early '70s, and the sorts of things that we're saying now are exactly the same things that were being said then.  We'll never be able to recruit.  They will be no good.  They'll be stupid.  They won't be high school educated.  They won't be college educated.  They won't be able to do it.  The Army's readiness will suffer.  The Army's combat capability will suffer.  I've come across very few people who recognize the enormous benefits that we would receive from the all volunteer force when we actually go into the all volunteer force.  The predictions were absolutely dire. I don't think that we are in a more difficult environment now than we were then.  In fact, I think it's a lot easier.  That was the height of antimilitarism in the country.  Yes, the economy was slack.  The economy is not going strongly now that I don't think we can recruit.  This is a task that we need to decide to do.  We need to do it based on the recognition that we're at war, we're going to continue to be at war, we have to behave that way, and that means spending that way.  That means reorienting priorities within the Army, within the defense establishment and within the nation.  I think that if we can do that, then there is some prospect that we can succeed at this.  Thanks. MR. SCHMITT:  Thanks, Fred.  Our next panelist is Major General David Ralston who is currently Director of Force Management at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army.  General Ralston as you look at the bio you can tell served a long and distinguished career as an Army Artillery Officer principally and he served and held commands in Germany, Fort Hood, Texas, Fort Sill, Oklahoma where he was the Deputy Commanding General, and he has also served in such hot spots as Kosovo and at Harvard where he was a Fellow from the Army War College.  Given what's preceded him today on the panels, the hot spot now is here. MG RALSTON:  Thank you, sir.  The last 2 years I've been the Director of Force Management under the Chief.  It's been an exciting job, and I think I'm going to try to take you a little ways from theory into practice here with my comments.  I'll be short so that we can get to the questions as well. As we all heard today with this panel and the one that preceded it, we are under a prolonged period of conflict with great uncertainty as to what the nature and the location of that conflict will be.  As a result, we have to have a different kind of Army, one that is more flexible, can be rapidly deployed and has sufficient depth to handle the situations. After 9/11 we really didn't have that type of a force.  We had a Cold War force.  We had excess heavy Army armor and artillery, and we had a force that was not the right type to fight the global war on terrorism. As a result, we started to change that.  The new Chief came in and used the analogy that he's got $100 bill and everywhere he turned there was a $20 cost.  So he said we're going to change that $100 into five 20s, and that's what we have been trying to do in the last few years. We tried to create now a more relevant and responsive force, one that is self-contained and standard.  If you took a look at the force a couple of years ago, there were no units that were really standard.  They had all morphed to different designs.  The Chief came in and wanted to make sure that we got down to just a few designs and absolutely standardize them so that we could have a plug-and-play kind of Army, and one that is lethal.  The new bridges that we are forming are actually a little smaller than the previous brigade combat teams, but they are in fact more lethal, and also able to handle full-spectrum operations.  They are truly joint and were joint by design, and we are trying to change now the leaders of that to be more adaptive and confident with tailorable command and control. There are really six initiatives that the Army has tried to go on.  The first is we redesigned the organization, modularity being the key there.  We made the way from divisions to-- [End tape 2, side A, begin side B.] MG RALSTON:  [In progress] --difference in how the Army thinks of itself and organizes in that way.  We tried to redefine the culture.  This is the difficult part.  This is really the transformational part, to redefine the culture. One of the things, not only are we trying to be more joint and expeditionary, but the key is, and we've talked about it here, a different paradigm for the RC.  We have a huge reliance on the reserve forces and in order to do the business as we see it in the near future, we have to have assured, predicted access to the RC.  If we don't have that, then the size and the shape of the active Army becomes fundamentally different.  So it is imperative that we have assured, predicted access to the RC. The third is we tried to relieve the stress on the force first by creating new modular units.  We are forming right now or in the process of building 10 new modular brigades with the option of going to 15.  That was an agreement between the Chief of the Staff of the Army, the SECDEF and the President about a year ago to date. The next thing is the Chief wanted to do force stabilization to try to keep soldiers and their families longer at installations in order to stabilize the force, the predictability for the families in order then to have a more expeditionary force with the soldiers.  We tried to realign the force and we are now moving back approximately 50,000 soldiers, 38 from Europe and about 12 from Korea.  We will bring them back into the States, station them in order to facilitate both deployment and training and utilization on a rotational depth of those forces. We are investing for the future with FCS, but also trying to spiral technology back into the current forces in order to improve the current forces that we have now.  The last, the sixth initiative, is the AC/RC rebalance. In addition to everything that I just said, we are moving around about 100,000--inside the Army in order to try to get this blend of AC and RC as right as we can at least in the near future.  That started in about 2004.  It completes, this transformation of this 100,000, by 2009.  We are doing such things are reducing field artillery by 34 percent, ADA by 47 percent, heavy engineers, 25 percent, armor 43 percent across the force. We are bringing on MPs.  We're increasing MPs at 46 percent, civil affairs 14 percent, SIOPS, 20 percent, quartermaster which is water and POL distribution by 20 percent, BIO detective units, 300 percent, MI, at least at the tactical level--at 200 percent.  We are trying to balance the force as best we can.  Ten thousand worth of MIL/CIV conversions started happening last year.  We'll complete next year trying to get those green suit guys out from jobs that are inherently not military and provide additional soldiers to fight.  Also a heavy use on contractors where possible. We we're trying to get an all-inclusive look at how to posture the force a little better by both rebalancing it, by changing how we fight, changing how we are designed, trying to stabilize the families in order to have more of a joint and expeditionary type of Army, and doing as much as we can to relieve the stress. The key as we talked about here today and the real question is the reserve force as part of that.  It is absolutely imperative that we have them and the ability to access them and use them.  As you all know, we've used the reserve forces now considerably more than we ever have before.  They have fought magnificently.  They have really come to the forefront.  And more than ever in my 30 years of service, it is absolutely a seamless Army between the Guard, the Reserves and the active force and that really has been a true benefit and something of real value for the United States Army. What has not changed, and we haven't talked about this as much as we probably should, is the soldiers as the centerpiece for our business.  You cannot talk enough about that individual soldier that is out there bearing the burdens in some of the most dangerous neighborhood in the world protecting our freedoms.  So thank you, and I look forward to your questions. MR. KARL:  Thanks, General.  The next panelist is Major General Bob Scales.  Bob was former Commandant of the Army War College.  He served in Vietnam where he was awarded a Silver Star--he's the author of several volumes of military and strategic thought, most recently he co-authored with Wit Murray (ph) a book on the war in Iraq, and currently runs a consulting firm that specializes in defense and leadership issues.  Bob is going to go forth in our panel, so he's sitting in the Ralph Peters seat, and those of you who know Bob know that that's completely consistent, so here's Bob. MR. SCALES:  Thanks a lot.  First of all, let me be absolutely clear.  I am a real option four guy.  Thank you, Michele.  I know you're probably three plus, probably, but we'll go with option four. I was giving a talk about 5 months ago at a very large gathering, a multiservice gathering, and I gave my usual shtick on the human factors in war and cultural and cognitive transformation and how this war is a wake-up call to go from the technocentric to the culturecentric battlefield.  I felt so good about myself that I sat back on the dias and a very, very senior flag officer from the service not my own leaned over to me and whispered, "Bob, that was great."  You know what, I'll be so glad when this B.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq is over so we can get back to the real business of war. I think in many ways that encapsulates the thought inside the Beltway, let's get this over with so we can do something constructive for our major programs and do whatever we can to fight China because they look the most like us. You should never fight the next war like the last, and I realize there's always the danger of that, but remember, I'm an historian down to my boots.  One of the things I've learned in studying history is that in every war there are threads of continuity, there are bits and pieces, there are insights that carry forward from your real war experience into the war in the future. The roots of Blitzkrieg nested with the--tactic that the German Army used in 1918.  You could argue that air-land battle was the direct derivative of the Israeli experience in the Yom Kippur War.  You could argue that phase four today in Iraq is a derivative of our experience in Vietnam and elsewhere in counterinsurgencies. I think the same rule applies to this war.  For those of us who are willing to stand back a little bit and look at the second- and third-order effects of what this war has on the future of conflict, there are certain immutable insights or threads that will carry forward, and then I'll translate that into the issue at hand as to what it means for the future of the Army particularly as it relates to force structure and equipment. What are the threats and where do they lead us?  What's the big thread?  In my mind, the big thread is that this war differs from the Cold War in that the initiative rests with red and not blue.  One of the interesting things about the Cold War is that the Russians spent themselves into penury because they were trying to mimic the intellectual energy that was put forward by defense intellectuals in the '70s and '80s and they failed. We were the ones that came up with the doctrine, we're the ones that came up with the materiel, we the United States and NATO led the way in transformation in the '70s and '80s and the Soviets followed in trail. Today it's just the opposite.  Red has the initiative.  They are the ones who are determining where the playing field is going to be played and what particular elements of power are brought to bear.  Unfortunately, we're following in trail.  This has enormous implications to the future of the Army.  What does it mean? First of all, we have no choice as an Army to cover as much of the conflict spectrum as possible.  I'd like to say that there's a narrow piece of the conflict spectrum that we'll own, but the enemy doesn't care.  As soon as we concentrate on one piece of the spectrum, he'll pick another.  Do you want to control the air, sea and space says our opponent?  You got it.  It's yours.  We'll just find another place to take you on. So when we build an Army, we cannot build a homogenous Army.  We must build an Army that's made up of many different component parts, each one of them with a special place along the conflict spectrum.  As we design our Army both materiel and structures, we have to ensure that we sacrifice a bit in the middle of the spectrum to allow that force to spread itself as far across the spectrum as possible. Second, we have to have an Army that's able to reach the farthest corners of what Barry Posen calls in his wonder article The Contested Zone.  Barry Posen's thesis is very simple, the enemy just like with the British in 18th century, the enemy says, you want the sea?  You got it.  There's your space.  Take it.  We'll fight you in the most remote and inaccessible places in the world, a place where cell phones don't work so your net-centric warfare deal has little or no impact on whether you win or lose. What this means then is that we have to have an Army that's able efficiently to get to the contested zones, and most importantly as I'll mention at a later point, stay there. The next is we have to find a way better to exploit command of the common, back to Barry Posen again.  We do a magnificent job of controlling the common, air, sea and space.  We do a terrible job at exploiting it, and the worst violator is the Air Force.  The object is to gain air superiority.  You got it.  Now what we have to do is translate that into ability to fight in the farthest corners of the conflict spectrum.  Not going well. It's very interesting, the phrase the Air Force uses for maneuver they call lift.  It's not lift, and it's not mobility.  It's the ability to take highly mobile, agile modular forces and project them to the far corners of the world and have them stay there and fight effectively for a long period of time.  I have to tip my hat to Admiral Vern Clark because in many ways the Navy has got it.  The Navy understands what operational maneuver from strategic distance is all about, and they've done a wonderful job with their sea basing initiatives and the partnership they have with the Marine Corps in being able to do that. Next, to mimic my good friend Bob Killebrew, this is not about winning a campaign.  This is not about having an effective lightening operational maneuver on land.  It's about winning wars. How about this for a phrase, ladies and gentlemen?  In this particular war, how about victory for a change?  Why don't we win this thing?  There is so much at stake, and in proportion to Korea and Vietnam and certainly World War II, the resources dedicated to this conflict so far have been so sparse that maybe an objective of this is to stay long enough and to continue our presence in this region long enough that the outcome is positive rather than negative. The next we have to realize is this is a war for will and the battle is focused on ideas.  The object here is to control not just the information spectrum, but to control the hearts and minds and the will of the people, and this argues for a long-term commitment where we can win this thing psychologically rather than physically. Next is we have to adapt to an adaptive enemy.  How will we know when we're winning?  I always get asked this question.  I'll tell you when we know intuitively.  When the tipping point shifts from red to blue.  When we gain the intellectual and the operational initiative in this war.  When we start calling the shots as to where these wars are fought and how they're fought.  That's when we can wake up one morning and say we're on the other point of the curve, where we're beginning on the downward slope of the curve to end it.  Not until we gain the initiative will we know we're winning. The Army in conjunction with the Marine Corps have to understand that the center of gravity in this transformational effort that we're going through is at the tactical not the operational or strategic level.  The shooting of an Italian guard and the wounding of a Italian correspondent was enough fundamentally to change the strategic balance in this war.  What does that say?  It says that tactical actions have strategic consequences. Our last transformational effort was focused on the operational level of war, but now we have two points to focus.  One is to get the strategy right and win the war.  And number two is to transform our small units so that they become as good as they possibly can be.  The manpower shortage will never be solved any time soon so it's time for us to pay attention to small unit tactics squads and platoons and companies and transform us there because we haven't been there in a very long time, and we have to do all of this by lessening the cost of this war in human lives. So let's talk about structures and materiel and what must be done to the Army in particular to accommodate these realities?  I hate those words Army in particular.  You're talking about land power here.  The Army, the Marines, Special Operating Forces and the reserves of each of those services.  One of the issues about this war that just struck me right between the eyes of this idea of convergence, the idea that the roles and the missions and the look of the land forces are beginning to merge and the dividing line between them is beginning to fuzz.  So a soldier and a Marine in Fallujah, the way they fight at the tactical level is virtually the same.  That's an important characteristic as we push forward.  This is not transformation of the Army, it's transformation of land power. The first of these is operational maneuver from strategic distances.  We must get that right, otherwise we will never be able to reach the remote areas.  The other is this issue of area control.  The days of attacking specific objectives and attacking the hill to kill the enemy there is over.  The object now is area control.  It's people, not armies.  It's the ability to control territory for protracted periods of time. Sustained operations in distant regions is the next one.  One of the questions that was asked by AEI is, how is the Army become more Marine-like?  In this instance, the Marines are becoming more Army-like.  The Marines have learned that an 18- to 19-year-old force is fine if you're only going to fight a 30-day campaign.  The old days of three deployments and you're out are over for the Marines and they're over for the Army.  In order to fight this war, ground forces must become more mature, they have to become higher in rank and they have to be more tightly bonded. Does anybody know what the optimum age for a close-combat soldier is at the squad level?  What is the most efficient age?  Very interesting.  It's 28 to 32.  The Israelis and the Special Operations Forces have done some studies on this, and I think that's spot on.  The days of the 18- and 19-year-old soldier or the 20-year-old squad leader are over.  In a war like this it takes maturity, it takes a multidimensional soldier that takes years, not weeks or months, to train. The other thing regarding the Marine Corps,l and I think it's absolutely essential, Michele's point about force sizing, is the 3-in-1 rule applies to the Army just like it does to the Air Force, Marines and the Navy.  You cannot do a 60-brigade rotation with 33 brigades.  The math doesn't work if you buy the 3-in-1 rule.  If you don't buy into the 3-in-1 rule pretty soon, we're going to break the Army. Modularity is important.  Why?  There are several reasons.  What we're talking about here is a brigade-based Army allows you to adhere efficiently to the 3-in-1 rule.  If you don't manage it by brigades, you can't manage it. Number two, it gives you projectable entities.  It's the old story about the magic of 5,000.  Anything above 5,000 is too heavy and cumbersome to project, anything below 5,000 is too thin to be able to sustain itself over time.  By the time you build our BCTs or UAs or whatever the heck they call them now into projectable entities, I suggest to you that they'll be somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000. Another point is it's not possible to build sustainment into combat power into modularity, and I disagree with Fred here, unless you have a concurrent revolution in the materiel that you use to equip these brigades with.  Without FCS, modularity will not work.  Why?  Because you've taken the aviation component out of it, you're taken the firepower component out of it, and you have to replace it with something.  The only way to replace it with something is to use the components of FCS to give it the killing power, the projectability and the sustainment necessary to fight a protracted battle at extended distances for long periods of time.  Without a materiel revolution to accompany a structural revolution, I believe they will both fail. Having said that, a homogenous Army won't work either.  An Army needs to be made up of many components, heavy and light, and the heavy force as we've seen recently with this performance in Fallujah, it will be with us for many, many, many years because it is not just something nice to have, it's a necessary component. This is an interesting statistic.  If you look at wars since the end of World War II, casualty rates for close-combat soldiers who fight mounted in terms of wounded are 50 percent less than you fight in any vehicle.  It could be a Humvee, a jeep, a tank, an APC.  More importantly, the death rates when fighting mounted versus fighting dismounted are an order of magnitude lower.  