<html><body>The Future of the United States Marine Corps: With General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. August 18, 2005 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording. <TABLE width="96%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD width="16%">8:30 a.m. </TD> <TD width="24%">Registration</TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">8:45</TD> <TD width="84%" colSpan=2>Panel I: The Role of the Corps in United States National Security Strategy</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Discussants: </TD> <TD width="60%">Max Boot, senior fellow, National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">Colonel Mackubin Thomas Owens, USMC (Ret.), U.S. Naval War College</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman, USMC, research fellow, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Moderator:</TD> <TD width="60%">Thomas Donnelly, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">10:15</TD> <TD width="24%">Coffee Break</TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">10:30</TD> <TD width="84%" colSpan=2>Panel II: Operational Challenges for the United States Marine Corps</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Discussants:</TD> <TD width="60%">Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, USMC</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">F.J. Bing West, USMC (Ret.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.) </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Moderator: </TD> <TD width="60%">Frederick W. Kagan, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">Noon</TD> <TD width="24%">Luncheon</TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">12:30 p.m.</TD> <TD width="84%" colSpan=2>Keynote: General Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">1:30</TD> <TD width="84%" colSpan=2>Panel III: The Transformation of the Corps</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Discussants: </TD> <TD width="60%">Michael Vickers, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">Colonel Robert O. Work, USMC (Ret.), Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%">Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, USMC; Marine Corps Combat Development Command, deputy commandant for Combat Development</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%">Moderator:</TD> <TD width="60%">Thomas Donnelly, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%"> </TD> <TD width="24%"> </TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="16%">3:00</TD> <TD width="24%">Adjournment</TD> <TD width="60%"> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. DONNELLY:  I'm very pleased to welcome you to what I think is going to be a really quite instructive and enlightened day.  This is the third in our series of reviews of the state of affairs in the services, and possibly the one that's, I think, likely to highlight the really wide range of stresses the multiple missions of America's military faces these days. If you went back to the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, I think the summary of what the Marines' lessons learned from that war is "Oh, my God, let's never do this again," in the sense that the Marines perhaps saw, before much of anybody else, what the future in Iraq might be and how stressful it would be to the Marine way of doing business, to maintain a presence, a constant presence in Iraq over an extended period of time. We should remember that Marine units actually rotate in roughly about twice as frequently as Army units do, that is, sort of the Marine way of doing rotations and this was something, at least from a service perspective, that was entirely unlooked for, unanticipated, and also like the Army, the response of people in uniform to the scientist-based measurements has been, while stressful, quite amazing and quite successful. The question is what are the lessons we might contemplate, going forward, and we're going to try to wrestle with that today in three panels.  This first panel is designed to take a broad strategic overview, essentially, what missions do Americans need the Marine Corps to conduct for them over the next period of years? The second panel is going to look at more operational issues.  How might the Marines go about doing their business and executing their missions? And the third panel is going to look at more programmatic and budgetary issues. So we're really trying to cover the waterfront in a single day and of course we'll have a speech by the commandant at lunchtime, which will try to weave all these themes together. And we've got a really distinguished group of folks who are going to be with us today and so I'm going to hereby turn the microphone over to at least two of them.  My colleagues on this panel are Mac Owens and Max Boot, whose bios and writings are in your packets, and are really too extensive for me to try to summarize.  But they're very much here for a reason and Mac, I'd like to ask you to go first and frame the whole day's discussion for us. So without further ado, Mac Owens, the mike is yours. COLONEL OWENS:  Thank you very much.  I'm very honored to be here.  I'm really tickled.  This is a great opportunity.  I love AEI.  It's also tremendous, you know, to see friends, people I haven't seen in years, and unlike myself, many of these guys, their suits haven't shrunk like mine have. But anyway, it's really terrific and a welcome to you all. With the panel, of course we're talking about the role of the Marine Corps in the United States, the national security policy and strategy, and I guess I want to frame the issue a little more starkly, when I say look, I mean, why is it that the--what are we in the Marine Corps for anyway? You can put it in two ways.  First of all, does the United States need a Marine Corps, and if it does, does it need a Marine Corps that's larger than most of the armies in the rest of the world? Now whenever I try to address this question, and I have done this before, I like to put it in the context of something that Sam Huntington wrote about back in 1954. We talked about the strategic concepts of the service.  He says the strategic concept is the fundamental element of a service.  Its role or purpose in implementing national policy.  A service's strategic concept answers the ultimate question: What function do you perform which obligates society to assume responsibility for your maintenance? And he pointed out that when a service didn't have a strategic concept of when it was fuzzy, that service would tend to flip and to flop. It turned out he was writing about the Navy in 1954, after which, you know, it was, in some respects, kind of a rough period for the Navy.  There was nobody for it to fight.  It had sunk the Japanese navy and the Soviet navy still on the horizon. He was dealing with that issue.  But I think it's a useful concept and it's one I want to use to talk about what we're doing today.  I guess if you say that the Marine Corps cannot justify its strategic concept, then we don't need a Marine Corps.  We don't need the virtues and the capabilities that Marines provide.  Then we don't need a Marine Corps. On the other hand, if we do need the things Marines do, then somebody's got to do them. Now you can give it to somebody else or you can leave it as it is and let the Marines continue to do it. And of course if you give it to somebody else, then of course that presumably could get in the way of what else that service is--a lot of people would say, Well, why can't the Army do some of the things that the Marines can?  And of course that's a possibility.  But it would seem to me that if you need the strategic concept, that is, the things the Marine Corps does, then you have to reinvent the wheel to create a capability with the Army that already exists. But the question is, okay, what is it that the Marines do?  What is the strategic concept?  And, you know, I would argue basically that, right now, it's centered on the idea of providing a flexible expeditionary force that can come from the sea on short notice, and can sustain itself from the sea, and then return to the sea when the operation is done. Now the Army, to a certain extent of course, is also going to come from the sea.  I mean, after all, as Colin Gray said on one occasion, if the United States is going to be a land power any place but in North America, it also has to be a sea power.  That is, ultimately, any time we deploy an Army, Army forces anywhere, most of their sustenance is going to come from the sea. So what differentiates the Marines from the Army in this case?  Now the Army's strategic concept I think is fairly stable, has remained stable for the last 60 years, and I think will probably continue for the foreseeable future, and that is to fight and win wars, land wars. And you know, this seems to be the centerpiece of what they do.  You know, today's Army is Emory Upton's army, it's an army that has given up kind of its constabulary focus and has focused primarily on trying to defeat foreign enemies.  I don't see that changing, although of course they may have to as a result of some of the things going on in Iraq. The Marines' strategic concept, on the other hand, has evolved over time, and I think this is one of the virtues of the Marine Corps, is the adaptability and flexibility and ability to integrate in the face of necessity. If you go back, you know, to the beginning of the 20th Century, and Max Boot of course has written a lot about this, one of the primary things that the Marine Corps did was provide essentially colonial infantry for doing small wars. Then in the interwar period, with the concern about the rise of Japan, the likelihood the United States would fight Japan, the Marine Corps adapted to the strategic requirement of the Navy. That is, to fight all the various modifications a war plan warrants, and so evolved into an amphibious force designed to seize Japan's naval bases, and of course they did that mostly during World War II. In the Cold War period, they evolved one more time moving away from sort of a strictly amphibious assault focus to a broader concept of amphibious operations, and the Marine Corps reinvented itself as a force in readiness, and I think that's really, they're on the cusp of that right now, and that will probably continue. What this does, I mean what Marine Corps is able to do, has been able to do during this period of time, is to provide a capability of responding, on short notice, with tailored, task organized forces, to any crisis across the spectrum of conflict, and, once again, part of this is the idea of going from a narrow concept of amphibious assault to a broader concept of amphibious operations, that is, the use of the sea for national purposes, and I think that's basically where we are today. Today, I think--I hope I'm not wrong on this--but the Marine strategic concept I guess can be called expeditionary maneuver warfare.  The ability to use the commons of the sea, especially the sea, as a maneuver space and a base, to be able to apply force when and where the United States wants, and to do it on relatively short notice. One of the concepts arising out of this of course is the concept of sea basing, and there's a lot of debates going on but of course it's a difficult thing to do and it's also fairly expensive. So I mean, that's one of the things that may provide a limitation in the future to what we ask the Marine Corps to do. Now what about the Army, on the other hand?  OF course the Army, as everybody knows, I think is moving to a more expeditionary focus.  Reorganization--and the Marines will look at some of the new Army organizations and say those things look suspiciously like MAGTFS, Marine Air Ground Task Forces, the same sort of task organizing to do particular jobs. So, in some respects, you can say that the Army seems to be moving in the Marine Corps direction. Now of course this whole concept about expeditionary is meaningless.  I mean, the fact is, if everybody can get to the battlefield faster, that's a good thing, but we do have to ask the question from the standpoint of the Army especially--if the Army is focusing more on the expeditionary, getting there earlier, is that going to ultimately interfere with its ability to do what it has been doing over the last 60 years, and that's to focus on fighting land combat? I mean, as you know, one a the things the Marines can duplicate the Army to a certain extent, and they have in Al-Anbar province and Fallujah, and places like that. But a Marine expeditionary force of course is not a corps, it's not designed to fight the operational battle, and I think that's a big difference between the two.  The question is how far does the Army want to move in the direction that it is, to basically become more expeditionary?  Will that be at the Army's, at the cost of the Army's ability to do what it has been doing so well over the years? Now a number of people will say, well, you know, the Marines, the Army, these are redundant.  Now redundancy is interesting because the fact is that redundancy is good in warfare, and some of the people who criticize redundancy confuse effectiveness, military effectiveness with efficiency.  Efficiency is a term from economics and engineering that says basically you want to achieve the greatest output with the smallest input. Well, in reality, we don't want to fight wars like that, so the fact is it is always nice to have some redundancy, and we do it in our communications, we do it in just about everything we do, and what we're trying to ensure is we do not have a failure, a catastrophic failure of one system or one part of the effort. So I think it's not a problem that there's some overlap, cause you would expect that it would be.  Now of course that's, I think, where the Marine Corps stands.  I think the Marine Corps can defend and justify its strategic concept, and I think that it's providing a force that is a utility to the nation. Now there's a big question, and again you guys that are involved in it know it a whole lot better than I do, but apparently there's a debate going on within the Marine Corps right now about whether the Marine Corps should continue, really, to focus on the power projection from the sea, sea-basing sort of things, or whether it should focus on small wars, and of course the term that is floated around here is 4th generation war. I know Tom Hammes is here and will be speaking a little bit later on. But interestingly, for those of you who know your Marine Corps history, that in fact is a modern version of a very old debate.  It's a debate that went on in the 1920's between Smedly Butler, on one hand, and people like John Lejeune, on the other, with Butler pushing for the idea of the Marine Corps as an independent corps of colonial infantry, whereas of course Lejeune was very much an advocate of power projection and amphibious operations. So we don't know.  