So when someone in the light Army or the Marines tell you of the wonder of dismounted Infantry or dismounted close-combat soldiers, they've got it absolutely wrong.  Remember, our center of gravity as far as the enemy is dead American, and you're less likely to die if you fight mounted than if you fight dismounted. When we build this Army of the future, think of it as coming in two groups.  Think of it as the operational maneuver element is being FCS equipped, brigade combat teams, projectable entities of about 5,000.  That's the operational maneuver.  That's the heavy Cavalry.  And think of the phalanx as being an Abrams equipped force which hopefully will be with us for another 20 or 25 years. The missing component is Army aviation.  We have not paid enough attention to Army aviation in my opinion.  Army aviation should be part of these BCTs.  The other thing that's missing in modularity, unfortunately, is Infantry.  The coin of the realm in close combat is Infantry, and we must increase the size of our Infantry forces. But this is a big debate that's going on right now, and I guess if I had to leave you with a thought it's this:  I'm very, very sort of upset that how internally within the DOD and internally within the Army and the other services we're seeing so much push back on this transformation to bring something like this duality of modularity or a brigade-based Army into synch with modernized forces. Much of it is coming from within the retired community in the Army.  It kind of reminds me, again as a history student, of the fight in the inner-war years between the battleship barons and the carrier admirals, where the battleship barons were absolutely convinced that the battleship would continue to be the future of the Navy even in the battle against Japan.  Sims's and Moffett's enemies were not just within the regular Navy, but within the retired Navy, in the media and in Congress.  Thank God they had the tenacity to build nine aircraft carriers before Pearl Harbor. The Army now is facing a very similar challenge in that what we're doing is absolutely right.  There's a little bit of professional pride here in the sense that I was part of the group that started building these concepts in the mid-'90s and nothing I've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan causes me to rethink the tenets of Army After Next and Force 21 that we came up with in those days. What we came up with then was prophetic.  What we came with then fits the combat situation that we are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and it will fit I am convinced as long as it covers the spectrum to the degree I've specified virtually any contingency that the Army is going to fight in the future, but you can't do it all with a 500,000 man Army.  We need at least 100,000 more soldiers in order to put the Infantry into these modular brigades and building of these brigades to do the 3-in-1 rule. I lived through two broken armies, as many of you with gray hair in this room have as well.  I remember the broken Army after Vietnam, and I remember the hollow Army in the late-'70s and early '80s.  I can see some heads going up and down.  I'll be damned if I'm going to stand around here and watch a third broken Army because we don't put the resources towards building a land power force that's able to transform itself and fight a war at the same time.  I believe we can do both.  Thank you. MR. SCHMITT:  We certainly have enough to talk about.  There is about 15 minutes for questions, and I suggest we go directly into questions so that we have a good chance to hear everybody's views about different matters. AUDIENCE:  --military attache from India.  We fully appreciate the extent that the U.S. Army is involved in operations, and they are overstretched and they'll be overstretched for quite some time to come as has been brought out by the panelists. I have another suggestion to make.  It might be controversial, as I see it outside as a foreigner.  While it is necessary to increase the extent of the U.S. Army, my suggestion, a little controversial, is that increase the size of the National Guard.  My suggestion is that every state, you have 50 states and every American is very proud of the country, the flag, the soldiers and its own state, that every state raises its own National Guard division. There are three aspects in this.  The equipment can be kept at 20 percent to reduce the budget and made up to 100 percent whenever it is deployed.  If you have the three divisions, one per state, the responsibility of enlistment then becomes of the Senators, the Congressmen, the state government, in relation to the people themselves--to ensure that its own state National Guard always remains at full strength when required. Another third, keep it at a 20 percent equipment state to reduce budgetary impact.  Issue them 100 percent equipment 2 months before deployment where they go through a crash course of 2 months' training.  And if you do have the three National Guard divisions, the deployment will come once in 5 years.  At the max, I don't think the U.S. Army will require deployment of more than 10 National Guard divisions anyway, so the rotation will come only once in 5 years. I know it's a little tough.  It may not be acceptable to American society, but I think it needs to be done. MR. SCHMITT:  Thank you for the question.  Bob? MG SCALES:  Let me answer it.  The answer to your question is very simple.  We tried that.  We did exactly what you suggested, almost exactly in the manner that you've suggested, in the Civil War and the result was 650,000 dead Americans. The last thing the American Army wants is to learn to fight by fighting.  What kills Americans in battle more than any other single factor is they go to war as amateurs and they only learn to be professionals by dying for the privilege.  If you don't have a solid core of professionals to be that leavening to ensure that you're able to do those things necessary to be able to fight on arrival and fight effectively with overwhelming power, then the result is defeat. The other thing that would be curious, I'd like to see how big the division would be from Nevada.  That would be interesting. MR. SCHMITT:  General? MG RALSTON:  I think key to this question is the ability to get access to the Guard as well.  The active component right now is on the 1-to-3 that we've talked about, it's really in a 1-to-1 because it is being utilized so rapidly. We have a difficulty in not being able to get to the RC as much as we would like.  In fact, I almost say that you go to the opposite way and take a look, and I think you need to do some excursions with the cost ration now as Michele brought out in her discussion, the more you utilize the RC the more the cost starts to get closer and closer to the cost of an active duty soldier.  And if you only can have access to the reserve component at a 1-in-6 ration versus 1-in-3, it becomes almost even a cost benefit if nothing else than to increase the size of the active component and the National Guard. It really is I think the access, the ability to reach out and grab them and keep them trained at a constant state so that we can in fact utilize them at the rate that we are. MR. SCHMITT:  Tom, you get to go now. AUDIENCE:  My question was one that I was hoping the panel would address and did not, and that's the question of Army posture. We say that we understand that this is a big, long war and we have a pretty good idea of where it is, even if you think the theater is the entire Islamic world which is real big, but it's in a particular place.  Our Cold War posture was an expeditionary posture.  We were in Germany.  In a way we had a theater Army that was capable of sustaining a commitment that extended over decades.  Why shouldn't we think about a similar kind of posture and not so much of this boom and zoom idea that is at the heart of the transformational idea? MR. SCHMITT:  Fred first. MR. KAGAN:  Tom, I think you're absolutely right and I think one of the things most disturbing that I have heard recently is what General Ralston just briefed us on that will bring 50,000 troops back to CONUS.  I don't understand how redeploying to CONUS makes us more deployable.  That adds an ocean's distance between our troops and anywhere that we might ever want to get to because if we're fighting in this near vicinity we're losing. I think it is vitally important that we remain forward deployed and I think the arguments that you and I have had, Tom, about where exactly we should be deployed are trivial compared to the question of whether or not we should be forward deployed.  I think it's absolutely vital, and in truth, I think we should be trying to forward deploy more. I would add parenthetically that my anecdotal evidence is that a lot of officers and soldiers are very excited about the prospect of being deployed abroad.  I've heard people talk about this as a retention issue, and I have not seen it in my dealings with officers.  But certainly from the standpoint of military effectiveness, it makes no sense for us to have anything other than the minimum forces based on CONUS and to be as heavily deployed forward as we possibly can. MR. SCHMITT:  Michele? MS. FLOURNOY:  Let make the point that I agree with the point that I think now is the time where we need to actually enhance our engagement abroad using military forces to train with others, to provide assistance, to shore up the capabilities of other nations that are partners with us on the war on terrorism and in other regards. I think should certainly be forward deployed, but whether they should be forward stationed is another question.  Unfortunately, there are parts of the world where permanently basing forces creates such a negative backlash type of reaction that it may actually undermine our very good intentions with regard to engagement. More engagement, yes.  Sometimes that will be from a forward station posture.  Other times when it's counterproductive to forward station because of local reaction, I think we need to think about rotationally based training exercises, in and out types of interactions.  I think it requires a case-by-case analysis going around the world. MR. SCHMITT:  Next question? MR. THOMPSON:  Jerry Thompson (ph) from the National Defense University. The last question about this support to foreign forces, how are we going to get that done?  There is huge institutional change taking place in the places we would potentially work with.  General Scales mentioned the line getting blurry between the Marines and the Army.  Like they're in this region that we're talking about, the Middle East, the line is getting blurry between ministries of defense and interior.  It involves government as well as police and security forces. Typically, we've done this sort of work with Special Forces, but I'm not sure that we're not getting into an area that is beyond the capabilities that they've had, and they've got other jobs. Are we going to contract it out, and where are you going to find contractors with the sorts of expertise that you need?  Even if you did contract it out, the Army is still going to have to write that statement of work and oversee execution which means that the Army has got to have or somebody has got to have expertise that I'm sure we've got right now.  How are we going to do this? MR. SCHMITT:  Bob first, and then Michele. MG SCALES:  First, I disagree with you totally.  The blurring I'm talking about is not just between the Army and the Marine Corps, but it's across all three, Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Forces. If I could draw a Viewgraph, it's so nice not to have to use PowerPoint anymore, but sometimes it works, if you could draw a PowerPoint slide that has Special Operations Forces on the right, Army and Marines forces farther on the left, you could see that all that's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed those to the right more into the direction action sort of engagement in the theater by all these forces, and it's left a void in trail. So I've written several articles and have been quoted about this concept called global scouts.  I don't mean global scouts in terms of what Special Operations Forces are going to contribute.  I mean global scouts across all of the land power services.  What do I mean by that?  I mean in the personnel system.  This is a cultural issue.  A change in the Army and the Marine Corps personnel system that would allow long-term engagement by professional officers and NCOs in regions of interest to us not just for months for a port visit, but for years if not decades that would allow a total cultural immersion. Is this going to happen?  Surprisingly, I think what we'll see in the next 2 years is a whole cadre of Army, Marine and Special Operations Forces coming back from the theater who have built, not because of any help us, through their own experience the ability to commune with foreign militaries in wartime, a sort of self-generated advisory corps, if you will, that form the cadre of this global scouts function.  If we leave it to the Army personnel system to perpetuate that, it will die tomorrow just like the advisory effort died in Vietnam in 1971. So to anticipate the opportunities here I would argue that we need to start now before this generation of young officers come back from the theater to build places for them to continue that.  By the way, if they do a good job, to reward them.  What to heck?  Make a couple of them generals.  There is room up there for people like that in my opinion because this is a war we're fighting that's based on culture and will, not just on our ability to kill people with large machines. MS. FLOURNOY:  If I could add, I think it's a very important question and the wrong poles in the tent, if you will.  I think it's broader than DOD.  I think this needs to be approached on an interagency basis. Right now we don't have interagency strategies for security cooperation, for capacity building in the various regions of the world.  We need that.  We need to have a strategy, a concept of operations that makes clear which agency has what kinds of responsibilities, the mechanisms to coordinate that, and some changing of the authorities from the Hill to really enable proactive pre-crisis peacetime engagement of the nature that's really needed actually across the military, the police, diplomatic and other domains. MR. SCHMITT:  We'll take one more question and then I'll ask the panelists if there is something they'd like to say before we wrap up. MR. TILSON:  I'm John Tilson (ph) from the Institute for Defense Analyses.  I'd like to follow-up on Bob Scales's point about fighting mounted. I commanded an Armored Calvary troop in Vietnam a few years ago.  When we came back and we went to the advanced course, a group of us did a research project and concluded that my Infantry colleagues had suffered a 1-to-1 casualty rate vis-a-vis the enemy, whereas I and my Armor colleagues had about a 10-to-1 casualty rate. What I see in land power in general in the Army and the Marine Corps is a bias, perhaps bias may not be the right word, but an awfully large portion of the force is Infantry forces.  It seems to me that the future conflicts we're talking about like the past conflicts, the Army made I believe a fundamental mistake early on in the Vietnam War when it sent only Infantry forces.  The 1st Infantry Division left its armor behind, the 25th Infantry Division left its armor behind, and sent only Infantry forces. The question I had is whether we've made a similar mistake in the early part of the current phase four operations in Iraq when we left the armor behind and whether we shouldn't be preparing mobile protected firepower carriers for all of our forces, at least for a much greater portion of our forces, than we currently have in the Army and Marine Corps. MG SCALES:  I think that's right.  I think perhaps one of the reasons for reluctance to embrace mounted combat in this new era of warfare is that it's very, very expensive, and the cost is not FCS.  That's very interesting.  The cost is the aerial carrier to deliver FCS. The greatest single need I believe today is not aerial vehicles capable of delivering dismounted Infantry at great operational distances, but to deliver protected vehicles to operational distances, and that bill is huge.  But I will tell you the--bill for not doing that is much, much, much greater.  If you ask the American people would you prefer to have a 10-to-1 reduction in your death rate and spend a few more dollars to build this aerial maneuver capability into the Army, or would you rather just go in dismounted and suffer 10 times the casualties, I think the American people will give you that answer. This is a very, very difficult sell to make in the Army today.  It's extraordinarily difficult, but it has to be made.  Did I mention the statistic earlier about the 10-to-1 ratio? MR. SCHMITT:  Final comments?  General Ralston, please. MG. RALSTON:  I would like to point out that the Army right now is in a massive reorganization and transformation, perhaps the most significant reorganization in the past 50 years.  Modularity is just one piece of that.  AC/RC balance along with all the other initiatives in the use of the RC has been a tremendous position in trying to shape the Army to get away from this Cold War structure that it had pre-9/11 into a structure that is more able to fight the global war on terrorism. It not only though is a restructuring, but it's a cultural change that we have to deal with, and it's a problem of trying to make the force as flexible as you possibly can.  Once you have a fixed end strength and you have a full spectrum of operations, it would demand more than what you might have on hand.  You have to make the force as flexible and as responsive as possible, and we appreciate your support and help as a nation in doing that.  Thanks. MR. SCHMITT:  General Scales, briefly, please. MG SCALES:  One point I'd like to make is the question that you have failed to ask, and that's the fear that I have that we're becoming too busy to learn.  We've built an intellectual deficit in the Army because of these back-to-back deployments and our inability to create a body of young officers and senior NCOs who have the time and the educational background to study their profession, to find those threads of continuity that I spoke to you about earlier and to carry them forward into the next war. War is a thinking man's game.  This war is more so than any war we've ever fought in our history because we had a period of historical discontinuity in the evolution of warfare, and at the very time when we need officers who are reflective, well educated, introspective and have a fire in their belly to learn about their profession we're giving them less and less opportunity to do so. So if there's one thing in the long term that's going to harm us coming out of this war is that we may become a military that's too busy to learn. MR. SCHMITT:  Fred? MR. KAGAN:  I agree fully with that.  I think that's a major problem we're going to have to face. I would point out that one of the reasons I think we are focusing on Infantry is because we spent the '90s telling ourselves that urban warfare and counterinsurgency were Infantry wars despite all the historical evidence to the contrary.  I've never really understood why we went that way, but we certainly did and it's beginning to catch up with us a little bit. What have we concluded here?  We need more Infantry, we need more Armor, we need more combat service support, MPs, MI and so forth and so on.  We need more training base.  We need more educational institution.  We need a force that can do rotation.  What's the conclusion? We need more Army.  There is no place that you can take the forces from in order to make good the deficit because the truth is we need more forces in almost every category of service that the Army has. That shouldn't surprise us.  The current force structure was not configured to fight a war, it was configured to take advantage of several peace dividends that we paid ourselves over the course of the '90s.  Now that we're at war, it's time to start paying the dividends back to the Army. MS. FLOURNOY:  I agree that we a larger Army.  We also need to rebalance the force and find new ways of employment the Reserves and that will require a different approach to a greater diversity of contracts for Reservists, greater resourcing for the reserve component. But I think the bottom line is we need to take this debate from inside a room like this and into the decision-making circles of this government.  Right now we're in the middle of a QDR.  This issue is not front and center in the quadrennial defense review.  We are facing the risk of breaking the U.S. Army and it is not being treated as a central issue in the ongoing defense review.  It is the elephant sitting in the middle of the room.  We need to start addressing it at the highest levels of our government. MR. SCHMITT:  Thank you all for the questions, and if you'll join me in giving a hand to our panelists who have done a great job. [Applause.] MR. SCHMITT:  One final word.  According to the schedule, luncheon is at 12:30 and then the keynote address is at 12:45, so you have about 5 or 10 minutes to do whatever you want. Schoomaker:  CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH:  Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?  I m delighted to introduce our luncheon speaker, Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker.  