I mean, there's also this issue of the degree to which the Marine Corps is going to play in special operations.  The Marine Corps has been directed to play in special operations, as you know, by the Secretary of Defense.  The question is the level. But I guess I would stop here, and of course a lot of this stuff can come up in questions and answers, by suggesting that the strategic concept of the Marine Corps calls for an expeditionary force that can come from the sea on short notice, and I think that's a valuable capability and I think it complements and supplements, especially the Army's strategic concepts, and the fact is that we need both. So with that, I will stop. MR. DONNELLY:  Thanks, Mac.  That's a very useful vocabulary for carrying on the discussion. Max, what do we want the Marine Corps for?  What's the strategic concept? MR. BOOT:  Good question.  I'm glad we're all here to talk about that.  Thanks very much for inviting me, Tom, and thanks to all of you for coming. Now I have to preface my remarks by saying that in the course of writing my last book, which Mac referred to the savage wars of peace, I gained great respect for the Marine Corps, and I just loved reading and writing about these great characters of the Marine past, people that, like some of the ones that Mac referred to, Smedly Butler, or there's Herman "Hard Head" Hannikan, or "Chesty" Puller, all these great swashbuckling adventurers who never had much by way of weapons or manpower but nevertheless cut a wide swath through their enemies. I have to say that recent generations of Marines, and the current Marines serving today have certainly added to the honor roll of those earlier Marines in places like Nazariya, Fallujah, and Ramadi, which deserve to be remembered with Hue City, Terrowa, and Bellow Wood in the annals of Marine glory. What I particularly like about the Corps is that it's a thinking person's service, which may seem counterintuitive to some people whose idea of the Marine Corps comes from popular entertainment, from watching movies like Full Medal Jacket or TV shows like Gomer Pyle, for those of you who remember that, which very unfairly depict Marines as being either bumblers or homicidal maniacs, neither of which is in fact the case. In fact, the Marine Corps I think has really been the intellectual service in many ways, because it's had to be.  It's constantly been under siege throughout its history from penny pinchers on Capitol Hill and from the other services.  It's had to fight for its very survival and so it's had to think really hard about what does it want to do, what is its mission, what is the utility that it's providing to the nation. And it's often come up with great ideas.  For example, just recently, in 1996, without anyone asking it to do so, the Corps perceived a mission that wasn't being performed and decided to form its own chemical, biological, incident response force, realizing this was something that somebody had to do. Now most other government agencies that I'm familiar with tend to run away in horror from new missions and the Corps tends to embrace them, which I think was part of the reason why it's so justifiably popular right now with national decision makers, and why you see, for example, General Pace becoming the first Marine chairman of the Joint Chiefs, at the same time that you have two other Marine four stars as head of Strategic Command and European Command.  I think that's really a tribute to the strategic thinking that the Marine Corps has done and the utility that they offer the nation. But while the Corps has always been good about carrying out its mission, its mission has changed pretty drastically over the years, as Mac alluded to, and really changed more than any other service. The Corps began life in the 18th Century as basically shipboard guards, primarily designed to protect officers from the enlisted rabble aboard naval ships.  Then in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, it assumed this new mission of becoming State Department troops or "soldiers in the sun," America's imperial constabulary, quelling disorder and administering government in places like Haiti and Nicaragua. Then, in the 1930's, again as Mac referred to, the Corps acquired a new mission, seizing advanced naval and air bases, which in turn set the stage for the Marines' greatest glory in the island hopping campaign of World War II. Since the, those two missions, imperial constabulary and amphibious assault force, have existed in uneasy conjunction.  The Marine ethos I think has remained mainly one of the 9/11 force, the break the door down force, the amphibious landing force, the shock troops. But in practice, its missions have usually had more to do with pacification and humanitarian assistance.  It has excelled at those missions, I would add, from Vietnam to Somalia to Iraq, but I'm not sure that the Marine Corps has yet made the full mental leap to reembrace its old role as imperial constabulary. I remember, a few years ago, visiting Camp Lejeune and seeing a big demonstration for VIPs of amphibious warfare in action.  It was all very impressive with the Amtraks and hover craft and landing craft, and Cobras and Harriers.  It was a terrific demonstration and just watching it, I thought it was glorious, but I also wondered, Was this a glorious anachronism? Was this like watching the cavalry on parade in the 1930's? When was the last time the Corps has actually staged a landing of this type?  If you discount smaller operations like those in the Dominican Republic in the '60s, or Grenada in the '80s, you really have to go back to Inchon, in 1950, for a full-scale amphibious assault against the defended shoreline. Such an operation was contemplated as part of Desert Storm in 1991 but rejected on the grounds that it would simply be too costly, that modern America could not bear the kind of casualties the Marines has suffered in the Pacific in World War II. I tend to agree with that judgment.  We should certainly retain some amphibious assault capability and who knows? maybe Marines will have to reenact the Inchon landing in a second Korean War. But I very much doubt we'll be reenacting the Sands of Iwo Jima any time soon.  The costs are simply too high and given the capabilities of our air power, the needs are not likely to be as pressing.  I suspect it will be judged more expedient to secure a contested shoreline with aerial assault so that Marines will not have to swim ashore under fire and suffer the devastating casualties of wars past. In light of that, I wonder if it really makes sense to spend $7 billion to buy a thousand expeditionary fighting vehicles to replace today's Amtraks. Now I agree that 30-year-old Amtraks desperately need to be replaced, but do we really need a slightly updated version with only slightly improved capabilities? It seems to me the problem with any kind of amphibious vehicle is that you're inevitably going to sacrifice firepower and armor for the sake of being able to swim.  Hence, it's going to be less useful to Marines patrolling Iraq or Afghanistan, where there's not a lot of swimming to be done. I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense, as an interim step, to buy more armored vehicles that are available on the world market, that might provide greater protection to Marines from IEDs and RPGs.  You could buy vehicles like the Israeli-made Rhino Rhiner or the South Carolina-produced Cougar, which I know is being bought already, but in very small quantities. And in the longer term, perhaps, the Marine Corps should work with the Army to develop Marine variants of the future combat system vehicles, rather than making this big buy of the expeditionary fighting vehicle. Speaking of Marine procurement and at the risk of getting myself in truly deep water with all the Marines present here today, I have to say, honestly, as a friend of the Marine Corps, I wonder if the MV22 Osprey really, truly, honest to goodness, makes sense. It's a nice aircraft, if it works as advertised, which is a big if, but even if it does, at $100 million a copy, which is the GAO estimate, it's a pretty steep price to pay, especially when most of its missions could be performed almost as well by MH60S Nighthawks which cost about $25 million apiece. In other words, you can buy four Nighthawks for every Osprey, and the Nighthawk can carry more armaments and almost as much cargo as the V22, while descending faster and presenting a smaller target for enemy gunners. With the money you save, you could easily also buy enough intercepter body armor and Cougar-armored vehicles for the entire Corps, at least the portion of it serving in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. Now I have to say while I'm not sure that the Corps is making the right move with these two major weapons purchases, I might add that it's a lot more on track, by and large, than a lot of the other services, such as, I could think of the Air Force, for example, which persists in buying the F22 whether we need it or not. The great thing about the Corps is that weapons systems are much less important to the Marines than the people who operate them.  Clearly, the Corps's greatest advantage is the high quality of its fighting men and women, and the fact that it simply has a lot more of what the U.S. armed forces needs in the future, which is plain old infantry.  It ain't glamorous but we need a lot of riflemen to control a hostile country and to impose our will upon the enemy, and the Army has gotten so bulked up, with even most of its infantry divisions becoming de facto armored units, that they just don't have a lot of dismounts to offer. That's a gap the Corps has been filling and will continue to fill.  That needs to be I think the crux of the Marine mission in the 21st Century and this will require some reorientation of how the Corps does business. Now General Mattis, who's hiding in the back of the room there, and will be presenting later on this afternoon, has been doing a tremendous job at Combat Development Command, with his ideas about fostering knowledge of foreign languages and foreign cultures, and I trust he'll go more into that this afternoon. I also think that the Marine Corps agreement with Special Operations Command, to get Marines involved in Special Operations missions such as training foreign forces is a great idea.  That's exactly the kind of gap that the Marines can and should be filling. I would argue that in addition to all that, the Marine Corps needs to "beef up" its civil affairs, intelligence, military policing, and CIOPS functions, all of which are so vital to missions like Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, and all areas where the Corps has found itself, to some extent, depending upon Army support. I suspect that in the future, a core mission of the Corps will be doing the kind of things that it did in the past, such as setting up foreign constabularies, such as Smedly Butler's Haitian gendarmerie, or "Chesty" Puller's Nicaragua national guard. In order to become more proficient at those kinds of missions, I think another area where the Corps could "beef up" its competency is in the foreign area officer program, another area where the Army has made more of an investment than the other services, and where I think the Marines could usefully put some energy and personnel. And I would also urge the Marines to think hard about whether you want to stick with the six to seven month deployments or go to a one-year tour like the Army. Now I can see good arguments for both positions but one major concern that I have is the question of whether six months is long enough to figure out what's going on in a complex place like Iraq. Perhaps that problem can be addressed by sending units back to the same places that they previously garrisoned. But the larger question that I want to raise and the larger difficulty that I see is that I think a lot of Marines still have the idea that their job is to bust down the door and then leave and let the Army take over.  That's just not possible in today's world, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Marines have to undertake long-term pacification missions alongside the Army, and I predict they will have to do a lot more of those in the future as we confront the continuing demands of the global war on terrorism or whatever we're calling it this week. If the Marine Corps is going to do what it does best, reinvent itself for the strategic needs of the moments, it will have to go back to the future, back to the era when Marines were soldiers in the sun, chasing bandits and pacifying violent lands. The war on Islamic fascist terrorism is not going anywhere any time in the next few decades and the Marines will continue to have a leading role in that.  So I think they need to think about how to reorient the Corps, and I know there's a lot of thinking already going on about how to reorient the Corps, to make that a vital competency of the Marine Corps, going forward, and not to have as big of an emphasis on the amphibious assault mission, which I think is in some ways a carryover from World War II.  Thank you. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you very much, Max, and you've set the stage for a red carpet entrance from out of the crowd by Frank Hoffman.  Frank, why don't you come up and continue the discussion.  I see you have PowerPoint.  Is that correct? LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Yes.  I'm a PowerPoint Ranger.  I'm sorry.  [inaudible] these other gentlemen. MR. DONNELLY:  We'll grant you leave on a one-time basis to-- LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  A little bit of leave.  I apologize for being late today.  If I look uncomfortable it's not because my boss is in the back taking notes on me or because I'm sitting on the right of three very distinguished-- MR.       :  [inaudible].  Push the button. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Sorry.  If I look a little uncomfortable, it's not because my boss is sitting in the back making me nervous.  I'm only a contractor, so I don't have a lotta tenure.  It's not because I'm sitting to the right of some very distinguished gentlemen, although it's very odd to be sitting to the right of Max Boot, Tom Donnelly and Mac Owens, if you're familiar with their writings.  But unfortunately, I'm a little bit sick today and I had to go back to my house today, so I could be sick again today.  So I've already left my breakfast behind, I'm a little bit behind the weather, and I can't leave anything else, so we can just proceed on today. It is a great pleasure to be here.  I was particularly impressed with the series so far, and particularly the Army event that I watched and have read the transcript a few times, the very intellectually rich environment.  If the QDR is only half as intellectually rich as that particular discussion, the nation will be well-served. My post today comes in three parts.  