After an illustrious and highly decorated 31 year career in the United States Army, focusing increasingly in his last two decades there on special operations, General Schoomaker retired in 2000 as Commander in Chief of the United States Special Operations Command. Then two and a half years into retirement came the famous phone call as he was driving his truck across Wyoming. He agreed to suit up again, come back to action for his most important special operation of his whole career, which is overseeing the Army s efforts to transform itself and get itself ready for the new challenges ahead that we have been discussing this morning and will this afternoon.  It s a great honor that he would take time from his busy schedule.  He will be making remarks, followed by question and discussion from the audience.  Please give a warm welcome to Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker.    GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well thank you very much.  My intention first of all is to keep my remarks quite short, because I understand you had rather a dynamic morning over here.  The seismograph here in the Pentagon was recording all kinds of tremors on occasion.  I kept asking what that was and they said "That's AEI over there and they're talking about the Army."  So I'm glad you're having this conversation, let me put it that way; it potentially could be very helpful and I think there's no better time for people in the United States to get engaged in the health and the future of the United States Army.  A very important institution and it brings and will continue to bring a great deal to the army, I mean the nation.  Hard to believe that's its been almost 22 months now since returning to uniform, and even harder to believe how much we've gotten done and the kind of things that we are doing.  And of course the more we get done, the more there is, we realize there is to do.  The one constant in all of this has been the great pride I've had in the soldiers, and the civilians and the families, that I've had the privilege now to serve again with and serve as Chief of Staff of the Army.  And I think all of us as Americans ought to be very, very proud of the service that these young men and women--in some cases, some of them aren't so young--that are performing today for us in this very noble cause, very noble service, and one that the nation ought to be very thankful and very proud of. One of the things that I've done throughout my career, and, as you know, I've spent an awful lot of time in the special operations business, although I did grow up in infantry and cavalry and armored organizations.  One of the things I've done throughout my career, like all of us do as professionals, is read and listen and talk and think about our profession.  And most recently I've been reading a book titled Army at Dawn, and some of you may be familiar with this.  Rick Atkinson wrote this book.  It's the first of a trilogy, but he's writing on World War II, and, you know, I never really thought about being Chief of Staff of the Army, actually having responsibilities for this.  And so reading this kind of stuff from that kind of perspective it really gives you a different--it's a different lens you're looking through, as I read it. Interesting that, you know, Army at Dawn is about North Africa, 1942-1943.  Interesting the kinds of things that were going on.  Soldiers arriving on the battlefield with no weapons.  Cases of bazookas being dropped on the battlefield that nobody had been trained on, with nothing but a sheet of paper.  No manuals or anything, but basically a mimeographed sheet of paper to explain, you know, what to do with it.  Tanks on the battlefield that were so underpowered and outgunned by the enemy that they were literally sitting ducks.  I mean it was frightful.  And this is two years after--well, it's more than that--after the invasion of Poland by the Germans--but it's two years after Pearl Harbor. The fact that George Marshall, a predecessor of mine, and I even hate to say that in the same sentence, I mean he's such an esteemed individual, but here's a man that came in as Chief of Staff of the Army and one of his first tasks was to relieve a great portion of the senior leadership of the Army, and then he closed the War College, the Army War College.  Closed it.  Ten years.  It reopened.  He closed it in 1940, and you might remember it reopened briefly at Leavenworth for a year in 19, I believe, '50 or '51.  The National War College stood up over here 1946. But imagine today--putting these things into context of this great generation of World War II and all that we think about World War II and all we think about what a nation at war is doing, think about a nation at war that had those kind of problems two and three years after--remember the draft passed by one vote, and basically George Marshall was the one that went over on the Hill and convinced the Congress to pass that bill.  Roosevelt--one of the readings I did--Roosevelt didn't feel he had the credibility to go over there, and he used George Marshall to do it. So this--the history of our nation and the way we go to war is very, very interesting to read.  And I think unless you understand the context of the way our nation goes to war, you don't understand the challenge that we had going to war and the challenge we have in transformation and quite frankly what it takes to push through the kind of bureaucracy that exists under the constant lens of media and others that are interested.  It's amazing. George Marshall said at the height of this problem there in about 1942, as he looked at what was happening in North Africa, he says, you know, "before the war, I had all the time in the world, but no money.  And now I have all the money in the world and no time."  And this element of time is a serious factor when you start talking about strategically about changing things like the United States Army and even bigger than that the Department of Defense and other things. The other thing I'd ask you to think about as you discuss transforming our Army is to remember that under our schemes today and the way we operate under the law, the Army is a force provider--organizes, trains, and equips.  And the requirements are articulated by the commanders in the field, the combatant commanders, and approved in the Pentagon and through the Department and the priorities are set in that way.  And so in many respects, this notion of providing the combatant commander with the kind of force that the combatant commander needs to do what he does, there's a certain amount of latency in the process, and it requires a great deal of anticipation.  And this anticipation to make things happen right requires a certain sense of vision and projection into things that, quite frankly, are unknowable.  But you can look at the trends and put yourself on vectors that make some sense. So I hope this isn't too disconnected here.  But it is the context that we must understand as we talk about how we are going to do the kinds of things that we're doing and, quite frankly, to understand what we are doing.  It is important to maintain it in that context. The other thing I would tell you is that the Department of Defense and certainly not the Army--neither the Department of Defense or any of the services, including the Army, are solely responsible for the protection of the national interests of this country; and that when we go to war or peace or whatever you want to call it, as we operate strategically, ideally we would bring all elements of national power to bear as tools within this undertaking, and the simple little phrase that we use or acronym that we use in war colleges would be DIME, diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. And so serving the national interests, our national security interests is not just the Army's problem nor is it just the Department of Defense's problem.  It is a national problem.  It is a national challenge; let's put it that way.  And it requires the integration of all elements of national power, which includes the interagency in the furtherance of this, and I might say that I doubt seriously whether in the near future, if not in the long term, whether we'll go to war in a large sense or a protracted sense without our friends which means a coalition, the diplomatic aspect of things.  And it will be done under the, under an umbrella of an information world that is operating at light speed and with a great deal of fidelity compared to what, how World War II was fought, as an example. Now, let me shift gears very quickly and then I'll get to some, to your questions. Transformation is a journey.  It is not a destination.  And transformation is not synonymous with modernization.  It is not only done in the material dimension of the process.  It involves doctrine.  It involves organization.  It involves training.  It involves the way we develop our leaders.  It involves the way we structure our installations; the way we train, equip, raise our soldiers; how we treat our families. Transformation is a journey that I will tell you we will never arrive at a destination on this if we're doing it correctly.  Now, how do I know that?  I don't know that for sure.  It's my belief.  But I spent an awful lot of my life in the special operations community, and I can tell you that we have the special operations force we have today because we failed in the hostage rescue attempt in Iran.  And I was there.  That's why we had that force. When I joined the special operations community, special operations was being put down the tank.  We were closing down Special Forces groups.  It was not the place for anybody that had a career in mind to be in armed forces.  It was the backwaters. And it was the failure in Iran that raised a serious national debate over our readiness, and then when we turned around, in 1983, and you might remember we had the Marines attacked in Beirut, 1983--241 Marines, sailors, and soldiers were killed in that instance--then we turned around and were in Grenada, and that was not a very pretty joint picture.  It reinforced many of the problems that were highlighted in the failure in Iran, and this whole movement of Goldwater Nichols was born out of failure.  And with Goldwater Nichols came the Nunn-Cohen amendment, which created U.S. SOCOM and other things.  And what I'm here to tell you is that in most of my life, we have been in transformation of our special operations community as a result of failure.  And it's taken us decades to build what we have.  If you were--you know, and I can't discuss it here in the open--but if you were to look at almost every aspect of what we have today in our special operations, those things in their current form did not exist at the time that we failed in Iran. So this notion that just because we're going to write a paper and throw it in the outbox; that transformation is going to appear and modernization is going to happen and culture is going to change and leaders are going to all of a sudden pop up.  Folks it doesn't happen that way.  It takes a long time.  It is journey, and on that journey you learn along the way. That's one of the reasons why when we take a look at the future combat system, we made a decision to push some of the less mature technologies, like the platforms, out, and to spiral those things onto our current force that we are interested in having, so that we are building a current Army modular force that will lead us to a future Army modular force and that we will learn and grow the doctrine, the organization, the leaders, the training, and all those things, as well as the materiel as we go on this path. It is not a leap from the--you know, I call it from the lawn to the front porch in one felled swoop.  It is--we have a ramp that we have to walk as we do that.  It is a large undertaking.  And it will take time. But I believe that what we are doing in terms of developing an Army that is balanced across the entire spectrum of conflict, which includes not only being able to dominate where the nation expects us to and that is in traditional forms of warfare, but also with formations that are agile enough, athletic enough--I call them pentathlete types of organizations that are thinking, adaptive, learning organizations filled by learning, adaptive people that we grow and educate, that will be able to operate across the spectrum to include in the non-traditional roles and stability and support operations and in engagement in shaping operations and all these other things that we don't consider to be war in the traditional sense to prosecute our nation's interests as we go. And then I'll just give you a last thing from my foxhole here.  I was amazed, quite frankly, coming back in the Army to see where we were.  None of our formations were the same.  There's no question we've got an Army that is very, very fine.  You know, I always hate to say best in the world--best in the world at what.  But we have an Army that is a formidable force, populated by some wonderful warriors, well equipped and very, very capable of doing things that traditionally we would do.  But we have to change to be relevant to where we are for the future.  And I was amazed quite frankly at the incremental modernization, at the incremental organization, at all of the kind of things that I found, you know, when I came back, because I certainly did not have insights into that before.  And it's directly related to the way our nation has always looked at land power and our Army--always--you know, I call it buying high, selling low.  You wouldn't do it that way in the stock market, and we shouldn't do it that way with our national defense, you know.  You get out of big World War II.  Down it crashes.  And then we find ourselves unready in Korea and up we go, buying at a premium.  And then we crash down after Korea and up we go for Vietnam.  Crash down after Vietnam; up we go for the next deal.  It's a rollercoaster ride, and we're paying a premium to do it that way, and we shouldn't.  And the thing that I would remind you is that over the last--in the decade of the '90s, as I say over the last 15 years, the Army, the active Army, had been cut 300,000 soldiers on the active force.  And, you know, I equate that to going and cutting down trees.  It's easy.  You know, gravity helps you. But now grow back 30,000 oak trees.  That takes time.  And there will be people that want us to grow mesquite and pine and all kinds of stuff, you know, that might grow faster, but that's not the way to do it.  We've got to grow back and invest in oak trees.  'Cause in the long term that's what it's going to take for us to--and this nation can afford to do that, should do that, and I'm very, very proud of the fact that it will.  I'm convinced. But it's going to take these kinds of dialogues.  We had elections in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had boots on the ground.  That's why we had those elections.  Now, I won't degrade anybody else's capabilities.  We certainly were enabled from other domains.  But it's going to be a long time in my view before we're going to be able to influence people, control terrain, and control populations, and to influence people in a personal way from outside, without putting people on the ground. And so my view is land power is very, very important dimension of this 21st century.  It's one this nation is going to have to figure out how to not only afford but to grow.  And we're going to have to do it in a way that--the pentathlete organizations, because, you know, as soon as you go and specialize in certain narrow spectrums, you know, this kind of deal does not give you time outs so that you can switch platoons.  You've got to be able to go through these things in these very seamless--in a very seamless fashion because phases do not happen in straight lines on a timeline.  And so this is a challenge that we're up to.  I believe we're on a path.  I believe it's going to take us a long time.  I do not believe it will be inexpensive.  But I believe the nation has no choice but to do this. And again, I'll just wrap up my comments here and tell you that I believe we're on this path, and I couldn't be more proud of the people that are putting this together, the people that are serving today.  And I will tell you that this nation has got a challenge manning our Armed forces that the nation is going to have to embrace.  All right?  We had a population in World War II of less than 140 million people in this country, and we had almost nine percent of that population in uniform.  Today, we're asking for 0.4 of one percent of a population that's twice as large as it was in World War II, more than twice as large. It's inconceivable to me that the nation would be unable to do that.  And so, anyway, I'll stop there because I know you have some questions and probably want to argue over some things, and I'll be glad to do it. I think the moderator is going to call on you. MR DEMUTH:  I will call on people.  If you could please wait for the roving mike and introduce yourself before your question.  Yes, sir.  Right here. MR. LITTLE:  Thank you.  General Schoomaker, I'm Rick Little with the Dallas Morning News.  This morning one of the themes of the morning I would say is that the Army needs to be bigger, even bigger than the 30,000 addition to end strength that you're doing now.  And a couple of speakers mentioned a hundred thousand as a logical number.  What's your feeling about how large the Army needs to be?  Does it need to expand beyond the 30,000?  And how do you get there?  If you believe that, how would you get there considering that right now you're having trouble meeting your recruiting goals? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  That's a great question, and it's a big question.  First of all, when I think of the Army, I think of the whole Army, not just the active force, and so I have to preface my answer to you by saying, number one, the size of the active force is directly dependent upon the assured availability of our reserve force structure.  And so that takes a paradigm shift and a change in expectations in terms of what the reserves are for.  And, if, in fact, we cannot make that shift, then the active force will have to be bigger.  If we're going to maintain the level of sustainment of land power at the level that we think we are on a one and three model, we either are going to have to rely on the reserves in a predictable force generation model, which we have developed and are starting to implement to help us with that or we're going to have to grow a larger force. Now, what happens is that's all great theoretically, but you bump right into the realities of the fiscal resources to do that, and manpower is a very expensive field.  And as I've testified, and I know many of you have heard me go on about this before, but if you take a look at the way our force was organized and the way that--both on the active and the reserve side--there's no--it makes no sense for us to go that direction until we have sorted out fixing the inefficiencies and the ineffectiveness of the force that we already have. For instance, there's over 80,000 overstructures, bases overstructure in the reserve components, which meant that, you know, with the end strength the reserves have, and I'm talking both the guard and reserve now, and that rounds off to about 555,000.  It's, in fact, more than 50 percent of our total Army.  Add another 80,000 to the top of that that are hollow spaces and now start letting that 555 roam around inside those spaces, and you instantly have unreadiness.  And then when you go call up for individuals out of that force, you make the holes bigger in those formations.  Then you go call up a truck company and now you got to get two or three truck companies to make one.  That's not readiness. You can't go and just count flags and say that I've got something.  You have to have real cohesive capability inside those. So part of what we are doing is getting rid of that overhead. We are creating structure that matters, and we are taking it down a little bit lower so that we're creating an account so we can take reserve soldiers and officers and send them to school.  It's called a TCHS account, like we have in our active force, so that people going to school can do so without hurting the readiness of the units they're in.  So that's part of it. Horizontally, we are moving over a hundred thousand people.  In fact, we've already recoded and moved over 42,000 slots--some ACRC; some within the AC; some within the RC; some crossing the lines--to get at and I think, Dave, I think you talked to it this morning, didn't you, on ACRC rebalancing?  That takes what we call high demand, low density units and reverses that trend.  If you're business and you had high demand, low density, that's called missing business opportunity.  You're missing market.  So we've got a lot of stuff that we don't need, and we got a shortage in things we do need.  We're cross leveling that, and that's what Dave was talking about this morning.  So that horizontal thing is taking place. And then finally what we are doing is we are changing our Army so that we have some standardization.  We'll have heavy units.  And by the way, the Bradley and the tank will be with us out to 2025, 2030.  And we're going to continue to spiral.  We're on our fifth model of the M-1 Abrams.  Okay?  We're going to continue to modernize those.  The same thing with our Bradleys, and we will have Stryker units and we will have light units.  And these units will be able to plug and play with each other and they'll be strategically deployable and all the rest of it. So, you know, that's kind of the essence of what we're doing on that, and going to your question about size, because you can't just say that it's about just, you know, putting another hundred thousand people in uniform, because if they go the same place we've had them and that same bankrupt structure, we're going to be paying a premium for, you know, on that deal for things that we don't need. Finally, let me just say one more thing.  