I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategic environment because I think this panel needs to set that up a little bit, I'm going to give a little bit of critique about where OSD is coming from.  I'm going to throw out three alternative Marine Corps.  You've heard a little bit of that today.  That's, in essence, the debate that will hopefully set the stage for this afternoon's discussion. I think General Mattis will clean up with that, and I'll put together a little synthesis. Of course we all understand how OSD is looking at the threat environment, the four emerging threats that's driving the QDR, some of the thinking in the building.  I think this is a very useful framework, at least in the beginning, cause it's gotten us out of some paradigms or some thinking about future warfare.  In the past we've looked at major conflicts, you know, MRCs and MCOs, we looked at as state-based, looked at it in very conventional type of thinking. This kind of framework gets us out of that and we get to stop thinking like some of the rubrics of the RMA and the transformation debate, where we're pretty much focusing on wars as we would like to to be rather than they're really going to be, and this thought process is going to get us there. However, I do have some limitations or some critiques about what OSD is doing.  It is good to think about long-term science and technology threats in a disruptive area, largely a function of what DARPA and the science and technology investment and defense industrial base must focus on. It's good to think about what the Department of Homeland Security has to do and what needs to be done to secure this nation's borders and protect against catastrophic attacks. It's good to think about conventional threats cause there are going to be major power competitions in the long range, if history is any guide.  But it's particularly useful of course to think about your regular threats, whatever those are, if we don't have a good idea, and it's a particular area, the conflict domains, the spectrum of conflict that we historically have not done very well at. But I do have a few problems with orienting on this which I think a lot of people in the Pentagon are--of course this is threats, this is not a strategy.  This isn't putting together a collection of instruments, means, to satisfy American interests.  It's just threats, and it's oddly a threat-based approach, and what Mr. Rumsfeld has called a capabilities-based planning system, somewhat of an odd--there's an assumption in the lower left quadrant where OSD has stated, several times, that there's some conventional overmatch, and that we have some tradeoff space, cause there's some excess, and there may be some but I don't think it exists in the ground domain, to the degree that it perhaps should, cause we haven't invested in that. There's some arguable distinctions in these little boxes, the way they've grouped kind of things, I think it's somewhat of a concern or a problem if you just focus on these as separate type of threats, cause I don't think that's going to be the future of warfare. I think we need to look at this as a menu, a menu of options, that what Freddy Craig calls the next Lenin, I might call the next Mike Collins or the next Osama bin Laden's going to use as a la carte type of thing to approach us. If you're not familiar with the quad chart and the threats, go ahead off to your local DVD store and get these four movies and you'll understand the domain of what we're really trying to talk about. Let me switch and I'll talk about the three different Marine Corps, which you've heard a little bit about today, and I'm always looking for strategic guidance.  I've gone to the Navy War College.  I was a student of Dr. Owens, I owe much to that education, but I really get the most from the great American strategist, Yogi Berra, who said the future ain't what it used to be. There's three different kinds of Marine Corps and the first one is I would call the forcible entry Marine Corps, and it's not the kind of Inchon, or here, you know, the D Day kind of approach.  I can make an argument, push back a little bit on what my good friend Max Boot had to say, that there is an argument that can be made, that in the 21st Century there are going to be major power competitions with states who have significant anti-access capabilities and are going to try to keep us out of some particular area, using weapons of mass destruction, missiles, or other cheaper forms of anti-access. And I can make an argument that in a strategic competition with such a power, that there are strategic rationales at some level, that you might want to keep.  That's why we have a nuclear deterrent, why we have a nuclear force, and why we have some other capabilities in our national arsenal. It's not that we've used them very much but that they produce a strategic reaction in our opponents, and I could argue that there's a need for forceful entry capability to provide the nation strategic independence, to come and arrive and achieve our interests in some place of our own choosing. We can argue that it's very good to counter your opponent's strategy, you should focus on your opponent's strategy, and there are strategies or countries out there following an anti-access strategy, and defeating that and defeating their strategy is a means to securing our interests in the future. Having the capacity to go where you need to go, being assured in entering a region, gives great assurance to friends and allies and potential coalition partners, that not having that ability doesn't do, and at the same time it also deters aggressors who think that they very successfully blocked us out and can achieve what they want to achieve at their time schedule. I think it's also a very good cost-imposing strategy.  Someone who has to defend against the United States coming anywhere along their coast, at any time, day or night, means they have to spend money on things that they'd probably not rather do, and if we didn't have that capability then they could focus on things they like to do and they could focus on an integrated air defense system, and for people who are focusing on air base maneuver, they could defeat us that way. Lastly, I just think it generates options and the more options we generate and counter other people's operations, the faster the dynamics in combat go to our favor. So you could have a forcible entry in the Marine Corps, a sea-based type of capability, not the sea basing that I think the Defense Science Board and some Marine futurists have taken, where they pretty much, you know, really let their vision run a little bit long, and got very innovative but also got very expensive, something the nation could not afford. But there's a sea-based forcible entry capability that I think one can envision, that the Navy and Marine Corps can come together on, that's achievable, at realistic costs, and would give the nation a great capability and provide the kind of operational flexibility and independence that the CINCs need out in their theaters. For those who think you know what sea basing is, this is not sea basing--this is not sea basing, not something as grand as that, although that's some people's vision, it's a much more operationally-focused kind of capability.  This is my forcible entry Marine Corps. The end strength would be roughly today's size.  We focused very much with the Navy, hand in glove with the Navy.  We would focus on kicking the door down, that would be our orientation of forcible entry in Marine Corps.  We'd have a full amphibious fleet of 36 capable ships, of 3.0 MAB [?] capability, which has been the Marine objective for at least two or three decades, the entire time I've been with the Marines. This forcible entry Marines would be fully capable of operating in a WMD or an MBC environment, cause that's part of the anti-access strategy that we're trying to defeat. I would, in essence, procure the entire Marine Corps program of record, if I was an advocate for this particular option, I might trade off some fixed-wing aircraft cause I think there's other services that might contribute to that, particularly the Navy. Corresponding with a forcible entry Marine Corps would have to be extensive Navy investments in things, quite frankly, I don't think the Navy's achieved what it should--mine countermeasures, small boats, special operations, and naval surface fire support.  In essence, you'd have to, you know, buy the DDX. Another Marine Corps.  Max talked to this.  The small wars Marine Corps.  This is an option, has some favor amongst some of us.  This is a Marine Corps that would be totally postured for the upper left box, the irregular warfare type thing. This would be a Marine Corps that'd be going back and working within its historical legacy of small wars, in essence, embracing what I would call the "second small wars era," which is how one could define the future environment. I remember General Krulak, several years ago, talked about the future of warfare, you know, we'd be focusing on the stepchild, the stepchildren of Chechnya, and I would just extend that to it would be the stepchildren of Fallujah, would be the things we'd be focusing on, and that would include extensive urban combat. We'd be prepared for the savage wars of peace that Max has written so eloquently about.  The Marine Corps would not become a contributor--right now we have out little toe, you know, at SOCOM, and there's arguments for maybe sticking a leg in--but this'd be a Marine Corps that might be the major component to SOCOM or at least make a contribution of at least 30,000 Marines to that particular command. It would also become the support base, in essence, the platform to try to operationalize interagency operations in small wars. We talk about employing all instruments of national power but there's only really one that can be both deployed and employed and sustained for  long protracted conflicts. This kind of a small wars Marine Corps would be what you would want, if you anticipated what the CIA calls in their future study, "Mapping The Global Future," they talk about a pending perfect storm of intrastate conflict, and in intrastate conflict you have to have an interagency or what I prefer to call a multi-agency capability. We don't have that in this country.  What we have is what I call the fellowship of the interagency ring.  We come to Washington and talk around circles and tables in D.C. but we can't necessarily employ things in the field. There's several excellent studies out there right now by RAND, Council on Foreign Relations.  The best one's from CSIS, who recently put out Beyond [inaudible], about what would be necessary to produce the doctrine, the structure, the training and equipment for effective multi-agency operations in the field.  And so we wouldn't have the ad hoc things like we have with AURA [ph] and CPA.  And this isn't something that's just nice to have.  A nice quote here from Clark Murdock's and Michelle Florinor's [ph] work. Ambassador Pasquale [ph] was recently down at Quantico at a conference General Mattis sponsored.  You know, it's not a matter of helping out the State Department or helping the Justice Department out.  This is a capability that the nation needs to succeed in the future.  It's an imperative. The kind of Marine Corps I would like to see, or one could argue for is, in essence, the age of the imperial grunts.  There's a new book out by Robert Kaplan, I encourage people to take a look at.  He makes a strong argument for this kind of a world.  The Marines would be the master's of the four-block war.  You've heard about the three-block war?  General Gregson's [ph] talked about the four block.  It's not just being in one area where you might be fighting, another street you might be doing humanitarian work, in another street you might be doing peacekeeping.  In the fourth block, you're employing information operations and trying to influence the perceptions of large populations in urban areas, something we find ourselves doing in Fallujah and Ramadi today.  It's something I agree with Max, the Marine Corps is particularly weak in, it has some, you know, not only a reliance on the Army, it's almost a total dependence in that capability. My Marine Corps, for that kind of a Marine Corps, would be very MEF-centric, I'd get rid of a lot of high-order staffs cause you wouldn't necessarily need those, you need to invest in other areas.  I would create four MEFs that would be dedicated, specifically trained, language-qualified and oriented on specific areas of the world. I'd have two brigades.  Perhaps both of them would be urban-focused and they'd have particular training, particular equipment to excel at urban combat.  I'd add some foreign training battalions, perhaps four, and activate two civil affairs battalions and two information operations battalions in the active Marine Corps. I'd also update the Marine Corps excellent 1940's, you know, doctrine, bring it up to the 21st century, and last, I'd make an extensive investment in human capital which the Marine Corps has not yet made but is looking at very hard in the future, and General Mattis will probably discuss that this afternoon. The kinds of investments are things that people like "Bing" West have been arguing about for years, that we need to do for infantry squads.  We need land forces, we need ground forces, they need to be in sufficient numbers.  They need to be rigorously trained, they need to be superbly led by strategic NCOs. General Krulak made the phrase "strategic corporals" kind of famous.  We need to actually make that an operational capability and the Marine Corps has some programs it's just initiated in that area.  We need to follow through on those. We need people with a little older, a little more seasoned judgment, and greater agility to work in a small wars era. The last Marine Corps as an option, Colonel Hammes might talk about this again this afternoon, Mac Owens talked about it a little bit today, I call it the global war against extremism, after next.  I don't like the term 4th generation warfare, so I came up with my own.  The GYN type Marine Corps.  This is a Marine Corps that's focused on future long-range threats, the hybrid threats, the multi-variant, multi-modal and multi-dimensional kind of an enemy that I expect in the future. It's represented in writings, you see in China in the unrestricted warfare area, what they called beyond limits combined warfare, where they're planning on using all elements of national power against critical infrastructure in the United States, financial targets, military targets and civilian targets.  That's a world to think about. A Marine Corps focused on that particular threat, Colonel Hammes can flesh out a little bit this afternoon, it's one that's really prepared for multi-modality warfare.  The Marine Corps would make a major contribution to both Northern Command and for SOCOM.  