We have to stabilize this Army.  We already have by going to unit rotation models and that includes in places like Korea, where we've already stabilized over 10,000 soldiers there, eliminated the amount of motion that's taking place in our Army, doing the same thing here in the states with the unit rotations inside that force generation model. So I've given you more answer than you wanted, but, you know, I really--you know, just to say, yeah, the Army needs to be bigger.  No, it doesn't outside of a context that's a very, very complex question. MR. LITTLE:  But the answer is not yet? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  The answer is we are growing the Army by 30,000 right now.  And you might notice that it has taken us time to do that.  We have raised our recruiting goal for the active force to 80,000.  That's 7,000 more soldiers than we recruited years previous, a year.  And we are retaining today 64,000 soldiers, which is 13,000 more than we retained in 2003.  And we're retaining them at over 100 percent. So people are staying with us.  We're doing our job.  What we need the nation to do is to get us people in the front door because they'll make the choice to stay if they come.  So the answer is we are growing the Army. Do we need to grow it more?  We will know as we go and find out, you know, how successful we are in this rebalancing and the rest of it.  But nevertheless, we've primed the pump, and we been working it now for a year and half.  So we're not losing any time. MR BAER:  Gordon Baer [ph.], Army retired.  Would you address the tension or the dilemma between creating elite and at least partially separate special operations forces and a unified Army, the kind of concept associated with your predecessor, General Shinseki? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  First of all, from my perspective, about better than 60 percent, I would say almost 70 percent of the special operations capability in SOCOM is Army.  And as far as I'm concerned they are in the Army.  And we're taking care of them like they're in the Army.  We equip them, not the special operations procured equipment, but the Army common equipment, in aviation, in the ground elements, in logistics and all the rest of it, so as far as I'm concerned they are in the Army.  And we are not separate. We are, from everybody I've talked to, our division commanders, our brigade commanders, every time I'm in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan, people are telling me that we're working closer together between conventional, light, heavy and soft units than we've ever worked in the past.  And I see that all as a very, very positive trend.  So I don't know exactly where you're coming from with the question, but I do not see, I do not see a barrier there. There are clearly capabilities we have that are--that it's not a matter of eliteness.  It's a matter of certain special things that they do that don't routinely operate with conventional forces as much as other parts of the soft community do, but I do believe that we're in a great--am I answering your question or am I? MR. BAER:  Yes.  In referring to the traditional tension between the major unit, the large unit Army, and the small unit arguably independent units that has been an historical problem at the personnel level, the operational level, and otherwise. GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  I, quite frankly, I didn't see that towards the end of my time in soft, and I don't see it now.  But I would not say that you couldn't find anecdotal evidence that there might be some tensions there, but what I've seen is a great deal of cooperation, and I know our Army is supporting our soft functions both with, you know, professional development, war college selections, Leavenworth selections, SAMS rates, promotion rates of our soft portion of the force.  I do not see what I experienced when I I was a junior officer in that business. MR. TILSON:  General Schoomaker, John Tilson from IDA. GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Hi, John.  How you doing? MR. TILSON:  Nice to see you.  We, now that the Army is moving to a three in one rotation scheme that is similar to that which the Navy and Marine Corps have had for years and which the Air Force has recently adopted as well, with the AEF, I wonder if the Army is beginning to look at the possibility of aligning all of these schedules so that you have the possibility of creating truly joint organizations that can train together in advance and be truly prepared to be joint when they arrive in the theater?  And if you haven't been, I wonder if you would--if you support that idea? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, I think there is--first of all, I do support it to a degree.  What we are doing is aligning the force generation model of our active and our reserve component cycles so that there is some habitual association--things like civil affairs, PSYOP, special operators and things like battlefield airmen, which John Jumper--we're working an awful lot of this between the Chiefs in certain areas, like logistics, battle command, joint fires.  So John Jumper, for instance, has agreed that he will increase the number of battlefield airmen he has available, and we will insert them into our formations during this cycle, and they will stay and train together when they do it. I don't know how much bigger--I mean how much bigger joint organization you're interested in, but my belief is we then go through some of the training cycles the joint forces command, for instance, has where we merge multiservice organizations into joint organization and fight them under JTF or joint force command constructs that then build the kind of associations and expertise. I'm a little bit not for building permanent organizations because you're as likely to get them wrong as you are to get them right at the macro size. MR. TILSON:  But my question.  [Off mike.] GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Yeah.  Right.  Right.  Right.  And this is the kind of thing that we are talking about a lot.  For instance, the National Training Center in Nellis is right over the mountain range there.  There's no reason why we can't have a great deal more joint interface in how we do that.  In our BCTP, we can have a joint context. As you know, we're running a joint force land component commanders course that all the services attend, where we're building that, our unified quest that we are going to run with joint forces command again this year.  It used to be called the Army Transformation War Game; it has gone to a joint war game, a joint Army--joint forces command war game.  That will all be done in a joint context. So we clearly are moving I think very aggressively in a direction that will drive, you know, the joint lessons that we need to have. MR. MILLER:  General, [I am] Bob Miller with a non-profit called Hope for America.  This morning and a lot recently we've heard much about what seems clearly to be to our advantage and that is the high quality of the all volunteer force.  One trajectory that's accompanied the development of the all volunteer force has been the gradual increase in the employment of women in combatant categories and I realize it has been politically contested and costly and complicated and recently has produced unprecedented numbers of casualties.  The New York Times yesterday had a big special if you've seen it featuring some of the maimed women recently, and there's no question that women have been putting themselves courageously and have distinguished themselves even in battle, remarkably. But as I read this again, it raises a moral question that I just wonder how is reconciled.  So the question is in two parts really.  One is do you and the Army see, as some of us have been trained to understand as youngsters, that men have a moral responsibility to be protective of women?  And if the Army holds to that or if you hold to that, then it would be interesting to understand how we reconcile that. And if we do not hold that there is such a moral responsibility, then does the all volunteer force stand unable to recruit and commission men who do commit themselves to such a sense of moral obligation to be protectors of women rather than employing them in hostile and dangerous circumstances to be killed and to kill. GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  I think we have a moral responsibility to protect the weak regardless of gender, and I do not see this as a gender issue.  First of all, we have a policy, and OSD policy, that says that we will not assign females to the infantry armor and Special Forces organizations that are trained, organized, and equipped to routinely close with and destroy the enemy.  And we have an Army policy that adds to that, not an OSD policy, but an Army policy that adds to that says we will not co-locate these women at the time that those units are undergoing those operations. The realities of the battlefield are such that this is not an issue of whether or not women will become injured and maimed anymore than anybody else will, anymore than children will or elderly or males.  The fact is that I think we have a moral responsibility to prepare those women that are serving in our armed forces to number one, have the very best chance of surviving by providing them with the warrior skills and tasks that, are required and, number two, make sure that as we operate that we operate in such a way that reduces the probability that any soldier will be placed in a position to be injured or killed.  So that's kind of the way that I approach that. I don't know if I understood your total question, but I don't happen to share a feeling that somehow that women do not have either the capability or the responsibility to share in the service the country, and I think that that's--we've now had a volunteer force for over 20 years, and the women play such an extraordinary important part in what we do that I think that we're good to go so far. MR. MILLER:  The other part was whether men who do hold that moral commitment are unsuitable then for a role in the Army. GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, that's an interesting question I would never have thought about.  I would say no.  But, you know, I think that we all have different little things that--but, you know, that may differ from one another on some things, but I mean I think you're going in the direction of conscientious objectors kind of status.  I mean something that would be similar to that, and I don't see that as--I mean, you know, there are some people that would say, you know, men and women can't even share the same tornado shelter in Oklahoma.  I mean there are.  I mean there's quite a wide spectrum here on what all this means.  I think that maybe since we're killing 40,000 people a year on the highways, they shouldn't drive.  Okay.  That's very dangerous, too. [Laughter.] GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  I mean I'm not trying to make fun of it.  I'm telling you that I think that, you know, you can expand this argument to an incredible deal.  I think that we are paying fair--we are paying attention to the realities, of where we are now.  If you were to ask me a different question which I don't want to go into here today, you know, do I agree with all of that, that's another issue.  When I'm out of uniform, I'll share that with you.  But& [Laughter.] MR. DEMUTH:  This gentleman in the back here.  This gentleman in the back.  Yes, sir. MR. HICKSON:  Robert Hickson, formerly a professor at the Joint Special Operations University, which you founded.  General Schoomaker, in light of your point about [strategic] anticipation, and of other, foreign strategic cultures, what are irregular warfare cultures like China, with their traditions of special operations forces (not just their DADUI, but other special units) doing in connection with special technical operations [STO] that you think we ought to be studying in order to help to anticipate what others are doing in this environment, as you've talked about? In other words, the studying of other foreign special operations forces, in the strategic sense, and what the Russian Spetznaz are doing -- even to help others like the Iranians; and should we be studying these developments -- the conjunction of special operations forces with special technical operations [SOF + STO] -- in other cultures; and what priorities would you give -- which countries would we have the most to learn from? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, first of all, I don't think we are destined to go to war with anybody.  I think we can do things that will make some of those self-fulfilling prophecies, but my view is that the whole idea here is for us to further our national interests.  And it s certainly not in our national interest to get into war if we can avoid it. On the other hand, as defense soldiers and as military people, I think we always have to be looking over the hood ornament as to where, you know, where the potential threats may come from and what will be the nature of those threats and how will they manifest themselves.  So when you take places, well, all over the globe, you can rack and stack, you know, as you know the intelligence community does and take a look at where we most likely need to prepare ourselves for. Special operations forces in particular I think, you know, as you know, some of this is a little bit of a loaded question, I mean this is a not a question for today.  It was a question for 20 years ago.  Okay?  All you got to do is follow the footprints in the sand back to where all this stuff started, and you know we're late on this issue.  Okay?  I mean it's amazing to me that so many people think this all started with 9/11.  I mean we've been on this path for a long time, and it's time people woke up to it, and got with it, because there are tigers in the world and there's real capability out there.  And we are not going to go into the 21st century where that is not going to be-- that will not have conflict of some form in it.  And I would tell you that, you know, as long as we are dominating the top end of the spectrum the way we are today, it's most likely that we will have that conflict down on the lower end of the scale.  And so we're going to have to be prepared in being able to deal with it all. Am I banging on your drum at all or not? MR WATTENBERG:  Ben Wattenberg at AEI.  I was not here for the morning session, but in case it wasn't mentioned, I would just like to--I say I was not here in the morning session, but in the event that it was not mentioned, I would like to salute you and the United States Army for a job well done, sir. [Applause.] GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, thank you. MR. WATTENBERG:  But you don't get off quite that easily.  You mentioned a moment ago about expanding the argument.  I dabble periodically in politics, and I wonder what your thoughts are given the experience of opposition, of sometimes vicious opposition, that we saw in the Iraq situation, whether you think it is plausible or even possible to reinstitute a draft in the United States in this era? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, I think--I don't put anything out of the realm of possibility, but I certainly don't subscribe to it.  And I do that for several reasons, and I won't go into all of them.  But one of them is I served like many did in this room here in a draft army, and if we were to go to a draft army, I will tell you unequivocally the Army would have to be a lot bigger than it is today.  Because the investment we're making in our force today, you know, growing these oak trees and the fact that, you know, it's not really until you get up into the high 20's and the low 30's if you really want to optimize your warriors, it takes that kind of an investment.  With a draft army, it's very, very difficult to do, as you know, with the short period of service.  And that means you have a tremendous amount of turning and retraining and all the rest of that.  And it is a different thing. What we are enjoying today is an extraordinary army that, in spite of all the people that sometimes like to give us a hard time, we have an extraordinary group of young people that are thoughtful.  They're learning.  They're adaptive, and they're tough.  This is a great generation of folks.  And they are staying with us, and they get it.  And they truly are capable of operating on a broader spectrum. I did not see that.  Don't get me wrong.  We had wonderful soldiers at the time that I served in the draft army, but they weren't with us long enough to do the kinds of things that are our soldiers are doing today.  So I don't--you know, I would not I don't want to see us go to it.  First of all, it's very difficult to make it a fair process.  Secondly, from the practical standpoint as a soldier, it isn't the best way to go. MR. DEMUTH:  We have time for one last question.  The gentleman in the back, please. MR. BENDER:  Thanks, General.  Brian Bender with the Boston Globe.  Given that much of the discussion here today about the future of the Army much of the point of departure is the operation in Iraq, can you give us any insight, your own insight as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that advises the President on how you see the situation playing out there, and particularly any prospects for a significant reduction of U.S. troops somewhere in the near term, in the next year or so? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, I think and I don't want to duck your question but the fact of the matter is I don't know.  I know what General Casey and General Abizaid tell us.  And what I have seen as they briefed in the things that the Joint Chiefs as we've looked at things, I think what they are saying is about as close to the truth as we could know right now, and that is there is an opportunity if things continue and if we continue to see the kind of great progress that's taking place in standing up Iraqi security services, as the political process takes traction, as they continue to stand up and mature, I would say yes. But in terms of the magnitude of it, it would be misleading for me to even guess. But we are prepared to continue to support the combatant commanders over there as long as it takes to do this, and that's not to say that this isn't difficult and that we're not carrying a great burden.  But the good news is as we continue to build this Army modular force what we are seeing is the more brigade modules we're building, the greater the dwell time between deployments has become. Last year, our dwell time was on average actually, about 15 months ago, it was about 1.2 years between deployments.  We are now up over 1.8, so we're approaching two-year dwell between deployments.  If you look at the Fourth Infantry Division, the 101st, as examples, that's what you get.  Third Infantry Division just went back over there, and they're better than a year and a half, approaching almost two years dwell.  And so that's a direct result of increasing the number of deployable entities that we have within our structure. There was a question over there.  I don't know if you want to do it. MR. DEMUTH:  You want to do one more? GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  I can.  I mean.  I'll probably be sorry I did it. MR. NANCE:  Hi.  Scott Nance with Defense Today.  I was hoping you might be able to elaborate a little bit more on what you're discussing with the FCS Program and the restructuring of it, and just talk about the implications of that as to the delay in terms of what parts of the program will end up being delayed and how that will affect the program, in particular the acquisition, platform acquisition, parts of the program. GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  Well, I'm glad you asked that.  So I am glad that he got to ask that question. First of all, last year, you know we accelerated the FCS Program.  Now, we say we accelerate it.  What we are doing is spiraling maturing technologies out of the Future Combat Systems Program on to the current force.  And because of this and I'll give you an example.  Pete Corelli, commander of the First Calvary Division, and when I was over there this past Christmas, he commanded the First Calvary Division in Baghdad.  He was directly providing battle command, command and control for 62 battalions 62 battalions.  That's a you know, for those that don't want to do the math, that's greater than five divisions.  It's better than normally two corps worth.  And he was doing it out of that division headquarters because of some of the enabling technologies we gave him.  By the way, one of those brigades that he had was an Iraqi brigade, commanded by an Iraqi general that was integrated.  And this is in the deal. So as we can spiral technologies and it's not just battle command, and it's not just digits.  It's things like on the UAVS that we can tie down to tactical levels, for things like radios and common ground stations so that we can have better joint connectivity and nodes 'cause we do this.  It enables our current force in ways that starts acting like the future modular force.  And, therefore, we start organizing.  We start developing the doctrine.  We start training the soldiers and leaders to act like we want them to lead in this future force as part of the transformational path. And so that's why we accelerated FCS.  