It's not a Marine Corps that's focused just on overseas type applications. This is a Marine Corps that does away with blurring distinctions between military and non-military capabilities and gains that occur, home or away.  This is a one-stop-shopping kind of an operation. The Marine Corps would provide JTF headquarters for both SOCOM and for Northern Command for employment.  Force structure ads.  I would take the concept of information ops or SIOPs and expand it to influence operations, something the Marine Corps is looking at and exploring.  So is the Army.  I'd stand up four battalions for that, to fill out that capability we don't have. Marine Corps Reserve has one anti-terrorism battalion.  I would create eight, one for each region in the United States for FEMA, and for Department of Homeland Security. I would have eight expanded sea berths, not the kind of small battalion we currently have, which is a national asset, but again, I would provide one very large asset, again, for each region in the United States, and two nonlethal weapons battalions and field that capability that's so badly needed. And then to pay for those kinds of things, I would eliminate the forcible entry capability and some of the heavy armor things that exist in the Marine Corps, eventually have to balance off and pay for some of these things. Again, Colonel Hammes will probably talk to this again today, but in his book, [inaudible], he makes some pretty good arguments.  This is not just a different kind of enemy.  It's just an entirely different kind of warfare and the nation might want to think about how to prepare for that. And on synthesis, I'm not sure where I come down on any of those three.  I think the debate today might come up with that answer.  I think the commandant will give a presentation today and General Mattis will have, will show how the Marine Corps is synthesizing between those three worlds.  We just can't focus on one, perhaps, and we can't afford to be that badly off. We might have to take some operational risk and not be completely optimized for one environment.  We have to be strategically smart and make sure we have everything covered.  We can't be too badly wrong and completely miss something. I'd focus on global influence, a phrase I got from Kaplan's book.  We need to actually, you know, look at supremacy by stealth.  We need to get influence, we need to get people out in the field, we need to get ahead of the game, we need to anticipate crises, not just react with 150,000 people for a number of years after a problem emerges, and there's areas in Africa and areas in Latin America where we can get ahead of the game and not just be reactive to threats. I'd avoid specialization.  I don't think we can have one of those three Marine Corps.  You need it all.  You need to embrace agility, you need to focus on people's education and their thinking, not just create a single tool for the tool box. And with that I think I'll wrap up.  Thank you very much. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Frank.  I thank all of you for a really fine and provocative set of opening presentations. Before we turn to the questions, and I will remind everybody of the three AEI rules for questioning.  First of all, wait for the microphone.  Second of all, identify yourself clearly for purposes of the transcript, and third and most important, try actually to ask a question instead of making a statement. I'm going to exercise the prerogative of the hall monitor to do a little synthesis and to pose a question to the three panelists. And I don't know whether I see the glass is half empty or half full, but here's one thing that I took away from it, that, you know, again, is more a personal reflection than anything else. I very strongly agree with I think both Mac and Max, that almost the real core competency of the Marine Corps is its open-minded intellectual basis.  Alone of the four services, this is the service that's looking for work to do, in the sense of looking for the opportunity to do jobs that the nation needs to have done for it, even if it doesn't fit inside the preferred mode of warfare that the service embraces. But in that regard, I still have a very strong sense that perhaps in a lesser degree than the other services but still to a disturbing degree, the embrace of what the war in the Middle East, the global war on terrorism, again, whatever the acronym of the week is, has an immediate, and at the same time, long-term commitment that requires a fundamental restructuring of the entire defense establishment. You know, I'm worried that we're not quite there yet.  To use Mac's term of the return to the sea as sort of completing the cycle.  I don't see any time in the foreseeable future, that at least would involve a significant defeat for the United States, where we'll be withdrawing from the region, whether we withdraw to CONUS, home bases, or to the sea.  That isn't to say this is the only war that the military is going to be fighting but it is the war that we're deeply embroiled in. So the question for me, or that I would like to pose to you guys, is what does the Marine Corps need to do, in your judgment, to fully participate in on the presumption--and everybody rightly pointed out that you can't talk about the Marine Corps without also making some assumptions about what the Army's going to be like.  But I'll leave that open to you guys. But what's your best guess, or estimate of how the Marine Corps needs to adjust itself in the most, in the broadest sense, to not just Iraq and Afghanistan but what I would toss out as being really a decades-long pattern of operations across the greater Middle East, the giant swath of the planet that extends from West Africa to Southeast Asia, but perhaps is most intensely--but where the sort of center of gravity is some place around the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. So with that really vague and open-ended question, what can the Marine Corps, what does the Marine Corps need to bring to the table in order for the country to be successful in this war?  And we can just go down the line. COLONEL OWENS:  Well, I guess of all the panelists, I'm the one that's most wedded, I think to, you know, sort of the older naval paradigm in the Marine Corps, and I think that it's important for a variety of reasons, not to say that, you know, that's all the Marine Corps should do. I want to correct something that Mac said here.  I thin it's a frequent error that people make when they talk about this idea of amphibious operations and I've been fighting against for a long time.  The confusion of amphibious operations with amphibious assault.  Amphibious assault is what we did in World War II. In a lot of cases, we didn't have any choice about where we went ashore.  You know, we didn't many--there aren't many good beaches on which to make landings, and of course the enemy can figure those out as well as we can, and so they would be there.  The broader understanding of amphibious operations is the ability to use the sea as a maneuver space and to land where the enemy ain't. I mean, any of you who saw, you know, Saving Private Ryan, you know that the traditional understanding of an amphibious assault is you assault a defended beach, you overcome the defenders-- [Start tape side 1B.] COLONEL OWENS: [continuing]:  Okay.  The whole idea of the broader understanding of amphibious operations is that you're able to do that without going through the defended beach, that it gives you flexibility to go a lot of different places in the world, and to take on a variety of opponents, a variety of enemies, and at the least it makes them have to plan, as Frank said just a second ago, it makes them at least have to plan for this. I think we want to be real careful about not making the mistake that you could say we've been making five years ago.  If any of you read Tom Barnett's book, Pentagon's New Map [?], he makes the point that one of the reasons we were so surprised by 9/11 was that we'd been focusing, and cause we wanted to, on the great powers, you know, the rise of China, these sorts of things. As a result, these guys could literally fly in under the radar.  Well, now, you could almost argue that the pendulum is swinging the other way, to now we have people saying this is all we're going to have to worry about in the future. Well, there's no question we're going to have to worry about it for some time, but you don't want to get in a position where, you know, let's orient everybody towards constabulary operations at the expense of nothing--or of everything else, because at some point we're going to be strategically surprised again, that China is going to rise and you're going to need these sorts of capabilities. I mean, the fact is whether we like it or not, Tom's point is absolutely right, that for most of the time we can count on access because of the lies and so forth, but let's say okay, if that's an assumption, if that's your going in assumption, what happens if that assumption is wrong? and at some time in the future, if you haven't dealt with this ability to do the sorts of things that the brains in the Navy work on primarily, then you're going to be at some sort of disadvantage. At the same time, I mean, I think the Marine Corps is in pretty good shape because it does have a culture.  Part of its culture, unlike that of the Army, is fighting small wars. As a matter of fact I think Max's point is well-taken, that there's an uneasy balance between the two, but the fact is at least it's there. As I mentioned before, you know, the United States Army is Emory Upton's army.  That's an army that designed to fight, you know, foreign countries, to ignore and forget about constabulary operations, and, you know, as a matter of fact, I remember during the '90s, the Army referred to these as nontraditional missions. Well, the fact is the United States Army, for most of its history, did these sorts of things, so they are traditional missions.  It's just the mindset changed. Of course I think like everybody else, the Army is recognizing they are going to need a constabulary force and are making changes and adaptations.  But I think the fact is the Marine Corps needs to keep its broad naval orientation, the ability to get lots of places and operate, you know, on short notice, but at the same time recognize that, you know, we're not going to come here to fight, you know, Marine, you know, a guy who's in a Marine tank company who's not Irwin Rommel, okay, and we're not designed to fight land battles. We need that flexibility.  We need the ability to anticipate, not to predict the future, but to anticipate bad things happening down the line. And as a matter of fact, I think General Mattis was up at the War College not too long ago and he gave a great talk up there, and I hope I've got it right, but you said look, we're really bad at predicting the future and the best we can hope for is we don't get it too wrong. And I think that's a good point.  The Marine Corps and the services, in general, have to take the point of view that we don't know what's going to happen in the future.  Otherwise we'd all be rich. The fact is we don't know and we have to provide a hedging against a number of possibilities and I think that's what you get from the Marine Corps with its current and I think future strategic concept. MR. DONNELLY: Max, let me try to guild the question a little bit, because it does seem to me that sort of in this theater, there are actually plenty of opportunities to use the water as a mode of maneuver and you find a pretty heavy Marine presence, say, in the Horn of Africa, and there are other parts within this theater of operations where this kind of capability could be quite useful. But, again, in this broad war to transform the greater Middle East or, again, you use your own term of art, what role for the Marine Corps? MR. BOOT:  Well, you know, I completely agree with Mac.  I mean, I'm not suggesting that the Marine Corps should be exclusively reoriented to constabulary operations any more than the Army should be. I mean, obviously, it's a question of balance and you do want to keep some of that amphibious operation capability, you do want to keep some of that heavy warfare capability, but I think that when you're looking at the broad spectrum of American military power, I think a disproportionate share of that heavier capability is going to reside in the Army and that makes sense because they have the heavy armored divisions, they have a lot of the training and equipment for those kinds of operations, and as Mac alluded to earlier, you know, they'll be coming from the sea as well. I mean, how else are they going to get anywhere?  It has to be from the sea, and clearly, the Marine Corps does--I mean, I'm not suggesting the Marine Corps not have any amphibious capability because obviously they're going to be coming from the sea as well, so they obviously have to have that and they have to have some "break the door down" capability. What I'm suggesting is not a 100 percent reorientation, which obviously doesn't make sense and does leave you open to other strategic risks of the kind that Frank and Mac have talked about. What I'm suggesting is kind of a shifting of balance and a shifting of emphasis, not going a 100 percent constabulary but moving a little bit more towards that direction because I think that's a de facto recognition of the kind of missions the Marine Corps is actually undertaking now, and has always undertaken for the most part. Whereas I think that the, you know, the heavy amphibious assaults or, you know, perhaps now amphibious operations, are very much the exception, not the rule, and of course you do want to keep that exceptional capability, you do want to be able to deter--all that kind of stuff is actually true, but I think you also want to be better prepared for the actual missions that you're undertaking and, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the kind a missions that the Marines are undertaking in places like Afghanistan and Iraq really have nothing to do with amphibious operations, and I think that will probably be, continue to be true. I mean, there will certainly be an amphibious component in operations, you know, on the Horn of Africa, or what have you, but it's not going to be like coming ashore at Iwo Jima.  They're not going to be facing those same level of defenses. The easiest part is going to be coming ashore.  The hardest part is going to be what you do once you get there and how you pacify these guys, because they're not going to be--I mean, a lot of these enemies that you're facing are not going to be hitting you with a heavy missile barrage as you're coming ashore. They're going to let you come ashore as they did in Somalia and then they're going to hit you with RPGs. So that's the kind of threat that I think you have to realistically plan for and obviously, as I say, keep the capability to come ashore against a heavily defended shoreline, but also "beef up" your capability to deal with the kind of problems that you confront across the greater Middle East where our challenge really has to do with pacification, nation building, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, whatever you want to call it, the full gamut of closely-related missions, and I think, again, the Marines have been excellent at those for the reasons that we've all talked about because I think Marines do have this adaptive mindset, they do place people over weapon systems and they do have this kind of small wars tradition which I think is very helpful in the kind of missions they confront. But I think there's also this heavy overhang of World War II thinking, of the "break the door down" force, and I think there needs to be a little less of that and a little bit more emphasis on the kind of things that I talked about before such as civil affairs, intelligence, military policing, psychological operations, and also sort of long-term logistical sustainment in a place like Iraq. I don't think that the mindset has to be anymore or should be anymore that Marines go in but then they're really looking to get back onboard ships and they look upon being, floating around on ships as being the rightful place where they belong and being, you know, on land as being this kind a weird period where they're just waiting to get back on to ship. I think they have to realize that they're going to spend most of their time ashore and while they're sometimes going to have those amphibious operations, that's going to be the exception, not the rule. MR. DONNELLY:  Frank, you gave us three Marine Corps to choose from.  Now you've got to make a bit of a choice and tell us, you know, where to bet most of your chips amongst your three Marine Corps. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I'm a small wars Marine Corps.  I'll be unequivocal about that.  There is a little bit of tension in the Marine Corps in that regard.  There are folks who are 100 percent forcible entry and see the Marine Corps at kind of a tactical level, coming ashore, breaking the door down and getting back on ship, and boring around, and I don't think that's the Marine Corps that we need. But it is a degree of emphasis.  There are some national capabilities that the Marine Corps does very well at.  The best one we have and the one that needs to be invested in the most for this kind of conflict, however, is in the mental agility of people, it's in learning how to work with NGOs, working with other instruments of national power, getting in interagency, it's investment in education of officers.  It's just not paying lip service to it and saying we're going to have a, you know, an Arab class for one hour before you deploy, or even a week. It's a serious investment, and money for that needs to come.  It is a protracted enemy, it's implacable, he's cunning, is going to be around for a long time.  It's just not the Middle East.  It's in the Philippines, it's in Indonesia, it's in Africa. We're going to face that aspect there all the time.  But it's not in terms of 50,000 manned deployments for a year either.  It's the imperial grunt, it's getting out small detachments, it's trying to work that kind at many different levels in a society.  A lot of training. Do I agree with Max?  The things that Marine Corps has done a little bit of in the last year or two in terms of we have added some civil affairs capability, we have added foreign military training capability, we have worked with SOCOM.  I think those are all initial steps that need to go two and three steps down the road. So I would take some investment out of the assault type of mentality and I'd like to see the Marine Corps commit to that and make a subtle shift instead of being--I think we're almost 80/20 today, more maybe to 50/50 in terms of its attitude, and have people embrace that as a mission and something to excel and be very good at. MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  I will begin to turn it over to people.  We've got two here, so we'll start there and work around to stage left.  We'll start with the gentleman--actually, we'll start with the lady just cause we're traditional guys. QUESTION:  I like that.  Okay.  G.S. Marconi, Marconi Works International.  I agree with Professor Owens about difficult to predict the future, so that definitely the next level is anticipating the future.  But it is also about directing the future, the adaptation, the evolution, which is really a shaping function. So where does the Marine Corps fit within shaping? COLONEL OWENS:  Well, again, I mean I think that--I'll just jump in right here--I mean, that's part of its naval function.  I think that traditionally, one a the arguments that the Navy has made, sometimes with more support than others, is that, you know, naval forces are very adept at shaping, helping to shape the environment because you can, you know, use naval power like a rheostat, turn it up, turn it down. I mean, when you use airpower, airpower is either on or it's off.  Okay.  Naval power, on the other hand, you can use as a way of signaling and the like, and certainly the ability to bring Marines ashore is part of that. So, you know, I mean that's one a the ways.  Of course there are the other things too. You certainly shape an environment when you're involved in being on the ground, so certainly the Army has made the point that their presence in many theaters of war has been very much of a shaper as well. But I'd say that, you know, from the traditional standpoint, the Marine Corps in its naval function--or shapes is part of the naval function. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I kind of disagree with mac a little bit on the naval emphasis.  I don't think naval forces out at sea shape very much.  I think you have to be on the ground, you have to sleep with people, you have to eat some of their food, you have to try to understand them, you don't necessarily have to know their language but you have to work with them, have some empathy, and have some understanding of what's going on on the street, and some of those streets are going to be a thousand miles away from a shore. It's nice to send sailors and Marines ashore and, you know, make a contribution to the economy in the bar area, or other areas.  I wouldn't know.  I haven't been deployed for a long time. MR.      :  No comment. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Yeah, we're on family TV here.  But floating around on the outside certainly sends a capability and a signal to traditional governments, but if you want to work local areas in small countries, you're going to have to get in there and sleep on the ground, and that's the essence of what Bob Kaplan's talked about in his imperial grunts and the essence of what, you know, in Mac's book is a history, is people working the problem down at the street level. MR. DONNELLY:  Max, any--you're allowed to pass. MR. BOOT:  A bit ditto. MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  And now we'll do the gentleman. QUESTION:  Thank you.  I'm Rick Whittle [ph] with Dallas Morning News.  I was interested in Mr. Boot's comments on the V22, which he seems to think is [inaudible] and I was wondering how Col. Hoffman and Mr. Owens feel about the aircraft.  How would it fit in with your view [inaudible]? I wanted to ask Mr. Boot if this aircraft doesn't make sense for the Marine Corps, why do you think the Marine Corps leadership [inaudible]? MR. DONNELLY:  Why don't we come this way, just to be different. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Work from the right.  The wedding to it is in essence, to some degree, some costs.  There's a lot of research, there's some national treasure, and more than money involved in that.  It's a reflection of the Marine Corps' innovativeness, in pushing the envelope on some things.  We are very selective when we're looking for accelerators in technology. We are very focused on the human dimension.  The capabilities we see in that aircraft, when it was envisioned a long time ago, offered a tremendous degree of reach and speed. I've heard someone today refer to some marginal capabilities in terms of its capabilities but I'm looking at the order of twice as fast, two and three times as far. If you want to operate in the nonassault mode, if you just want to get from the ship, which might have to be further out now, and just dump Marines on the beach and call that amphibious assault, then you can do that with helicopters, and you can go get a helicopter probably at a third of the cost of what the Marine Corps may have to pay for the Osprey. But the range and the speed are the characteristics that support the concepts that were started in the '80s and the '90s for amphibious capabilities in the 21st Century. Now how much we'd need of that--do we need 12, 15, 20 squadrons?  Are they going to cost 80 or $100 million apiece?  I mean, these were issues that weren't contemplated 10 or 15 years.  You know, now we need something.  We're on the verge of bringing around this kind of remarkable kind of combination technology. It's high cost, it's complex, it doesn't seem to be as important to moving towards a middle in terms of a balance for me.  I'm particularly concerned about manned portable anti-air defenses in the 21st Century, something cheap.  People can start distributing rockets at five and seven thousand dollars apiece and knock down American helicopters.  I'm not going to be interested in cramming 20 Marines in those and flying over a lot of areas where I might lose them. So I'm open for reconsidering the scale to buy as we look at shifting from concepts we've been working at for 10 or 15 years, the concepts that now kind a face us for the near to mid range. But you have to balance that.  I think it's got some capabilities.  It's not the cost and it's not quite the optimum machine I need now. COLONEL OWENS:  Look, I mean, one of the things that at least cause--of course tradeoffs in all decisions, and of course we'll probably have to do some rethinking about this.  But the thing the Osprey does is expand the area of amphibious operations. I go back to my disagreement here with Max.  Amphibious operations is not an amphibious assault.  You want to be able to go where the enemy ain't, and where you want to go and the enemy ain't, something like the MV22 is what you need.  Now again, I keep quoting General Mattis.  Another time he was up at the Naval War College, and, you know, he's a very remarkable guy.  He's actually commanded a naval task force, and one of the things he was responsible for doing was seizing those advanced air bases in Afghanistan and he said--I'll say to speak for you, General, I'm sure you can speak for yourself--but that if he'd had the Osprey, he'd be able to do that in one jump. Instead, the Marines had to go through a politically sensitive, you know, putting the troops on the shore in Pakistan, you know, at nighttime, erasing the footprint before the next morning to do this.  It was very politically sensitive. Something like the MV22 would have given the ability to do that in one jump, and again, it gets back to our ability to say we now extend the range of an amphibious operation in the sense that I'm using it, which is to use sea power as a very flexible means of applying force where and when we want it. MR. BOOT:  Well, you know, I certainly agree that the Osprey has some capabilities that helicopters don't.  Obviously they can go further and faster.  But they don't carry a lot more cargo and they're actually less armed than helicopters, and they also present a bigger target profile. They've got those wings and everything.  So we're seeing how vulnerable helicopters are in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  We're losing a lot of them.  Certainly we lost a huge, huge number in Vietnam, and the problem has only increased, because as Frank alluded to, the spread of manned portable anti-aircraft missiles all over the world, with tens of thousands of them being in circulation. So, you know, I'm not sure that we want to put a lot of money into very few Ospreys.  I think it may make sense to have more redundancy and achieve roughly the same capabilities with much cheaper helicopters, especially when you can extend their range with in-flight refueling. I mean, and ceratinly in an ideal world, if you had an infinite amount of money to spend, it may well make sense to buy the Osprey.  But when it's four times as expensive as a helicopter, I'm not sure it delivers four times the capability and, in some ways, it doesn't even deliver the same--it presents greater vulnerabilities.  And so I think this kind a goes back to the question of how much emphasis do you put on this kind of amphibious operation and I think that the Marines would be better off buying more intercepter body armor, more GPS devices for every infantryman, more satellite radios, and personal digital assistance for every infantryman, for every individual Marine, wiring them into this network, giving them greater capabilities, also giving them greater protection by buying the Cougar armored vehicle or some version of that, so they have greater protection from the kind a weapons they've likely to face. I think if you look at what are the most pressing needs of the moment, I don't think that the Osprey is the most pressing need, although in an ideal world it'd be nice.  I think there are other things where the Marine Corps could probably more usefully spend its money. MR. DONNELLY:  Let's kind of work our way around to the gentleman in the middle, and we'll get over here.  We've still got 20 minutes, so I think we're doing okay. QUESTION:  My name is John Schusler [ph]. I'm with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.  I have one correction for Mr. Boot.  The last major amphibious operation was Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and that was amphibious deception, where you had two MEFS that held down approximately five to seven, or perhaps more, Iraqi divisions.  That's a very important capability that comes about because of the credibility of Marine forces and forcible entry. My question concerns other missions that the Marine Corps has that haven't been addressed today, specifically defense of advanced naval bases and naval capabilities overseas, and the Marine security guard mission. We see the chief of naval operations talk about developing expeditionary naval infantry or an expeditionary naval infantry capability.  The State Department is employing private security companies for enhanced security of State Department personnel overseas. So are these two missions that the Marine Corps should abandon or should the Marine Corps perhaps enhance their capabilities in those areas? MR. DONNELLY:  Frank. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I implicitly discussed the advanced naval base concept in trying to promote sea basing because I don't know why it is that you would want to put, quote, advanced naval bases other than at sea.  