But when we accelerated these technologies that we're spiraling into the current force, we push the platforms out until they could provide us with something that would give us a significant improvement over the current platforms that we have. So until we've got something that is a huge leap over the M-1 Abrams tank, we're not going to move in that direction.  Until we have something that's a huge leap over what the Bradley will give us, we're not going to move in that direction. And, as you know, part of this was taking Comanche and improving the Army aviation piece. So, that's what we did last year, and that's basically what I presented and did in the programmatic side.  What you just saw the Secretary of the Army do is come back and take a look and say wait a minute now.  Let's take a look at the business side of what you've done, and can we do this better. And so what he now wants to do and he had a press conference he and I stood up in the Pentagon the other day he wants to move from a OTA-based contract to a FAR-based contract.  And I just exceeded my level of understanding about all of that.  Okay. [Laughter.] GENERAL SCHOOMAKER:  But what I understand is it's a matter of where you start and what clauses you add or subtract.  And since the OTA was basically designed for the time in which the FCS was being developed under DARPA, where it was appropriate for using those kinds of contract vehicles, it is now going in a different way. And so what he wants to do and I take his word for it, because he studied this very hard, he thinks that this conversion can take place without delaying the program and without having much effect whatsoever.  But it gives us a better base, contractual base, for the Army to do its responsibilities in overseeing the program.  So.  Okay? Listen.  Thank you very much for your attention.  You know, thanks for engaging on land power, and we really need your help, number one, to talk to America about the nobility of service and our armed forces, especially at this time, and number two, to recognize the great service that our young men and women, civilians, and our family members are doing and for taking on this very, very important issue of land power, because I remind you again we had those elections because we had boots on the ground and we had people that could help people, and we had people on the ground that could get into somebody's face when they had to, and do whatever what was required.  Thanks very much. MR. DEMUTH:  Thank you, General. Panel III: COL KILLEBREW:  Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, those of you who were here from the morning, my name is Bob Killebrew.  Tom Donnelly has thrown me the only softball he's ever thrown me in that I get to moderate a panel of very distinguished speakers sitting on my right.  This will be the easiest job I have had to do in a long time. I'm sure all of these speakers are so well known to you I don't need to go into detail, but I'll just quickly cover the waterfront.  To my immediate right, General, U.S. Army retired Barry McCaffrey, former Commander of U.S. Forces SOUTHCOM, former Commander of the 24th Infantry Division, former distinguished member of the Vietnamese Airborne Division, and a genuine American hero. On his right, Michael Vickers (ph), former CIA case officer, former Special Forces officer, with expensive experience in Afghanistan and Central America, now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. On his immediate right, Brigadier General David Fastabend, the Commander of the U.S. Army Futures Center down at TRADOC, the gentleman who had the reputation as the smartest Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, then the smartest Colonel, then the smartest Brigadier, and also bears the distinction of being the most sued U.S. Army officer in history. On his right, Michael O'Hanlon, a distinguished scholar in defense issues at the Brookings Institution.  You've seen him quite frequently on almost everything to do with national defense, a brilliant, incisive mind, and I'm sure we're going to enjoy hearing from him. And on his right and batting clean-up is Major Don Vandergriff, probably the most distinguished writer and speaker on military personnel policies that I know of, certainly, and he will I'm sure give us some insights into 21st century military, and in particular, Army, personnel policies. I'd like to ask the speakers to hold your presentations if you can to about 10 minutes so we'll have time for questions at the end.  Tom Donnelly has told me that he will be batting clean-up, but I plan to hold Tom off as long as questions keep coming. If there are no questions from the audience, I'd like to turn this over to General McCaffrey. GEN McCAFFREY:  Thank you.  I see a lot of friends in the audience, my high IQ friend Ralph Peters who just wrote one of the best articles I have read hands down on looking towards the future in the U.S. Army, U.S. ground combat power.  And Colonel Mark Rock (ph), where are you, Mark?  Probably he's out hitting the food bar.  A terrific JCS staff officer; P.T. Mickleshek (ph), an old friend, Tom Donnelly, thank you, sir, to be here and the other board members, particularly my friend Dr. O'Hanlon.  He has been such a welcome lecturer at West Point in my class.  Dave, you are the smartest Army officer we know.  I didn't realize you were the most sued, but I'm glad to be part of it.  Mike Vickers and I have been on TV a lot together.  And Don, I'm proud of your work and I'm glad to be part of this panel. Ten minutes, I don't know.  I wrote last night seven pages of sort of an outline of some thoughts to offer.  Let me see if I can summarize it. Our panel in theory is talking about doctrine, training, equipping, and the easy one is training only in the sense that we actually know what we're doing there once we understand the force structure and the doctrine.  And I would suggest that you can't have a discussion on our topic unless, number one, you've agreed upon the threat that you're concerned about and you have thought through not only the likely threats but our vulnerabilities and, therefore, what you need to do defend, deter, mitigate or defeat.  We rarely are very good at talking about the threats. We have a conversation at the top secret CRYPTO level, and about an hour and a half later it's in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times.  So there is an element of self-paralysis to bluntly and aggressively dealing with what we think might be the threats in the coming 15 years, not next month. If you can't do a threat, you can't do a strategy.  And by the way, the strategy isn't an Army strategy, it isn't an armed forces strategy, it's how do we bring together the elements of national power to mitigate, or deter, or defeat these threats that we have decided upon.  If we have a strategy, then we imagine capabilities, military capabilities that we either have now or lack and we go out to the industrial base and we say, can you produce these capabilities? Some of the military does that extremely well the Air Force.  I always like to hold them up as an example of where they can see a stealth technology requirement, they're willing to invest in it, they'll work with DARPA, and 15 years later they'll have the capability they require.  The Army tends to be a bit slower at sorting that out.  So capabilities, and then and only then can you write down and articulate a doctrine which is vitally important to the Army, I would argue to the Marine Corps also.  It annoys the Air Force and the Navy when we get wound up in thousand-page tomes and acronyms, but it is extremely important that we have a doctrine and that we teach it to our Majors. And it takes us 5 years to get a doctrine, I would argue, to permeate our institution.  It's all well and good to have an informed conversation around a conference table.  We have to get it where we've written it down, we've got protocols and methods, tactics and techniques.  And then finally, we sort out a training system and a leadership training system to employ that doctrine. So, in theory that's where we are.  Where is the consensus on the threat matrix?  It doesn't exist, which causes me enormous concern because I would argue right now, for example, one of the things that most amuses me is we're doing BRAC where we're deciding on infrastructure of future use and yet there is no congressional consensus, which is where this supposedly starts and where our national security strategy is.  The last panel today has its work cut out for it. Now look, it would be fun to reiterate some of the breath-taking insights that many of us who are pundits like to throw out.  One, that the former Soviet Union is gone, never to reappear.  No tank battles, no big air stream fights in Western Europe, no B-2 penetrator missions into 15,000 nuclear weapons that have already raised the dust, and now we're flying a B-2 with gravity bombs looking for SS-25 batteries.  So we know we don't need to do that. Yes, we understand technology has jumped ahead 1,000 years in 40 years.  GPS, medical, stealth technology, night vision, computers, precision munitions, et cetera.  We ve got that.  We understand that.  Yes, we understand old ideologies have collapsed and new ones have appeared, fascism and communism.  There are a couple of goofy commies left in Cuba and North Vietnam, but basically it's disappeared. Now we have radical Islam.  We have got the convergence of drugs, terrorism and crime.  We have the failure in places where the nation-state, which Ralph writes about, the failure of tribal structures, the failure of democracy to achieve the expectations that people thought. So what do we have?  We have a revolution in military affairs or is it by and large the same threat scenario we used to see except in the area of homeland security?  I would offer that at least as a hypothesis that the New Deal is protecting 290 million people here at home in an environment where in fact nobody is in charge and apparently we like it that way. What's the challenge to our doctrine?  The first priority, and it never gets said in a conference like this, is the deterrence, defense, mitigation or retaliation against weapons of mass destruction.  That's the deal.  So if you're an Army officer, you still have to put that down as the number one priority, what's our piece of protecting the nation from WMD:  preserve and modernize the U.S. nuclear force, create a national and regional ballistic missile defense and pay for it and accept the tradeoffs to do such a thing. Some of them are non-Army tasks:  create a rational border control system not with the United States Army or the National Guard, but with the Border Patrol or other institutions.  Create new alliances, treaties, legal concepts. The second priority is preserve the high-intensity combat capability of the United States Army.  At the end of the day there is a low probability of us fighting the North Koreans in the next 36 months, about 5 percent maybe for discussion's sake.  We'd better be able to carry out that mission.  We'd better preserve the air/land/sea force to fight high-intensity combat. The third priority is how do we carry out, as in Ralph's latest article, punitive raids, seize key political objectives, evacuate humans in peril, do counterinsurgency, general ground combat missions.  I would argue to include peacekeeping, peace making and that sort of grab bag of requirements. Then finally, how do we build a new National Guard, probably a larger National Guard, capable of offering 54 state and territorial governors the capability to carry out the homeland security mission? We have some problems.  The Army and the Marine Corps are grossly understructured, have inadequate manpower, and inadequate budgetary authority.  We are headed towards the cliff.  We're going to start unraveling in the coming 24 months.  We're hoping we achieve our purpose in Iraq just rapidly enough to save the force from fracturing. We have to build a new National Guard.  This is a non-Army mission.  If you want the Army to survive and act effectively in ground combat power in the coming century, we have to build other institutions that currently don't exist.  The Border Patrol was 5,000 people when I started.  It's now 10,000, and it ought to be 45,000 people.  The Coast Guard, currently around 35,000, ought to be 70,000 people and a more robust air and maritime capability. We need an Gendarmerie Nationale, not the U.S. Army, 25,000 people, a federal marshall's service capable of doing law enforcement, training and peacekeeping.  We need a county-based public health service, not the U.S. armed forces to protect us from some of these WMD threats.  And we need an FBI capable of being British MI-5 instead of a reactive evidence-based law-enforcement agency. We have two other tasks it seems to me.  One is we have to build an intelligence system that's adequate for the new threats, but it will never see enemy forces adequately below brigade level.  Why would we build an Army or an Army's doctrine or its equipment and change our assumptions about firepower and armor if we had to assume perfect knowledge of the enemy on the ground?  I think the brigade commanders, battalion commanders, and OIF knew about the same thing that a battalion commander at the Battle of the Bulge or at Tawara did, almost nothing. And then finally, as to our doctrine and our equipment, it seems to me we ought to be cautions about suboptimizing to meet the deployment expectation of Iraq.  We have to fight the war.  The Army leadership we have, thank God, I think is brilliant.  Pete Schoomaker, our new Secretary is a technological whiz, Dick Cody is probably the best Vice Chief we ever had in the Army.  We have a new fellow, Ben Griffin out there at AMC.  We have the leadership there to fight the war.  We have to make sure we look beyond this war to the next conflict.  On that note, I will defer to my colleagues.  Thanks very much. MR. VICKERS:  I was asked by my good friend Tom Donnelly to assess Army transformation, and I'm going to reinforce a number of things that General Keane said this morning.  I think he was pretty much on the right track. Before I do, there is a common misperception about transformation, that militaries rarely do it and our military today isn't doing it, and you're either on or off, you're doing it or you're not doing it, and that really is inaccurate. The more serious question is whether you're transforming to solve the critical problems.  You can make a lot of choices about ways to advance military capabilities, but will they be more relevant?  Are they the critical problems that if you don't get them right will cause you problems?  When you look at transformation historically, that's really one of the key separators, did you address the right strategic problem in your efforts. I hope what I'll offer here is a constructive critique.  I think Army transformation while making enormous progress in a lot of areas is focused to some extent on the wrong problems for reasons that I'd like to address. We have a great Army today.  We will need a great Army tomorrow.  It's really important to get this right.  I want to add that unlike some critics of Army transformation, I don't think those who disagree with me or my views are stupid or evil.  As Eliot Cohen wisely said this morning, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding this and there are a lot of choices confronting our decision makers. I'm going to talk about two topics, basically.  First, very briefly, what are the core elements of Army transformation, and then spend a bit more time on the drivers of it.  And then I'm going to talk about what we might do to realign it a bit. Two flagship elements to transformation as General Schoomaker covered.  The first is the modularity to the organizational redesign of the Army to go from 33 to 43 or 48 active maneuver brigades and equivalent growth in the Army National Guard.  And then the future of combat systems, the modernization program comprising some 18 separate major systems of manned ground vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, autonomous systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and a bunch of command and control communications and intelligence systems. The future combat system has an R&D estimated between $21 and $25 billion and a procurement cost of some $115 to $145 billion or so to equip 15 units of action or loosely brigade-size forces, but that's not exactly a good parallel. Now, the key point as General Schoomaker mentioned this morning, is that Army transformation is not just about some distance future force.  There is no strategy pause as a number of folks thought in the 1990s.  We're a nation at war, and it's not just confined to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's a global protracted war against Islamic extremism. So first, what are the transformation drivers?  I'd like to suggest that there really have been three of them that have animated Army efforts:  the quest for strategic speed; the perceived ability and desire to do open battle standoff attack encapsulated in the future concept; see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively.  Then finally rerollling and expanding our rotation base for protracted irregular warfare. I would like to suggest to you that the first two of these while challenges and goals are perhaps of some value, are not as important as other challenges we face.  Even the third may be of limited temporal strategic utility. First, about strategic speed.  I would argue it's not our problem.  If we did the first part of OIF in 4 days as opposed to 19 days, we're at the ninety-ninth percentile in terms of our ability to conventionally change a medium regime.  We used to worry a lot, my friend Bob Killebrew here is a big veteran of the 82nd, about speed bumps, about light forces, early entry forces going into theater and then having their combat power fall off right before follow-on forces could really build up and we had this gap that we needed to close. In a number of scenarios, the precision revolution hasn't affected everything in warfare, but it has improved America's ability to kill in the open pretty substantially.  I'd also like to suggest that strategic speed is largely irrelevant in irregular warfare.  Again if you think of that, early entry forces to follow-on forces, our problem isn't in that gap.  In Iraq it's occurring well after we had the follow-on forces there, and in the global war on terrorism it's before we even deploy anybody, or at least large forces.  So we need to really rethink this quest for speed. As many said in OIF, speed does kill, but it's operational speed, it's rapid operational maneuver to exploit the effects of fires as we did so fantastically in OIF.  It's not how fast we got to Iraq, it's how fast we moved once there. Now yes, it would be good to have a more robust corps-sized Army and Marine forces as an early entry force that can seize the initiative and exploit our early opportunities, but I think we're way overdoing it in the quest to make essentially the whole Army, or a big chunk of it, more responsive than strategic speed. Even more problematic I think is the desire to kill at a distance.  You know, if there is one problem America has solved right now, it's that in the open, and we don't need an Army to do that.  The Army has the technological capacity to do that in the future.  We just don't need it for that.  As I say, it's largely driven by technological opportunity, but also by the shift from physical to information protection.  If you have less physical protection, you're going to want to kill folks before they close with you. If we take joint or interdependent seriously, we ought to let the Air Force do that.  As a good friend of mine, recently retired Secretary of the Air Force said, if the Army is worried about killing at a distance, someone needs to tell them we have an Air Force that does that very well right now; there are other things we can't do. On the rerolling, the big challenge that we face, I think modularity is a very, very good thing, but there are size limits as well as strategic limits on our ability to do protracted occupation.  If you ask planners, are we doing okay in Iraq?  Yeah, we're doing okay.  What if we have the same problem in Iran?  We'll probably need a different strategy.  We're probably not going to follow the one because the force requirements are just too high.  What if it's Pakistan?  That's six times the size of Iraq.  We definitely need a new strategy.  Bad thought.  We don't even want to think about it.  So 20 percent increases in the size of the Army aren't going to address those problems.  They may address others, but they're not going to address those and so we're going to have to go back and think.  The key to irregular warfare is building indigenous capacity, and that's the path we're on now. I will say one of the things about land power in the future, we will need high-intensity land forces as General McCaffrey just said to eloquently, and one of the things you can see about modern wars is that your requirement for land power, labor intensity, goes up after so-called major combat operations are over.  Whether it's Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq, we see the same pattern and so we ought to expect that pattern to continue. Now something about technological readiness.  The FCS program is on schedule and on budget.  There is a lot of promising technology, the Fire Scout unmanned helicopter, an advanced robotic vehicle, some active protection systems, and I think it's precisely right to spin those off into the current force. What is it now?  