So I probably talked myself out of the mission by advancing sea basing as a concept, so I wouldn't have those vulnerable places to have to waste Marines defending somewhere along the line. However, if you look at the power projection problem, leaving CONUS, going through places, say, Italy, other areas where we have intermediate airfields, there is something to be said, that that needs to be thought through.  Something I didn't talk to on the last slide, kind a dealt with a presentation I gave to OSD on future base posture.  I said I wasn't really interesting in investing in some of the little lily pads they were buying.  They've underestimated the cost, they've overestimated the savings of bringing things back home, and all they've done is trade known political vulnerabilities for bases we have with current friends for unknown vulnerabilities in small countries like Uzbekistan and other places in Asia, who, before we've even built the airfields have already denied us the use of some of these facilities. So I'm looking for sea basing to try to, you know, maximize flexibility, maximize my influence and not get tied down and have to defend things. The security guard battalion issue is, you know, something related to the State Department.  We've supported that since 1948 and I see that as a mission that will continue.  But the Marine Corps has made investments in the Marine Corps Security Force Battalion with the FAST [ph] companies for some time.  My proposal on the, you know, GWAT [ph] after next Marine Corps, had a discussion in there about increasing anti-terrorism battalions for domestic use but those actually were for deployment while they were on the active duty, so that they could go overseas, work in areas, critical infrastructure areas, immediate staging bases. I'm more interested in nuclear facilities, chemical plants and biological plants in the future, which is why I put that in that aspect.  So it's been addressed a little bit, just where you want to put it, where you want to put your emphasis again. MR. DONNELLY:  Does anybody else want to--okay; go ahead. MR. BOOT:  Fast comment.  I mean, you can suggest that what happened in Desert Storm was an amphibious operation, but it was, as we know was a deception, and the reason why it was a deception was because the decision was made by General Schwarzkopf and General Boomer, that actually putting those Marines ashore would be unimaginably costly and not necessary.  I mean, there was, as you know, serious discussion about doing that, but it was basically decided that the cost would be too great and I think that's fairly well-known in the world today, and so I wonder about whether the value of that deterrent has gone down, the value of that threat has gone down simply because potential enemies realized what the costs are, if you're doing it against a truly heavily-defended place like Kuwait under Iraqi occupation. You know, I think the issue of the Guards is an interesting one because the extent to which the State Department and other government agencies have to rely on private security now, especially in places like Iraq where we have about 25,000 private military contractors running around, is really an indication of the fact that we don't have enough infantrymen in the United States military, and the Army, and in the Marine Corps.  The Marine Corps, as a percentage basis, has a higher number of infantrymen than the Army, but overall, we just don't have enough of those folks, and what we're doing is we're basically taking the retirees from our services, and the retirees from the British and South African and other services and employing them to provide private security in places like Iraq, and all over the place with the State Department, obviously. Now I can see the imperative to do that.  In fact if we're not going to increase force size, I think you almost have to do that, but I think the larger argument is you should increase force size and I wonder if we're getting false economies here, because what you're doing is you're paying these folks an awful lot of money and it's true that you may not have the same kind of long-term retirement or medical plan or other benefits, if you have to pay for with active duty service people, but you also don't have the same degree of control over them, and obviously there have been problems with clashes between regular service troops in Iraq and some of the contractors. And I just wonder if it's really, if you're really saving money when those contractors are getting four or five times what ordinary service people are getting in the Marine Corps or in the Army, and you're basically just competing against yourself by paying contractors to hire away people that you've trained and that you've relied upon for many years.  So I wonder if that's a false economy there. MR. DONNELLY:  I'd like to redirect, briefly, on the idea of sea basing, which if it's not an aircraft carrier and not a floating city, but what in the heck is it?  I mean, this has been such an amorphous concept, and Frank, you raised the issue of vulnerability.  It does seem to me there's an inherent tension between building something that works effectively or efficiently as kind of a logistics and operational hub and if it's, you know, if it's big enough it's going to be a target, and it's also thereby likely to be vulnerable, particularly to those nations who were developing enhanced strike capabilities. I'm not perfectly sure where the niche that this thing is supposed to fit in, and I'll leave it to you to better define, you know, exactly what it is, but I guess the question is I'm not quite sure why I want one of these things, other than kind of the general, sure, I want an invulnerable place from which to operate; you know.  It's hard to say no to that. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  It's hard to say no.  And that's what it is.  It's hard to refer to it as an "it" because it's not a single entity, it's an aggregate of capabilities, of different types of ships.  Amphibious ships, which I would think would be more the centerpiece.  There's the "prepo float" [ph], the Army and the Marine Corps have, and then we have some technologies in high-speed lift, intra theater kind of connectors that can get things ashore, and it's the aggregate capabilities of interfacing those.  Right now, we have to take everything to the beach and dump it, and that makes a big target, and if somebody's got WMD or got any capability of attacking things, just lots of IEDs or mines, you pay a cost for operating that way, and that's the way we operate today. The sea-basing concept in my operational kind of sea-basing concept is much built around kind of existing legacy kinds of ships with advanced logistics capabilities and advanced interfaces between those kinds of ships, so the Army can bring up a ship with a battalion or it can bring a battalion from air and put it on a ship, people can access their gear and they can be deployed, either aviation mode to surface modes and get ashore some place. And that capability is distributed, the Army, and the Marines, Navy assets working around a theater can be brought together in a package, in a tailored capability that the CINC wants at the time and place the CINC wants it, not because there's a base a thousand miles away, it's the only place that somebody will give us permission to work out of. This is working against both the tactical and operational vulnerabilities of people that can strike us, and I'd argue that being at sea and moving around at 125 miles away from somebody's shoreline is a lot harder problem than hitting me in some airport that I used to own until the Army or the Marines came in and took it away from me, and now that I know where, exactly where they are, that's the kind of capability I want. And it also works against the political vulnerability problem.  You know, in the Cold War we had alliances and we had a lot of relationships with people and there were reasons people worked with us. Now those reasons aren't there any more.  In fact, you know, some people are pushing away against us.  Their costs, politically, economically, and threat-wise, go up if they work with America and so people aren't giving us the kind of bases.  We're not going to have that access, and you offset that by having some ability to work out at sea, have some independence from political issues and some reduced vulnerability to tactical threats. MR. DONNELLY:  That was still the most, the clearest and most articulate definition of what it is, that I've heard so far.  Let's try to get a couple folks on this side of the room and we'll start here with a gentleman in uniform, in front, and I think there were some hands farther back. QUESTION:  Good morning, gentlemen.  Major Aaron O'Connell, Yale University International Security Studies.  Major force structure changes take time, at least 20 to 30 years, so I'd like to ask each of you for two numbers, which may be a little too specific than you can give, but I'll ask it anyway. Having your druthers and assessing the threat environments as you assess it now, in 20 years from now how big would you like the U.S. Armed Forces to be and how big would you like the Marine Corps to be in terms of personnel?  Thank you. MR. DONNELLY:  I want to go so badly, that I'll go last.  Again, let's go down the line from Frank to Max to Mac. LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  [audio drop] forces no bigger than today.  I would shift some things around today, some of the investments.  You know, I'm an infantry officer, retired.  We know we need land forces.  I know we need effective ground forces.  I disagree with those who are proposing for a 100,000 man increase.  I don't think the demographics of the country or the political interests of the country will sustain it.  I don't think we can afford it. I don't think we can afford more than we're currently spending for defense today.  I know that's not a popular opinion, particularly perhaps in this building.  But the level of interest in these kinds of wars and in the kind of defense spending is going to come up pretty harsh against some realities and demographics around 2010. So I'm not going to build myself a force that I can't afford to sustain for the long term.  I'd trim off some of the programs, you know, to pay for some of the things that I need for sea basing, for some of the capabilities, reduce the FVEY [?], reduce the V22 by investing in the squad leaders of the future, invest in the strategic NCO.  Those are lots of small things, not a big profit margin for the defense industry, but there's enough there for them to get by, if you're buying Ballou [ph] Force Trackers, if you're buying networks, radios and body armor for people, and that's where I'd put the investment. The size of the Marine Corps?  I'll be kind of specific.  I spent a decade in the Pentagon, kind a working that issue as a force structure analyst.  About 175,000; maybe even a little less.  They're all going to be a little older.  They're all going to be a little more mature.  They're going to go to squad leader school--required.  Probably double the number of officers that go to education.  We're well below the Army in terms of--although we might be more intellectually agile.  I'll take that.  But we do not invest in the education of officers to the degree that the Army does. We need more advanced schooling.  I think something like 25 percent of all Marine field grade officers get to go to a career level school, and I would double that, and that takes end strength.  So you need at least the 175 for the long haul. MR. BOOT:  I wouldn't make any change in the force size of the Air Force or Navy.  I think that's fine, the way it is right now.  With the Marine Corps, I think it's also not too terribly out of whack simply because the Marine Corps, out of all the services, took the smallest hit after the end of the Cold War. I mean, I would probably still increase the size of the Corps a little bit, 25-, 50,000 Marines more, something like that; not a huge increase.  I  would make the biggest increase in the size of the Army, which I think needs to go much closer to its 1990 force level than it is today.  So, in other words, probably another 100,000, 200,000 soldiers, assuming that we can recruit them. I think given the kind of missions that we face in the future, they're going to be very manpower-intensive.  I mean, I think there's certain things that technology allows you to do with many fewer people and there's certain things it doesn't. I mean, clearly, on the high-end side of conventional combat, we can achieve much greater--we can kill a lot more people, blow up a lot more things, using a lot fewer people than ever before.  That's clearly what smart munitions and the tremendous advances in air power and naval power have allowed us to do over the course of the last decade, where you see the tremendous success that a much smaller force was able to have in Operation Iraqi Freedom in the initial invasion stage as opposed to the force that we used in Desert Storm. A lot of it has to do I think with the networking, the technology, the smart weapons, all the rest of it.  So I think there's been a real force savings in terms of what we're able to do in terms of the high and conventional combat phase, but there's just not a lot of savings, if any, I don't think, on the more demanding counterinsurgency, nation building, peacekeeping, that kind of the--the post, what happens after the end of major combat operations.  That still requiems a lot of riflemen standing on street corners talking to locals and trying to impose your will upon them and trying to change the kind of government that they've had, and there's just no way to short-circuit that with a lot of fancy gadgets and high technology and standoff weapons systems. So I think you need to have a lot of those grunts who are available for deployment.  I just don't think we have enough right now, as we're seeing in a huge strain that the Marine Corps and Army are suffering as a result of our huge deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. MR. DONNELLY:  Mac. COLONEL OWENS:  In some respects, I think it would be great to have a bigger Army.  I think that it would be a good thing.  But I agree with Frank, that I'm not sure the demographics would support it.  I think it would be very tough to get that.  That being said, there are additional things we can do.  I mean, you know, I get plenty of Army officers at the Naval War College, and a lot of them say look, a lot of the problems we have with deployments are self-generated.  They have to do with the way we've done things over time, and we need to change it. I think that's probably true.  There are better things that can be done internally to improve the rotational basis and the like. There's another thing too, which is a lot of your effectiveness on the ground has less to do, is less a function of the number of troops than it is with what you have them do.  