The Government Accountability Office, had critiques about the FCS.  I think as typical, they can't see their noses past their faces in the sense they say 52 of 53 technologies are unproven.  That's usually the case with transformation technologies.  My concern is not that they don't work, but they do work, that we invest a lot in killing at a distance which is what the critique is, if you don't have the network you can't kill at a distance, when we really need an Army for other things, fighting in a clinch and others. We have slipped FCS to the right a bit, but we're still supposed to deploy the first vehicle, a non-line-of-sight cannon out of the politics of the Crusader decision, which is probably the least important of the eight systems I think we'll deploy right now, and we need to lock in a decision or so this year.  It's my belief that this is too soon for manned combat systems.  The advances aren't quite there yet in lethality and survivability and in mobility.  They're now talking 30 tons or something like that.  And I think we ought to wait on the major platforms while spinning off all these other wonderful technologies into the force. So then how to make the Army transformation more relevant to the problems we face?  Doing so, I argue, will require three things.  We're focusing on three key challenges.  One is projecting ground power against a nuclear-armed adversary.  Most of the folks we worry about today in combat are getting both missiles and nuclear weapons, and that will fundamentally challenge our power projection. The second is developing overmatching capabilities in urban warfare.  That's where our adversaries go to challenge us these days.  They don't want to be out in the open where we're going to blast them. Third, improving capabilities for protracted transnational and intrastate irregular warfare. Throughout the '90s and beyond there were some false assumptions made about a number of these things as I think the panelists this morning said:  we're not going to do irregular warfare, we really don't do cities.  We're going to send in the allies to do cities.  Again, not to critique planners, the future is inherently uncertain, but we need to try to make midcourse corrections on some of these things. On the nuclear adversary, it would be a very risky bet right now to say missile defense will solve this problem and so we may need distributed concepts of operation to be able to project power against someone that can shoot at our ports and airfields.  High-speed, shallow draft vessels aren't going to solve this problem either.  It'll make it somewhat better, but it's not going to solve it. What that may mean is, the Army may have an operational insertion problem that it really needs to deal with.  The Air Force and the Navy supposedly are going to take care of the strategic mobility problem, but actually getting forces in so they can't get whacked by missiles and nuclear weapons may require a bigger investment in operational air than the Army is currently planning. Urban warfare.  Obviously, unmanned systems will feature prominently, and that is really one of the big job ones besides rapid exploitation of fires for high-end combat. Now let me turn to irregular warfare.  As I mentioned, we confront both a globally distributed transnational adversary and insurgents whose operations are largely confined to one country.  To defeat the global adversary, we're going to probably require an expansion of so-called white SOTF, our Special Forces Groups, principally, and black SOTF, our Special Missions Units.  You can't mass-produce SOTF and there are quality limits, but we also need a realignment.  We still have a lot of our SOTF oriented toward Latin America, Europe and Africa and way too little toward Asia, the Middle East and South Asia.  We need to beef up those areas. General Schoomaker and others mentioned this morning that one of our big problems in intelligence is that we can't find our transnational adversary in a lot of cases.  So one of the big issues this year in the quadrennial defense review is whether we need to expand defense human.  President Bush has recently directed that my old outfit, the CIA, expand by 50 percent its clandestine service.  Whether that's enough, whether it's the right mix of folks or not remains to be seen, but we may need to get more in this business as the Defense Department. One of the issues that we may need to do to look at protracted irregular warfare is create an advisory corps.  We had one in Vietnam.  The gentlemen both to my left did a number of those.  We've moved away from that area.  So again to make up for the inherent limitations on SOTF force structure, we may need conventional officers who specialize or at least spend part of their careers doing advisory efforts. There has been a big debate about whether you should create specialized stability operations units.  The Office of Force Transformation has advocated this, some folks at NDU, or whether general purpose forces.  I would argue we have no choice but to do general purpose forces because of the rotation base requirements.  So rather than having one or two divisions that specialize in this, we're going to have to move by rerolling, move the mix slightly between high-end combat and counterinsurgency in our general purpose formations. I would also like to suggest that rather than looking organizationally at the future Army that's made up of Armor units of action, we're going to have some 22 of them I think in the force structure, FCS units, Stryker units and light units, that we might consider combining these capabilities at a little lower level than we currently plan to. The Marines do this.  If we look at the need for hybrid forces between high-end combat and irregular warfare, we may need to move the Army a little more in the direction of the Marine Corps.  Now that makes the Marine Corps uncomfortable, but I think that's where we may need to go.  In the Cold War we were thinking about just the reverse. An Air Force war planner I know from OIF said, how do you get the Army to move really rapidly, and they did move very rapidly during major combat operations?  You put the Marines on their flank and you get them to race them.  Both forces did quite well, I would like to suggest, and so we might look at where we can go organizationally. General Schoomaker talked about conventional SOTF integration.  If you look at some of the operations in the Western desert and elsewhere, there were some remarkable things done by putting small amounts of Armor and truck-mounted missile artillery together with SOTF, and I think we can do more of that in the future. My final comment on future combat systems, as I said, I think that there is a lot of remarkable technology.  I think the Army is on the right path in terms of spiraling it into the force.  I would wait for major platforms--until we can get a little bigger leap ahead. BG FASTABEND:  As usual I'm starting out behind.  Even before I make any remarks I need to make three refutations.  First of all, Bob Killebrew got a little overenthusiastic when he introduced me as the Commander of the Futures Center.  I am merely the Deputy Director of the Futures Center, and because I value that job I'd like to publicly clarify.  The Futures Center is led very ably by Lieutenant General Curran. The second is that I'm the most sued General Officer in the Army.  I was the most sued General Officer in the Army when I commanded a division in the Corps of Engineers, but now my successor is the most sued officer in the Army. And finally, I'd just like to on principle refute the allegation that I'm the smartest man in the Army because every speaker made a point of saying to what an extent the Army is in an intellectual deficit and so I don't think it's very complimentary to be described as the smartest man in the Army. I'm going to spend probably a portion of my presentation refuting what other people said and trying to add value to the themes that have been talked about. It is said that the Army has made bad decisions over time, and that is certainly true.  I wonder why that is?  I think it has to do with the type of business that you're in when you're in the Army or in the military, you are, as Clausewitz pointed out, in a duel where you have a thinking, adaptive adversary.  So your future when you're a soldier is not only unpredictable, it's counterpredictable.  The choices you make will drive your adversaries to go in other directions. So it is true that at the end of Vietnam we honestly thought that the country wanted us to win the Cold War, and we believed them when they told us your biggest threat is the 8th Guard s Army over there across the border.  We optimized the Army for that, and we did walk away from the irregular mission to a large extent. Imagine if we had not.  If we had ignored the Cold War and had optimized the Army to refight Vietnam and we were the best counterinsurgency force in history ever and were virtually perfect at that job, and forget about Panama and Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, somehow we got past those, what would we see?  I don't think you'd see the video of Osama bin Laden picking his way up the mountain trail with an AK-47 over his shoulder.  He would be waving at you from a T-72.  Your enemy is going to adapt to whatever choices you make, and I think that is just the fundamental fact,-- that our business is counterpredictable which makes it so incredibly interesting. I think Professor Cohen really brilliantly pointed out how change is constant, and change certainly is.  The Army is always changing.  You always have a current status and you always have a future, and one of the things you continually must do is you just assess how well you predicted your situation 8 to 10 years go, and our current assessment goes like this:  8 to 10 years ago we did not anticipate that we were going to be in a global protracted conflict without mobilization.  We always viewed war as a singularity, an episodic event.  The balloon goes up, Lariat Advance was called, you had the big war and then it was over. Our mental model was not of a protracted conflict that lasted indefinitely.  That single shift from the idea of episodic war to protracted war, it has incredibly significant changes which is driving a lot of the changes we have in the Army.  So, not anticipating protracted war without total mobilization has introduced some changes. We talked about there being the possibility of noncontiguous warfare in the future, but never really appreciated what it meant when that was brought to reality in front of you.  We talked about a volatile, uncertain environment, we talked about having adaptive adversaries, but these folks we're up against now are extraordinarily adaptive. There are also some opportunities we didn't anticipate.  We never anticipated 8 to 10 years ago the extent to which the other services would be willing to apply combat power to the land problem.  And I think we probably underanticipated a little bit the extent to which we would have opportunities to use network capabilities and information technology. So our immediate solution of course is the modular forces that have been discussed today, change in the AC/RC mix, trying to go to a stabilized force that can endure a protracted conflict potentially of indefinite length. But even today we also have to anticipate we have a future, and so what do we think the future is going to be like?  It's probably a safe guess that the future is going to be a lot of what we're experiencing today, but it would be foolish on our part ,I think, to assume that the future is going to be exactly what we have today.  There is a lot of evidence that one of the significant dimensions of the future is going to be what we call hyperkinetic threats.  Hyperkinetic threats would be along the lines of what we could feel today if we chose to, weapons like line-of-sight antitank or C-CHEM (ph). These are weapons amount of kinetic energy on a target, a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.  LOSAT, you can mount four on a Humvee and you can put 43 megajoules of energy on a target.  For the few of you who are not physicists, 43 megajoules of energy compares to about the theoretical maximum you will ever get out of 120 millimeter main gun of 12.  That's a lot of energy.  Armor technology always advances, but if you could somehow absorb this amount of energy without fracturing or without melting, you would physically displace a main battle tank 700 meters. The Russians just publicly put on the market an RPG that penetrates a meter of steel.  Pete Corelli's division had 70 main battle tank combat losses over the course of a year.  I'm really not ready to put the future of the Army and the nation on the assumption that passive armor is the wave of the future forever.  We need a hybrid mix of solutions. A lot of what's driving our solution of the future threats, particularly future combat systems, are some of the factors you mentioned, Mike, are right on point.  I think you missed an important one, and it's the counteraccess problem.  You have to ask yourself are we going to see hyperkinetic threats in the future?  What do our adversaries need?  They need money and they need information.  I hear it's a networked world and information is fairly fungible and available to many.  So it's a bad assumption to assume we can keep control of this information. You need money, but on the greater scheme of things, not all that much money, and of the top 100 economies in the world, only 46 are nation-states.  So we think it's risky to assume that our adversaries won't have these hyperkinetic capabilities and they will logically defend the points of entry, the APODs and the CPODs.  So your only hope against potential challenges like this is to have a capability that can go into an area of operations outside of the points of entry and fight your way to them through the clutter, and it's also to develop systems that attempt to engage out of contact if possible, but recognize there have to be other solutions to the direct engagement fight, and we will have a direct engagement fight.  There is no way we can pretend that we are not going to have direct engagement fights. Even today in this relatively networked world General Lawless will tell you ever engagement on the road to Baghdad was a meeting engagement.  There were no deliberate attacks because it's just very problematic to know where everybody is and how to deal with it.  So future combat systems is in many ways a strategic investment about the type of threats we're going to have in the future and looking for fundamentally different ways of fighting. And yes, there are systems and, yes, there are technologies, but it's a fundamentally different way of fighting that we would be fairly incautious if we ignored them because of the potential problems we have on the horizon. So you can see we're in a bit of a fix that we have to deal with our current challenges.  We also have to deal with future challenges. I'm going to just talk briefly about some of the things we're doing in the major areas of interest.  Doctrine.  I really loved General McCaffrey's comment that it takes about 5 years to absorb doctrine.  A General in our Army was quoted right after Iraqi Freedom as saying our doctrine never prepared him for what he was experiencing in Iraq.  I had a chance to meet with this gentleman and I said, I don't understand why you said that.  Look, in 1993, we introduced military operations other than war, and then we introduced the idea of full-spectrum operations.  From '97 to 2001 we introduced the ideas that operations are a seamless combination of offense, defense, stability and support.  How could you say that your doctrine did not prepare you for what you experienced in Baghdad?  He said, yeah, Dave, I know.  I read all that stuff.  Read it many times, and I thought about it.  But I can remember quite clearly, I was on a street corner in Baghdad smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back. It just takes time to internalize doctrine.  It really does.  I think we are doing that in spades right now because we're bringing back a huge portion of our Army that has personal experience in what full-spectrum doctrine means. We have very quickly taken actions to reenergize our counterinsurgency doctrine.  Normally our doctrine process takes about 4 years.  In 10 months we've generated a counterinsurgency interim manual, and then in a few more months we'll make that final where we'll talk about the natures of insurgency and how to deal with them. Soldier training has changed.  When combat is episodic, when wars are episodic and you're strapped for resources, it is very hard for an institution to resist the temptation to take a little risk in the way it trains soldiers.  Because why not?  The soldier is going to go into a peacetime Army and he's going to be trained by his unit for months and months, maybe years before he's ever used.  But now the average time between soldier graduation and first time that he's in physical danger is about 43 days. We used to train 78 percent of the essential battle task in basic and AIT, 78 percent-- a reasonable risk because this guy is going to go to a unit and it's probably going to be years before anything bad happens to him.  We've had to shift our assets on how we train soldiers.  We have to train all these battle tasks.  We have to train 10 fundamental soldier drills.  We have to instill the warrior ethos because everyone is exposed to danger.  There is no front line, no rear line.  There is no safe convoy, and this is different model from what we had before. We've had to train an extra, an extra, 86,000 soldiers a year.  This is a bit distracting as you can imagine to train an extra 86,000 soldiers a year on the TRADOC training base. Leader development.  I'm not quite sure leader development is completely broken.  We get an awful lot of good anecdotes that our junior leaders, all our leaders, are courageous and innovative.  A lot of the good work that the junior leaders are doing happens because the senior leaders set the conditions for them.  But nonetheless, we're not resting on our laurels.  There is a lot to do. When I talked about balancing change between the current and the future, the future fight for leadership is happening today.  So there's a lot of activity underway to assess how we're doing in leader development.  The War College is doing the Agile Leader Study where they're looking at the nature of the threats we have today and the types of challenges we're going to have in the future and try and determine if we're training the right competencies. We're working hard to introduce a cultural focus into our war colleges and CGSC, where people have a chance to not necessarily learn the culture, we're not sure you can learn a culture, but you can certainly learn the role of culture in military operations, and that has already worked its way into our curriculum. I just spent a couple of days visiting Leavenworth last week, and just a couple observations from what I saw at the war game called Omnifusion Bill 2 about what's going on out there.  We had 13 students and a professor from the journalism department at Kansas State out there playing embedded media and introducing media play.  We had an interagency cell with representatives from all the major elements of the interagency community. The most important change is that we started the students out midstride.  Anyone that knows the Army knows that in our education system we use the planning process as a means of education and most of your instruction is built around developing plans and refining plans.  We had this planning culture developed during the Cold War because we spent our time planning for something that thank God never happened, and the planning culture is still alive in the Army and that's a good thing.  Ask anybody on the Joint Staff if you have to write a hard plan, you look for an Army officer because we do that. But increasingly in this volatile and uncertain environment you have to have an execution focus.  This war game, no plan, start the students out and midstride the battle is begun, you're at it, start executing this battle, and oh by the way, simultaneously plan for the next one.  Really a dramatically different focus from anyone who's ever spent time from CGSC can tell you. If you haven't been to the Combat Training Centers in the last 18 to 24 months, you are totally out of synch with what's happened in the Combat Training Centers of the Army.  Even in the bare and bleak deserts of Fort Irwin we have managed to introduce complex terrain.  Several villages have sprung up on the desert floor.  You'll find 250 Arab linguists there role-playing trying to replicate the complex environment that we expect all our units to go through. The JRTC at Fort Polk has always been a little more advanced along those lines, but they too are working very hard to introduce the complexities of the modern environment. I know I'm running out of time and part of our topic is materiel.  There is a lot going on in materiel.  I never thought I would see the Army working so hard and so effectively and so quickly to introduce materiel changes.  There are a lot of things that haven't been talked about yet, the Rapid Equipping Force, the countermortar activity that's going on in the Army right now from my battle buddy Phil Coker (ph).  We are taking a Navy gun, Special Operations sensors, Air Force fusion capabilities, a Marine planning capability, and putting together a system to deal with the mortar threat, and we're doing that in less than a year.  