It's entirely impossible to envision, you know, a larger force in Iraq whose biggest job is defending themselves and defending their logistics bases, and so forth. It's what a friend of mine refers to as a self-licking ice cream cone.  Basically you get a bigger force but you basically spend more and more of your resources basically trying to defend your bases. So the effectiveness can be enhanced, I think, by what you do with the troops.  The sort of things I think we're doing now, which is going on the defensive much more frequently, and also by changing the rotational structure. MR. BOOT:  Can I just make one point because both Frank and Mac have mentioned the demographic problem.  I'm not sure if there is a huge demographic problem, although I guess there might be the question of certainly we're--the Army's certainly having a lot of problems recruiting right now. But I think the way you can escape that problem is to do something that I've proposed before, which is to not limit your recruiting only to U.S. citizens or permanent resident, legal aliens, as we currently do.  I think you could certainly recruit people who are not legally here at the moment.  You could certainly recruit people who are not here at all.  You could certainly recruit foreigners.  In fact, we already make a lot of use of foreigners in places like Iraq where we, they're being hired as independent contractors. We're actually hiring Gurkhas and others, and I'm not sure why, if we're able to hire them for private security missions, we can't just recruit them into our own military and why, for example, if there's a Gurkhas regiment in the British army, why there couldn't be one in the American army.  That kind of thing. I think there's a huge number of people who would be happy to serve in return for the kind of pay that American soldiers and Marines get, and also in return for the promise of American citizenship, which I think would be a very powerful inducement on the model of the French Foreign Legion. So I think that's something that we need to think very hard about and I think makes a lot of sense. MR. DONNELLY:  Frank, did you want another-- LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I just want to talk about the demographics and  I was going to make mention of the French Foreign Legion, which I won't have to now since Max did.  I thought the country kind of got over the mercenary things when we beat the Hessians a few times up in my hometown area up in Washington Crossing, Pa., and we wouldn't be interested in hiring mercenaries. The demographics, though, are there.  The demographics are changing in the country, who wants to join the military, how big the country is, the population rate, and also the demographics of what this country's going to spend on nonmilitary spending in 2010 to 2015. If we don't change some of the fiscal policies in the country, the tax policies in the country, the demographics are going to drive spending in another way.  Rather than buying the two or three thousand extra recruiters and people working the training base now for all these young people, many of which might not speak English or have other qualifications like, you know, security clearances we might want to use for foreign people, I'd rather send those, you know, people we have now to school and invest in their training and education and not have to buy a lot of recruiters trying to chase less people. And I'm very, very concerned about the dilution of standards for education, high school completion, the disciplinary aspects that I see in some of the services.  It's a tough market out there.  I'm sure it'll change as soon as the war's over.  But a much larger service.  You know, the need for that assumes we're going to do business the way we have in the past, and I don't think we're going to repeat all the strategic mistakes that have required us to have the investment we've made in Iraq today. MR. DONNELLY:  I'm sorry, I particularly apologize to the gentleman in the far back.  I promise that he will be recognized early in the next round of Q&As, when we get there, if he still wishes to ask a question.  But all time for debate has expired, as we used to say, and I'm sure they still do in the Congress. I Just wish you'd join me in a round of congratulations and appreciation for the panelists. We're going to take a really brief break and then hop right in with the second panel absolutely as fast as possible.  So don't go far. [Break.  End of tape side 1B audio.] MR. KAGAN:  I'd like to welcome you to the second panel of the AEI conference on The Future of the United States Marine Corps. I'm Fred Kagan.  I'm a Resident Scholar here at AEI.  We have with us two-thirds of an extremely distinguished panel to discuss this.  Once again, the biographies are available to you and I won't take time going through what would be an extremely long process of listing all of the activities that these two very distinguished gentlemen have undertaken.  But we have with us today Lieutenant General John Sattler, Mr. Bing West, and we do not have with us at the moment Colonel Hammes, but we are eagerly hoping that he will arrive at some point in the course of the panel. In the first session we covered the ground I think pretty well and rather abstractly talking about roles and missions and the sorts of challenges that the Marine Corps faces today and into the future.  I would like to focus this panel on what the Marine Corps is actually doing today.  The Marine Corps has been a critical part in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operating Iraqi Freedom.  The Marine Corps remains extremely committed to those operations. The Marine Corps has drawn a lot of lessons out of those operations, and it's worked very hard to do that.  I think as we proceed into the future, before we start thinking about exactly where we're headed, it would behoove us to think about what lessons we can actually draw concretely from the sorts of operations that the Marine Corps is undertaking today. To speak to that question and to whatever else they would like to say, I will now turn it over to General Sattler and Mr. West.  I think we'll start with General Sattler. GENERAL SATTLER:  I'm the one-third that's not distinguished. [Laughter.] GENERAL SATTLER:  Two-thirds of a distinguished panel are going those comments are typed, they weren't written out.  I apologize, so I'll reconnect here. It really is a tremendous opportunity to be here today.  I'm going to go and push the notes off to the side and I will home in on lessons learned and what we've done as far as the Marine Corps goes to capture the lessons learned, and a large part of that has been on the back of Lieutenant General Jim Mattis who is going to speak on a subsequent panel here.  He has taken the opportunity to bring the noncommissioned officers from the grassroots on up to squad leaders, the ones who fought through the town, went mano a mano, opened the gate, gave them the opportunity to go to the front door, reached the front door, once in the building gave them the opportunity to then clear all the rooms on the bottom floor which now is the opportunity to go up the staircase and clear the upper deck. Keep in mind that during this urban fight we did not have nor did we want to raze the town.  The whole objective in each and every one of the fights, and I'll home in on the Fallujah fight, was to return the city of Fallujah to its rightful owners, the Fallujahan people.  Therefore, there was no attempt to carpet bomb, no attempt to fire indiscriminately.  Every round that was fired from an artillery piece or a mortar was a controlled round, and every piece of ordnance that was dropped from the fixed-wing aircraft, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, didn't matter, was in fact guided and put on the exact building that it needed to be dropped on in proximity to friendly forces. So what General Mattis did is he brought in the noncommissioned officers and let them from their perspective on the ground, dust and dirt blowing over the top of them, what did they see were the most important lessons learned, what would they like to see changed, what could have one better and how could he as their commander facilitate them to do better. He also brought in all the senior leadership in the May time frame back to Quantico to talk about small unit excellence and what do we need to do at the unit level from the battalion commander on down, and he actually brought regimental commanders on in, to talk at that level from the regimental commander all the way down to the squad leader up on stage in a forum talking to the senior leadership of the Corps, senior staff and noncommissioned officers, and talking to their fellow NCOs. So we've captured these lessons learned, the tactics, the techniques and the procedures, that are sometimes learned in building one and then they're implemented in building two. That's how fast this is.  It's adapt and win.  You have to be adaptable, and the corporal and the sergeant, the 19- to 22-year-old, 21-year-old, on the first row of buildings did things differently as they took down the second row, and that changed on the third row.  They just got better. The way they incorporated some of the lessons learned, how do you bring the tanks, because keeping in mind during this particular fight we had two battalions of soldiers, two tough mechanized battalions from the U.S. Army, one from the 1st Cav and one from the Big Red One, the First Division, that spearheaded both of the Marine Regimental Combat Teams. So we were at the same time working that joint operation and put six battalions of Iraqis in on top of that, so now it's joint and combined and it's all being done in a town that's about 3-1/2 miles by 3-1/2 miles with fixed-wing support, rotor-wing support coming in from all three services from the carrier battle group.  If you showed up and you had a capability and you could put that capability in the fight, someone took charge of you and you were in the fight. Then we also have the British, the Black Watch Battalion, came on up and cut off the Euphrates, the rat lines that led down along the Euphrates river. So you go back to the sergeant's perspective.  What lessons did he learn that he could now bring back or she could bring back, because a lot of the convoys, remember there was no rear area, there is no rear area in this fight.  Every time you go outside of a gate you're in the combat zone and a lot of the convoys, almost all of them are being run by combat service support warriors and there's a great mix or men and women in there.  So this was not just a male war, definitely not just an Infantry war, and it will remain that way for the future. So how do we take those lessons learned, bring them back, capture them and not put them in a shiny document with a nice pretty cover so it sits in the dentist's office and when you're waiting to get a root canal you read the first two or three pages?  What we wanted to do was make it a document that everybody would want to get their hands on, that they would be able to get their hands on, that was accessible, very user friendly.  General Mattis has in fact done that and will continue to do that and upgrade it. A lot of the lessons that were learned were also taking out to Twentynine Palms where we're building an Urban Center of Excellence.  We're building a town and as we sit here one of the towns is completed with a little over 100 buildings.  The next one will just be a little bit over 300.  And then the mother of all urban centers from the Marine Corps perspective, it'll be about 1,500 buildings.  And the buildings are able to be reconfigured, they're modular so that you can actually go in, change the structure so that individual squad leader, platoon commander or battalion commander gets a different look each time, has to request the imagery, has to go and redesignate the buildings, has to plan what buildings he needs to work commensurated coordinates on for air strike. We've also not only taken those lessons and taken them into our malleable training which changes between each course.  It's not a program of instruction poured in concrete.  That flexibility and adaptability leaves room for those NCOs and the young officers, and the senior officers are coming back, to go and put their enthusiasm, their creative juices and their individual lessons learned into the training package so that the next unit that goes out, the goal is everybody who goes out should be a step faster and an inch or a foot taller than the one that came out. The beauty of it is that those that are out there understand that's their responsibility.  If you don't go out better than I came back, I failed, I failed in my responsibility to get those lessons learned out, and that we've failed as an institution if we don't take those lessons and put them into the training program so that the warrior goes out and has, he or she, everything working to their advantage. You cannot alleviate risk.  If you want to alleviate risk, stay home, stay in your bed, don't even walk out of your house, because each time you move forward you incur more risk.  But you must mitigate risk and the mitigation of that risk is taken by the lessons learned, by being creative in our training programs, and by taking the next warrior to go out and ensuring that he or she is taller, as I mentioned, taller, faster, stronger than the warrior who just came back. The last part of that equation is that we're taking those who fought the fight, these young noncommissioned officers and officer, they're the ones who are coming back now and they're teaching at Twentynine Palms at the Urban Center of Excellence, at the Basic School.  They're at the recruit depots where we bring in our bar steel that the recruiters and America gives us and we turn that into United States Marines. So all along that path, that journey to go over to combat, there's somebody who has their hand, a calming hand, that exudes confidence and talks very knowledgeably from having been in the fight, to make sure from recruit training all the way up through your MOS, military occupational specialty training, and then when you go forward in your unit, cohesion type training, all along that way there is someone who is mentoring you, not just teaching, but mentoring you and talking about personal experiences, and it's working and it's working extremely well. Today's great idea will be no good in 6 months, so the status quo will breed complacency and will give the enemy a chance to get ahead.  What we're doing as an institution is we're creating an environment where creativity can change almost on a daily basis.  It still needs to be vetted because--2nd Lieutenant's salary came back with something I thought worked really well but I was lucky, we don't want to take that idea and immediately go in and change the program of instruction.  