It's an amazing process. We are moving very quickly to develop nonlethal capabilities that pretty soon will be fielded and will be a tremendous tool in the hands of our soldiers. Materiel has a big impact on organization and it has a big impact on techniques.  You may have heard recently that UAVs are a big thing in the military.  General Wallace will tell you on the march to Baghdad he commanded and controlled a grand total of one UAV.  Today over Iraq there are 700 UAVs.  This is a UAV.  It's disposable, flyable UAV.  You can program this thing with a PDA.  It'll fly 3 or 4 kilometers out and come back. I guarantee you that this thing was not in the minds of the people who sat down around the Key West Agreement.  So when the Air Force announces that they're the executive agency for UAVs and you've got a corporal getting ready to pull this thing out of his rucksack, he's probably not on the air tasking order.  Technology is going to drive huge changes in what jointness means and how we work together. So I will just close there and look forward to your questions.  Thank you. MR. O HANLON:  The most amazing thing is the UAV matches Mike Vickers's coat.  I don't know if anybody else noticed that.  The Army really is adaptable. It's a great honor to be on this panel, and I'll try to be brief because we have so many things already to discuss and over a short time.  But I'm going to be brief in a way that's sort of silly because I'm going to throw out a huge topic which is partly trying to take up General McCaffrey's challenge of trying to talk about the threat and how we should think about it.  I'm not an expert on doctrine like the other folks on this panel, so that's maybe my comparative advantage anyway.  But the unfortunate thing is if I'm right, even going through this list you won't wind up any smarter than you are now because it's basically going to say we have to be ready for a lot of different kinds of things and, therefore, just don't get too specialized, don't expect too many radical insights or the final answer to this question which I think is consistent with what we're otherwise hearing from the panel today, but I just want to make it explicit with 10 scenarios.  So I'm going to say about two sentences on each one.  I'm going to do a sweep of the world from Northeast Asia, winding up in Africa, going that way.  So that's my plan for the next 7 minutes. Again these are missions that I think the future Army needs to think about, be ready for.  Obviously, they affect other services as well.  There are some scenarios here that are not primarily Army, and you'll know which ones or at least be able to guess yourself which ones you think aren't primarily ground force oriented, but let me just mention a few. And again, those who would think some of them crazy, I'm going to first of all remind you that most of us would have thought a war in Afghanistan crazy 4 years ago.  Secondly, I will start with two scenarios that I think are crazy just so you know that I am trying to draw the line somewhere.  I do not think we should plan for Chinese invasion of Siberia, even though I admit it could happen, maybe a 1 to 5 percent probability in the next several decades.  And I do not think we should plan for a Chinese invasion of the Korean Peninsula.  Because I do not think that is the most likely way, even if Chinese-Korean relations deteriorate greatly, I don't think it's the most likely way for China to put pressure militarily on Korea.  Nor is it the sort of thing that would serve our interests in planning for because the South Koreans don't want to talk about that scenario.  So those are two I'm not going to include. But I will start with this matter that General McCaffrey mentioned as maybe a 5 percent probability which is, of course, possible war in Korea today against the North Korean threat.  MR. O HANLON:  Let's just acknowledge and agree and remind ourselves we have to take these scenarios seriously.  Just what that means requires its own discussion, so won't do more than just mention that point that this is a scenario that would undoubtedly be at least 10 times as bloody as what we've seen in Iraq by even the more optimistic images of how that scenario could unfold and be at least as demanding on American forces, probably 50 to 100 percent more demanding in terms of the number that would be required at any given moment.  The occupation may be primarily dominated by the South Koreans, assuming a war ends in the first reunification of the peninsula, but that's just a scenario not to forget. A scenario that is probably a little less demanding on the ground forces, but still so incredibly important that we have to at least mention it in this conversation is the Taiwan Strait problem, which is primarily a Navy-Air Force scenario, and I'm glad to know the Navy I think to some extent is liberated from some of the daily drudge of Iraq and Afghanistan and able to think more about this scenario because it really is very important and a lot of the rest of our military doesn't have the luxury of thinking about it, although they try to anyway, I know, and they should. But Taiwan still could involve some ground force aspects and considerations, for example, if we find that U.S. forces in Okinawa are being threatened directly by the Chinese and the Japanese need some help in protecting them, protecting air fields, et cetera, we could see a role at least for limited amounts of ground power, even in this conflict. There is another set of missions I'll talk about that involve collapsed states.  The first one moving in this direction that I've proposed is Indonesia.  I don't necessarily think all of Indonesia would collapse in any plausible scenario I can imagine, but I can certainly believe that large fractions of it might.  And the Indonesians may ask us to come help them restore order to the parts they have lost control of perhaps where terrorist organizations have set up shop.  There are a number of ways in which these sorts of collapse scenarios could unfold. But picking up a point Mike Vickers made which is very important, a state like Indonesia is six, eight more times more populous than Iraq, and if you start talking about even a fraction of that country being destabilized with the U.S. having even a fraction of the job of restoring order, you're talking about a very large operation indeed.  Because don't forget, the dispute that General Shenseki and Secretaries Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had about how many forces we would need for Iraq in the stabilization mission was based on some general historical truths about how many people you tend to need per thousand population to do a stabilization mission right.  So there are rules of thumb, sizing guidelines here which tend to apply across a lot of missions, even if there is some dispute about just what you need in a given instance and that's a legitimate thing to debate.  There is no doubt that a larger country requires more or less proportionately more American or coalition troops to stabilize. Another mission might be a possible Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir.  We are not going to get involved in such a war directly I don't propose, nor would either of the parties expect us to.  But, what if that war gets right up to the nuclear edge or cliff, and what if it even goes to a nuclear point and there has been an exchange of one or two nuclear weapons?  At which point perhaps even the Indians who have up until now resisted internationalization of this problem might say we're better off internationalizing it. For example, how about a trusteeship run by the United Nations perhaps contracted out to NATO for its military aspects and, therefore, led by the United States in all likelihood in which we propose that the United States and its coalition partners, some of them NATO, some of them non-NATO, restore order, police the region, do whatever counterterrorism is necessary  to prevent a worsening of the problem and then in 10 or 20 years resolve the political issue of where Kashmir owes its allegiance and to which country it belongs or whether it's independent.  In other words, the Kosovo model, in effect, but in a place where there are nuclear weapons implications and where we might feel obliged to get involved under certain ways in which these scenarios could unfold. Another problem that many of us have thought about, and I know many in this room have helped me think through, is collapsing Pakistan.  This is again something Mike Vickers mentioned, a country of 150 million people with maybe 20 to 50 nuclear weapons and many important Islamic fundamentalist groups that would be more than happy to get their hands on those nuclear weapons. A collapsed Pakistan is the national security equivalent of perhaps a direct assault on the United States, certainly it's worse in terms of its direct implications for our security than even an attack on our NATO partners.  We're talking about nuclear weapons getting into the hands of people who want to use them against us, and we already know that for a fact.  Therefore, a collapsed Pakistan is a vital national security interest of the United States, and I use that term in its literal sense, not in the exaggerated hyperbolic sense we often have seen the phase vital national security interest used in our field. So I think if we could find any way to contribute to the resolution of that problem, we would have to expect to do so and be called upon by national command authorities in this country to do so.  Just how that would play out, of course, depends on the scenario.  If Pakistan begins to collapse and its security forces want help in restoring order, they may very well ask for some help, some of which could be very quick Special Forces sort of help trying to actually get to the nuclear weapons.  Some of it could be helping stabilize the country or broad swaths of that country. Again, I don't know how much of this would be U.S., I don't know how much of this would be coalition.  The majority would have to be Pakistani because the country is just too big for coalition forces to do this on their own in any reasonable time frame.  But if the country were fraying and beginning to fracture, you could see a very important role for the outside. I think I've already come close to using my 7 minutes, so I'm just going to mention the next five and not talk them through. I agree with Michael that an invasion of Iran a la invasion of Iraq is almost undoable based on the size of the country.  But having said that, there are scenarios areas in which one would have to contemplate some kind of a forced pressuring of that regime.  I think we're a long ways away from that right now, but I would not rule it out entirely.  And things well beyond air attacks on Bushir could be contemplated in a worst case.  So we're talking about very demanding scenarios there as well. We're also not in a position to rule out the possibility of trying to help restore order in Saudi Arabia should that country undergo a coup.  I would hope we would not be in such a precarious position depending on Saudi oil for our national way of life that we would have to intervene quickly and unilaterally in such a situation.  That could be very counterproductive for our national security interests.  But over time even if we had the energy policy that allowed us some flexibility and some time to respond, I think we would have to contemplate the possibility of maybe helping one element of the surviving Saudi government restore order in the eastern oil fields.  Again, not out of the question. Nor is the possibility of some kind of a trusteeship for Palestine.  We're all optimistic these days about a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace.  I remain to be convinced this is going to happen.  I could imagine some very nasty things happening like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad running out of patience, Mr. Abbas running out of his ability to keep them in check.  If these negotiations don't move quickly, we could wind up back in an ugly situation where the Israelis might very well say we're not going to do a deal until the Palestinians control their terrorists and the Palestinians say we can't.  What do you do in that situation?  There is only one plausible way to really solve the problem if the parties involved want to, which is to invite international trusteeship for Palestine to deal with those terrorist organizations and finally allow the creation of a Palestinian state. It's a small area, a small population, but a big problem and very great implications for the world.  So, again, the United States and its partners would have to be prepared to do this sort of thing if we got asked to and if events played out a certain way. The last two scenarios are both in Africa.  One could be a limited humanitarian mission let's say to protect people in Darfur.  Another could be a broader stabilization mission in a huge country like Congo where I don't think the international community in general or the United States are really honoring our moral commitment to the Congolese people right now and where a large number continue to die.  This is a humanitarian problem.  It's also a national security problem in an age of terror, where terrorists use these sorts of territories for sanctuary, for resources, et cetera. So here are 10 scenarios generally that begin to at least speak to your question, although I do a very bad job of answering it any useful way except to say I think we need a full spectrum of military and other national capabilities to address a wide possible range of plausible scenarios. COL KILLEBREW:  Thanks, Mike.  Don? MAJ VANDERGRIFF:  Life's an irony because I'm going to talk partly about changing the culture and I'm the only panel member all day that s used the PowerPoint slides.  So someone from the Army had to do it. What I'm going to talk about is, part of the name of the panel is training.  The Army is very good at training.  The training revolution of the '70s and '80s that you, General McCaffrey, led partly, and General Story and General Myers and so forth. But the Army tends to use the word training as a synonym for education, and education as General McCaffrey also said, training is easy.  Education is the hard part as many of you have talked about  throughout the day, especially given the way the war is going.  Sir, I'll give you credit with a quote up there as well General Schoomaker, the Chief of Staff. I really believe in General Schoomaker not because I had the uniform and there's a thing called loyalty, but I spent a lot of time in my profession studying what we're trying to do, writing about it, because I love the Army, but I love to argue with it when it's wrong or when I think it's not going the right way, and I give it when it credit when it's going the right way as you're going to see. I think the Chief knows which way he wants to go with the culture and I think a lot of strategic leaders do as well.  So what we're going to have to do here is talk about education in the context of leading a generational cultural change as well. My friend Steven Stewart (ph) who's currently in the audience recently threw me into turmoil because he reviewed my manuscript from my forthcoming book Raising the Bar:  Creating Adaptive Leaders to Deal With the Changing Face of War, and he told me, None of your ideas are going to work.  I spent 9 months on this manuscript researching and writing on my own time because I still have day duties to attend to, and then he told me every one of your ideas is good in context of a holistic educational reform, but the problem is, is the culture going to be there when those guys are created and they come back from Iraq, for example, as we know they are. That's going to be something the Army has to deal with.  You'll have adaptive leaders coming back from Iraq right now.  They've done well.  And you have a younger generation, the Y Generation, currently emerging that's expecting something different than the Boomers did. There's a lot of good news, though.  The Army is trying to reform.  I don't see that as a bad thing as somebody alluded to earlier.  I see it as a good thing because the Germans did it in World War I, evolved their doctrine, evolved the way they fight in the middle of the war even though the cultural revolution began in 1806 when they lost the Battle of Jena in Prussia. Soldiers and leaders are making this transformation happen, but the problem is the foundation of the culture, the personnel system.  The question comes to why are we--those assumptions?  I've never seen in my seven intense years of studying this so much written about changing the culture, for example.  One of my favorite articles is yours, sir, the one you co-authored Adapt or Die.   It's an excellent article.  It says a lot of good stuff in it, but why is it hard to move the culture? The old culture is entrenched, and surprisingly it rests upon an Industrial Age personnel system or foundation.  This is not bad because we do a good job of bringing in good people and we have a good leadership doctrine.  So there is always a conflict there, but still we have a lot of policies and laws that have to be addressed that sometimes cause a conflict in what we're saying in rhetoric, for example, adaptive leaders, innovators.  A good friend of mine recently said, yes, we want adaptive leaders and innovators as long as they don't rock the boat.  So we have to address those issues. In my analysis of current Army transformation, I don't even like to call it transformation, I like to call it evolution.  An army, a good Army or a good organization is always evolving over time if it's going to stay competitive in the market, so to say, to borrow a business term. The Army is understanding and realizing why the threat has changed.  I even heard the Chief talk about fourth-generation warfare.  I'm going to how a slide that a good friend of mine, Chet Richards (ph), put together for me, they're good at defining what?  The training model that TRADOC usually listed is very revolutionary and in its own way has helped changing the culture, but doesn't know the middle ground between rhetoric and--to create a how-to plan. Very detailed and very hard to do, as I said earlier.  You want to look at all the institutions across that compose the Army.  You want to know the second and third order effects.  I remember Secretary Rumsfeld a couple of years ago talked about doing away with up or out.  That was a big thing about the promotion system and replacing it with up or stay.  When you do that, there are a lot of things you have to examine.  For example, up or out is based on assumptions we made 50 and 100 years ago about weeding people out and how to keep the force young, by the way. So how you have to look at this problem is--a systemic change across the institution where everyone influences everything else.  The Army currently as I said earlier since the days of Secretary of War Root is making some of the most dramatic changes in its history with General Schoomaker's 17 focus areas, but they have to evolve together and this is what is very difficult. Every factor has to be considered and analyzed in the context of other institutions.  Their impact is to get to the vision set by strategic leaders, in this term, the Chief of Staff.  Again, he's got the vision and I think it's the right direction to go. How do get the culture again to not only create these leaders, but nurture them.  And then there is a second problem as I alluded to earlier, these guys and gals that are adapting in Iraq, they're coming back and they're going to come into the bureaucratic Army that we've talked about all day.  Are they going to stay?  How are we going to retain those?  Those are questions we need to ask.  It falls under how to change the culture. What parallel evolution does is it provides senior leaders with the strategic model or how-to for organizational change.  Okay?  So it's designing systems and outputs and outcomes and analyzing the second- and third-order effects. Because war is getting very complex, so one of the demands is, why do you change the culture?. You change the culture to create, promote and make the force effective that you feel that you're going to fight as the panel has talked about.  We define the enemy before we create the doctrine, but we also define the enemy before we create the leaders we want to fight that type of enemy. We have going back to Sun Tsu and Alexander these states and nonstates that wage war.  It's not something new that occurred after 9/11.  The Army still has to worry about state-versus-state warfare or what we term the legal form of warfare.  Then we have a generation of war which was talked about in a great article in 1989 written by a few officers and William S. Lynn in the Marine Corps Gazette, The Changing Face of War. The first generation has been across the span of time, close-quarters fighting.  The second generation is industrial war, the mobilization of the society.  The third generation is an ideal-based form which we're trying to move to and we've talked about.  We can do it, we have the people that can do it, and we're thinking about it which is an ideal-based doctrine.  Then you have fourth-generation warfare, whith with nuclear weapons, the unaccountability of nuclear weapons, use of maneuver concepts beyond mobility, new commo and trans networks, states and nonstates waging war, involved in fourth-generation warfare. What kind of leader do you want to be able to operate?  This leader is going to require the most that we've ever asked of our junior leaders, our mid-level leaders and our senior leaders.  I took this from your article, Adapt or Die, we have a culture today for good reason 100 years ago and 50 years ago relying on the amateur citizen soldier who had to know something overnight, all these procedures combined with the theories of Frederick Taylor.  I'll say that again, Frederick Taylor. This system we have today in place, the playing model, for example, MDMD, is an evolution from that of the French Army and methodical battles and has worked well for us in the World War II where you have a clear enemy and you can plan and set the tone of the battle. Now we're into, I heard someone say earlier, an execution phase where we have to adapt quickly and make decisions under pressure very quickly. Right now with my educational reforms, the baseline is the assessment process, ROTC which is based on the model that you have time for units to train.  As you said, sir, earlier about 47 days, correct me if I'm wrong, from a soldier from basic training into combat.  Let's look at the lieutenant now.  The lieutenant is not the one in a band of brothers who has time, 2 years, to learn his trade and then he has a platoon sergeant that may take the reins.  And then he's got some quality leaders that can overcome problems. So if they had a task--which can be traced back to the late-1800s, confidence was based on assessing task performance.  Evaluation particularly for junior officers was not really a big concern.  And by the way, I m not the only one there is a good article recently written by Colonel Fred Reed (ph) at the War College talking about this system back to Frederick Taylor. Some of the other problems the way the personnel system also uses the forward model, the Frederick Taylor model, for producing officers which undermines the confidence that we require these people to have.  We have a current shortage, which is probable, and another one future field grade and force structure changes, for example, years of action requires more field grades.  We commission more, we promote more and promote faster. So what's going on now?  A lot of it went on in the Cold War in the 1980s.  No problem.  We were equating competency level based on time in grade.  We're asking these people to do more because we relate it to their time in grade versus their competency, what they've learned.  But in reality experience goes down, quality decreases and competence can go down. Retention also pays because the quality people see someone else getting promoted faster who does not deserve it or they feel doesn't deserve it, so it s a question of the profession.  AUDIENCE:  [inaudible] MAJ VANDERGRIFF:  Army machine being the factory equates when they promote people faster, can equate the 2nd Lieutenant to zero years of experience to captain when they're trying to promote people and they rely on numbers. AUDIENCE:  [inaudible] MAJ VANDERGRIFF: Experience, sir.   We promote someone real fast.  I'm just combining a whole bunch of data here.  But we combine someone's ability to do something.  For example, we promote a Captain very quickly, and at one time he could equate to what a Major does. Cause the personnel system again sees slots and spaces, not experience.  One of my proposals that's going to coming out here is leadership is so important, it's the key aspect in my opinion of all the important things we're doing.  Why don't we combine with the great leadership centers that are now being brought together and take ROTC, for example, out of the militia age or out of the secondary extracurricular club stage and move it as a degree in the science of leadership with foreign language skills, history, cultural and leader requirements? What does it do the Army in conclusion?  I hope I didn't go over 10 minutes.  I've tried to keep it at 10 minutes, but I wasn t watching.  We have to create a strategic how-to plan which is the hard part in order that the culture is there when we create the adaptive leader evolving together and then nurture them as well when they display the traits that we're saying on PowerPoint slides we want them to have.  That's what's key, because we're writing great stuff, but are we going to nurture those persons when they make these decisions or show these traits that we want them to have?  With that, thank you. COL KILLEBREW:  Don, thank you very much.  Thanks to all of you.  General McCaffrey has a limousine waiting outside right now, but he'll take one question.  Do you have one for the General?  He has a five o clock plane. GEN McCAFFREY:  Let me apologize. I certainly enjoyed being part of the panel. [Applause.] COL KILLEBREW:  Do we have any questions for the rest of the panel? MR. BEAR:  Gordon Bear (ph), University of Pennsylvania ROTC Class of 1967. Going back to what Eliot Cohen said this morning, the failure to get ROTC back on nominally elite university campuses in the post-September 11th world, does it matter?  Should it be looked at again?  To me that seems a no-brainer.  ROTC on elite campuses has had a very checkered history.  It was kicked off the Penn campus after 1970 with the Cambodian invasion, back to a degree in the '80s, and off again in '93 as a result of the homosexuals in the military issue.  I'd appreciate if any and all could address that. MR. O HANLON:  I'll say a quick word.  I agree with you entirely, sir.  The point that I would make, it's a point that Kirk Campbell (ph) are going to make in a forthcoming article, and I apologize for putting the spin on it just this way, but let me go ahead and do so.  Democrats have an opportunity here.  This is a good opportunity for Democrats to prove that we, because I'm one, care about national security and about being reasonable more than catering to certain interest groups. And I'm not saying the military has everything right in its treatment of the homosexual issue, for example, but to use that as a basis for excluding ROTC to me makes no sense and is disproportionate and Democrats and others should say so.  So just let me add my voice to yours. MAJ VANDERGRIFF:  If you don't mind the historical detail, we recently briefed the changes we made over the last 4 years, the academic rigor, to the Council of Deans at Georgetown and one of the statements was, We didn't know you did things that hard or thought about your profession like that. Part of the reason is in the '20s and '30s there was a big debate on many campuses about the role of ROTC, would it just be those fill in the names on the roster for mobilization, give you the fundamentals and you could develop more once you're on active duty.  That was the theory and that was also what the Army thought would be safest for the nation at the time. The other thing, too, is a lot of the adversarial, and that may be too strong a word, from the academic side of the universities was because the rigor was so low and so focused on tasks versus more educational things, they formed this tradition of being resistant to ROTC and they assumed that's what's going to happen when they come back on campus. So, I think it's a good thing to get them back on campus because of the pool of talented people that the nation needs.  And I think if the academic rigor is raised which it can be not just in the name of they are raising the the rigor and cutting people, that it can truly be raised and all the things that I briefly pointed to in a lot of these elite schools, I hate the word elite, they're no better than anybody else, just costs more, then they would be allowed back on campus because there's a perception that they don't have the rigor that these campuses want to have. COL KILLEBREW:  Another question in the back, please? MR. KIM:  --Korea.  My question is to Mr. O'Hanlon.  The U.S. Department of Defense recently indicated that it might expand the role of the U.S. forces in Korea more than just to dealing with the North Korean threats, including counterterrorism, but the South Korean government seems opposed to this idea.  What do you think of this controversy?  What do you think should be the future role of U.S. forces stationed in Korea? MR. O'HANLON:  A great question, and I suspect my fellow panelists may want to chime in as well.  Let me give my two cents. First of all, I think that the U.S.-Korea alliance has been extraordinarily important, as you say, focused first and foremost historically on North Korea and that must continue to be the focus for the foreseeable future.  But we are very grateful as Americans for the strong contribution of South Korea to the stabilization mission in Iraq where South Korea is now providing more troops than any other country except the U.S. and the U.K. This is not the first time that South Korea has helped the United States.  So, it really is an alliance of mutual assistance, and I think over time we have to think of how to generalize that concept.  Any American strategist who follows this issue knows that South Korea is in a very delicate position between China and the United States.  I think the United States needs to be very careful to presume that South Korea could ever be asked to allow us to use military bases on its territory in operations against China.  The United States does not want to convey that impression. Obviously, we don't want to fight China, but should we wind up in a conflict, it's very important for South Korea to know, whether the issue is Taiwan or anything else, it has the opportunity and the right as any other ally would to say no.  European allies, of course, do this routinely.  They're used to saying no to us.  I don't mean to encourage it.  I don't mean we always like it.  But it is in fact a right of any ally to say this is our sovereign territory and if we don't agree with a certain mission or certain operation, we would like to have the opportunity to decline your use of that facility for that purpose at that time. I think as long as we're very clear about these things we should be able to work this out.  And the main issue here is, yes, China is not the issue we want to talk about and not the issue we should need to focus on.  There are a lot of other reasons why this alliance historically has been very important beyond the peninsula and why it could be in the future, and if we focus on those missions, I think we can avoid the grand theological worries about whether we're really preparing for war against China. In the United States, I think, don't need to expect South Korea to provide bases for any contingencies against China, and even if we wanted that option, South Korea should always have the option in a specific instance to say no.  If we're clear on that point, I think we can move the conversation on to other areas of genuinely mutual interest and importance. COL KILLEBREW:  Any other questions?  Over here, sir, in the very back, and then over here. MR. KOVO:  Stanley Kovo (ph) with the CATO Institute.  I think it was Frederick the Great who said, he who would defend everything defends nothing.  Now we've heard about the full-spectrum combat to do everything, but realistically you can't do everything equally.  You have to make choices.  We all have limited resources and we all have to make choices.  What are the priorities as you see them? MR. VICKERS:  Well I think it depends on the institution, but if you're talking about at the national level, I think we worry about the rise of a major power like China, we worry about nuclear proliferation particularly to medium powers or others, and then we worry about a struggle with radical Islam, and that has both homeland defense implications and overseas implications in that it's a global war.  I would say those are the three big things. BG FASTABEND :  I don't know that you're not posing a false dichotomy to us.  I mean, sure we have to make choices.  One of the choices is to optimize our forces for only type of conflict and the other is to accept some suboptimation and put other resources into training and education so that they're flexible and can apply to whatever environment they find themselves in. Knowing the fundamentally adaptive nature of war, I think we're well advised to accept the fact that the enemy is always going to have a vote and we have to be prepared to react to whatever they pose to us.  Therefore, you need a hybrid mix of forces, a menu of forces from which you can pick and choose to match to the situation at hand, and you have to have a culture of innovation and adaption to correspond to it. COL KILLEBREW:  And I think we had a question over here. MR. LOWE:  Christian Lowe (ph) from Defense News.  I have a question for General Fastabend.  It's FCS related. There has been some doubt expressed today it seems that the manned ground vehicles will actually be this leap in technology that General Schoomaker was saying was needed, and Mr. Vickers was mentioning that it was somewhat in doubt that it could get there. What's your assessment of that?  Is there any chance that the manned ground vehicles could be pushed off even further or even cancelled and turn FCS into what it is now as sort of a technology smorgasbord for current forces? BG FASTABEND:  There is obviously a chance that absolutely anything could happen to the program.  The challenge of creating a manned ground platform that is in the 20- to 24-ton class is daunting.  This has never been done in the past.  We can do air envelopment now because we can put in air mobile forces or air-borne forces, but once you put them there, they're relatively immobile, they're relatively vulnerable. The ambition of the future combat system is to develop a platform that is within a weight class that's amenable to air envelopment, but once you put it down, it has the mobility, the survivability and the lethality to deal with it. We are going at this challenge more strategically and more aggressively than any time in history.  We're integrating the strategic and operational problems of strategic deployment and intertheater deployment together with the tactical challenges of being able to survive in a very lethal environment. The engineers are coming back to us.  They're telling us the problems.  We're looking at the trades.  We're doing analyses.  We re not going to spend the money unless it works and until it works we're going to have to keep working on it.  That might mean it moves to the right, it might mean that the concept evolves, it might mean the parameters evolve, but we put a great deal of effort into analyzing this and the jury is still out. COL KILLEBREW:  Fred, a question over here, and then let's take one question after this. AUDIENCE:  Thank you very much.  This is a question for General Fastabend.  I was very intrigued by something that you said.  You seemed to be giving away the notion of passive defense of armored vehicles in the future on the grounds that hyperkinetic rounds and so forth will be so devastating that it will be impossible to create a survivable system. I find this a little bit troubling because of the historical parallels which seem to suggest that every time someone has said that, it's turned out not to be true.  In the inner-war years the notion was that the antitank gun would make tank survivability impossible, and I have just been reading about the development of the M1 tank where the perceived wisdom was that it was even silly to try to imagine armoring a vehicle until they discovered [inaudible] armor. So my question is, are we closing the gate too soon and deciding too quickly that because there are going to be fearsome hyperkinetic rounds we can't defend the system, that in fact if we put the efforts into materiel development or some other sort of passive defense system we might be able to protect? BG FASTABEND:  Well Fred, we're headed to an Army of 87 brigade combat teams.  Fifteen of them might be FCS.  So I don't know if we're betting the farm on the demise of passive armor.  As the Chief pointed out, we're going to continue to improve the M1 program.  It's a very, very effective system.  Heavy armor is a very effective system. The future combat system includes passiveprotection against heavy machine guns, against artillery, against IEDs.  So it's not a total giving up, as you say, on passive protection. It's a mix, but there is some daunting math and we're looking for people that can help us to solve it because we'll have the same problem that other people will and that is when you have this much energy coming at you, how do you deflect it, how do you absorb it, how do you deal with it.  And the math is bad.  So you have to deal with it in the cold light of reality to develop a range of options that might help you get through it. Certainly, whatever the solution is, it is going to be a hybrid mix of capabilities.  It is always going to be a hybrid force.  We're going to have Airborne forces, air assault forces, light Infantry forces, heavy forces, and FCS forces, a broad menu from which we can deal with the uncertainties of the future. COL KILLEBREW:  We have two questions over here. MR. ZIKERO:  Thank you.  Joseph Zikero, Army Times publishing.  I'm not a journalist.  I'm on the business side of the company. I have a two-part question.  You've talked about training, you've talked about transformation, all the different changes that will evolve or occur.  How you discipline soldiers in light of the Abu Gharib scandal, is disciplining going to change?  Is the Uniform Code of Military Justice going to go through some transformation?  I know other services are subject to it, but is that a sacred cow?  Are there any other sacred cows like that? BG FASTABEND: I'm not a subject-matter expert on the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  I'll just simply tell you as a soldier this is something that is defined for us by the government.  So if it's going to change, they're going to change it for us based on what they think the needs of the nation are.  Whatever it is, we're going to do it and we're going to hold people accountable to it. COL KILLEBREW: Dan Goure, Lexington Institute. MR. GOURE:  Where's the money?  Of all the things that you guys want to do, they're already in the works.  Let's forget about the proposals for mixing forces, redoing training, adding brigades, resetting, the list goes on and on and on.  Or any number of reports--about where the shortages are.  The supplementals are getting eaten up when and if they come as fast as someone is there.  In the mean time, money gets shifted out of doctrine, infrastructure, maybe not training because that's so high, but a lot of other things, to support literally momentary, current needs in the most immediate sense. Iraq ends and I don't know why we don't see the defense budget head south or at least flatten noticeably.  What are you going to do when the money dries up is the question?  For any of the proposals here, what are you going to do when the money dries up? MR. VICKERS:  I think it is a reasonable assumption right now that the defense budget will flatten in a few years.  Many wish that weren't the case, but I think planners inside the Pentagon certainly assume that right now. It's hard to plead poverty on $4- to $500 billion a year.  Yes, the force is stretched.  The last major transformation that we talk about in history a lot occurred in the innerwar years during the Depression.  If they could do it, it's hard to say there's just no way.  If I tried to make the case, transformation fundamentally comes down to choices.  A lot of these things aren't expensive, they take time.  Three more battalions of Special Forces might be a good thing.  You're not going to get them that are high quality next year or developing HUMINT capabilities.  That's going to take time more than money.  You're not talking about huge numbers of bodies. Whether we invest in long-range--or 4,000 short-range platforms, It's money.  It's a choice.  One may be strategically effective, the other may be not so strategically effective.  I guess you can tell which side I'm on of that debate.  I don't think money is really the fundamental problem barring change. Again, on the global war on terrorism, it is still considered a lesser-included case.  We re not even shaping any forces for it right now.  We don't have a scenario for it yet in the Department of Defense.  Now we've been at war for 3 years.  We're still debating whether it's a& we have two concepts for using force planning in the Department of Defense, first defeat and win decisive. We've had some debates lately.  Is the global war on terrorism a swift defeat?  I can tell you the short answer to that.  It's 3 years and counting.  Doesn't look so swift to me.  Our concept for win decisive is we occupy enemy capitals.  Is that how we're going to win the war against radical Islam?  Probably not, but it's not a money issue. COL KILLEBREW: Tom. MR. DONNELLY:  All I wanted to do is gavel the proceedings to a close.  It's been a full day and a great day for me I must say.  Thank not only to this panel but to all the panelists.  Naturally, you can't get away without further observation from me, that being that the war in the Middle East has already changed the Army a lot.  It's changed its modernization program.  It's changed what it understands transformation to be.  It's changing the personnel system.  It's changing its people.  It's changing the level of investment all the way through.  If it's not a nation at war, it's certainly a service at war, and we're still trying to wrestle with what that exactly means, and if we've made some small contribution to that today it's been because of the panelists.  Please join me in a round of applause for these guys and for everybody. [Applause.] MR. DONNELLY:  We'll do this again.  This was I think for AEI certainly a wildly successful thing.  Thank you everybody for coming and a safe journey home.</body></html>