So there is a group of sage folks who take a look at it, but it's not a bureaucratic sage that takes months or years to change a program of instruction. So I guess what I would say is by being adaptable, by letting the creative juices move forward and by taking decisive action it's working.  I'll just leave it at that and look forward to your questions.  Thank you very much. MR. WEST:  Apparently we have PowerPoint slides.  I don't know if they have been loaded or not. GENERAL SATTLER:  I had them, too, but I decided not to use them. [Laughter.] MR. WEST:  In the mean time I'll just start without them because I think that had the privilege of watching Lieutenant General Mattis when he was there in Fallujah for the first battle in April and then Lieutenant General Sattler in the November battle. [Technical interruption.] MR. WEST:  What I'd like to do would be to que off what you heard from Max, what you heard from John, and I know what you're going to hear from Jim, Lieutenant General Sattler and Lieutenant General Mattis, which is the enormous focus that has being given to the junior Marines because it is a decentralized battlefield and they are the tip of the spear. So I'd like to start with just the first question, who joins the Marine Corps, because that is the essence of the issue.  Fundamentally, I think that the challenge for the Marines, the basic challenge, is projecting a difference in an age of jointness.  In essence, Marines aren't joint when they join.  You join the Marines because there's something inherent in you that causes you to want to be a Marine.  What we saw in the two battles in Fallujah demonstrated that today that same essence that was there in Iwo Jima, at the Chosin Reservoir and in Wei City, is resident in the force today. That was proven because in Fallujah in November there was the highest number of fights inside houses recorded since Stalingrad, and it may even exceed what happened in Stalingrad. The standard operational procedure in Wei City and other battles was that the enemy force would flee from the houses as their first line of defense when you breached the houses.  The murderous jihadists in Fallujah wanted to go into these concrete rooms in the back of houses because they didn't believe that the Marines would really have the courage to go room by room. And consider this, you had 30,000 buildings, you had 300,000 rooms that were searched by 100 squads.  When I was out there, my calculations were that each squad had at least two fights inside rooms.  This exceeds anything that any SWAT team anywhere in the world has ever encountered and it was done by the United States Marines at the average of 18, 19 and 20 years of age, going in room by room. There was a Corporal Corners (ph) from the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, and he had the most fights.  He was in 12 different fights inside houses.  Later when I was talking him, we were talking about a lot of things, and one thing he said to me was, he was asked what was your best piece of equipment, and he said my three fire team leaders.  He didn't mean it in any way, he just meant instinctively that's what he thought. Then he looked at me and he said, well, sir, you know why we all join.  We all understand each other.  And it was that key, why they all joined, that I think is the essence of those small units and why they do it because the Marines are hunters. I get a little bit tired with the press always saying and kind of portraying us as being victims over in Iraq.  When you're on a battlefield with Marines, it's not the Marines who are the victims, they're the hunters.  As long as that essence is there in the Marine Corps, I think they can carry out any of their operational missions.  So it really starts with who joins because that forms the backbone of the Marine Corps. To a very large extent, about 65 to 70 percent of all Marines who come in only stay for one tour.  They're only there for 4 years and then they leave.  They pay a price in terms of their future careers because the time that they're in the Infantry they're not hooked up to computers, they're constantly training, they're constantly out there, and the skill they have in the end is to walk up to some employer in the future and say I can really shoot a rifle. I think that the society owed to them when they're getting out that group, they owe them a chance of developing other skills.  Practically every Marine in this room is helping with some other Marine who's going on to do something else.  I've been trying with three or four, and I've discovered I just wanted one corporal to get on a police force, and he had been in three or four fights in houses.  Nobody on SWAT teams had been in that many.  I discover time and time again with the police that there's certain cookie-cutter regulations that have to be followed and then they'll consider a letter of recommendation rather than saying I'm starting with a guy who's really well trained. Similarly, I'm trying to get another young man into college, and again I discover, they say let's look at the SATs first.  I say, wait, wait, wait, he was doing something entirely different.  Can't you change this a little bit? I think that there has to be a program.  I'd love to see the Marines and the Army get together on this, where they would say we'll do one of two things.  We'll really put real pressure to have something equivalent to what happened after World War II.  After World War II, for instance, my two uncles came back from Marine Infantry where they had been on Okinawa.  They both ultimately went to very good colleges.  They really weren't, God bless them, really academically that qualified when they came off the battlefield, but there was a systemic understanding in our culture that we really were going to help those coming back. Today what we say is we get bumper stickers We're Supporting the Troops, but I haven't found that it changes too much at all any of the regulations that were in place.  So I'd like to see one of two things done, either the Army and the Marines together saying when you're getting out if you want we'll give you 4 or 5 intensive months or study with a stipend so that you can catch up, offer a job.  Or that we really begin to put pressure on the outside community to actually give credit to those who did the fighting for us, which they really don't give that much credit when you go for jobs today. Back to the operations themselves.  One danger I think that we've built in for ourselves is we have now in my judgment in our society highly unrealistic expectations about force protection.  Iraq in my judgment is about at the peak of how you can fight a war with minimal casualties.  When you consider that we're having every day these pictures shown on the front page, if we did that with the police in the United States we'd be thinking we had crime rampant throughout the United States because the relative level of casualties compared to past wars, for instance, in Vietnam, is much less. I think that this will not be the norm in future intense combat, and I'm concerned that there will be a shock to our culture about casualties because we really I think have gotten as close to minimal casualties as we can in the Iraqi war. If I had one suggestion for an operational change, and several already mentioned it, if I took any three senior reasonable organizational experts from the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, and had them look at the structure of the United States military as an organizational structure, not understanding the bureaucratic politics, I'll bet you that time and again they'd say the most logical convergence here is between the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Forces, and the Special Operations Forces should be part of the Marine Corps. I believe the time to do that has passed because we're in the midst of a war and the Secretary of Defense is not going to undertake that major a shift at this particular time.  But logically I think operationally that one was staring us in the face and everyone missed it.  The Marine Corps missed it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff missed it, and SOCOM missed it. On the other hand, I will say that there are two things that converge together that any operation in the future is going to face that I believe that the senior operational staffs must take account of in a way that they did not in Iraq, and the first is that we are not a united country in war fighting, we are not, and we are not going to solve that in our political system. If we go to war, one has to expect that the longer that war goes on, the stronger that those who are opposed to the war in the first instance will become, and therefore, there is an imperative to take time into account when you are doing your operational planning. The second aspect that I think is even more dramatic is the information war.  Fallujah in April, we had our butts kicked by al Jazeera and it caused fecklessness at the high levels.  We can expect that any time this notion of information war where we thought we were on top of it, we really weren't, and to a large extent I would argue that overall in Iraq, even today we are losing at that information war level where we pat ourselves on the back and say we're so good. So I would say that these two challenges feed into one another and any senior operational staff that's going to undertake a campaign that has not looked at this much more rigorously than we have today will be failing in its duty in the future. Then if I stand back, where do I come out overall?  The United States Marine Corps has the deepest and the strongest combat leadership I think ever at this particular time.  The greatest challenge, and thank goodness I don't have to sit on promotion boards or have any of the responsibilities that General Mattis or General Sattler have, is that the Marine Corps is so deep that in the pyramid of our hierarchy when you have to take all these superb company commanders and First Sergeants and winnow them down to many fewer Sergeants Major and battalion commanders, you have a tough, tough thing to do.  We're really that deep today, the Marine Corps is. I've been on a lot of battlefields with the Marines and been out there with about 12 different battalions.  Let me just give you three anecdotes that bring it all together. Last year at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball I was sitting with a general officer and the young troops, of course, would come up for their pictures taken and the wives would come up and talk with the general's wife, and this continued throughout the entire evening.  As I'm walking out, my date who was a senior corporate executive, she looked at me for a minute and she said, I'm astounded.  That would never happen in my corporation or in most corporations in America where the most junior employees would feel perfectly free to come up to the CEO's table and the CEO would be delighted to see them and they'd stand there together and chat, and this went on.  She said, I have never seen that kind of camaraderie before. The second anecdote has to do with one of the Lieutenant Generals in the room right now, and I won't say which one.  I was sitting on board a C130 flying somewhere and the G-4 in charge of logistics was sitting next to me.  I said, so how are things going?  He said, pretty good, but I wish the Lance Corporals didn't feel so free always just to tell the General anything that's going wrong. Another time, the third anecdote, I was down south of Queens in a bad section of Fallujah with a rifle company and the word came down, the Division Commander General Natonski had just gone into the stack and gone first into a room.  The squad I was with, immediately what was the response?  Kind of a shrug and a couple of jokes.  One said, a Lance Corporal, good job.  Somebody else said, overpaid to be a Lance Corporal.  Then they were back to work again.  The point was that they were so accustomed to seeing their senior officers right down there with them that that just got a shrug, okay. I think as long as the ethos of our military is such that the Generals and the Lance Corporals talk back and forth both ways, that the Generals feel comfortable talking to the Lance Corporals and the Lance Corporals feel comfortable talking to the Generals, I can take that group, put it on any battlefield and it will succeed in the operation. My conclusion right now is that this is about as strong a force as we're going to see, and if somebody said push for operational weaknesses, I'd say three.  The first operational weakness would be let's really try to do harder something good for those E-3s and E-4s that are getting out after 4 years who were in the Infantry, to open up doors for them or to give them a supplemental that helps them when they have to get an education or a job. Then on the operational battlefield, the information war, we really have to work on that. The thing that disturbs me the most I kept for the last.  It's really not quite fair to put this on the Marines because not one of the senior military leadership positions in the Iraq or Afghanistan war has been a Marine.  Nonetheless, we all understood that the mission overall, though it took a long time finally to get that mission articulated, the mission was not for us to prevail in the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, but to build up the indigenous forces so that they could prevail.  This gets to the heart of the matter, there still is not in advisory effective operational template that works so that somehow the ability of the Marine leadership or the Army leadership can transfer the essence of being good combat leaders to the Iraqis so they can get the job done more quickly. In Vietnam, our advisers in the Vietnamese Marine Corps and in the combined action platoons, everyone knew the keys to success.  We haven't found those keys to success yet in Iraq and I think that's an operational ingredient that needs work, and I'd stop there.  Thank you. MR. KAGAN:  Thank you very much.  I see that are still a very shall I say distinguished two-thirds of a panel.  I would like to take the opportunity to press our speakers a little bit more and try to begin a little bit of a discussion before we open it to questions. It strikes me that there are a number of issues that have emerged in Iraq certainly for the Army, but I think also for the Marine Corps.  I would like to ask the question, do we need to take these into consideration?  Do we need to think more about improving capabilities in certain areas in order to be able to conduct operations like this in the future. One of them is language training, how important a capability is for that for the Marines and what is the Marine Corps doing about that?  Is that something that the Marine Corps can do? Another is armor, and I don't mean body armor, I mean tanks and heavy vehicles.  I note that in the past two wars the Marines have had armor cross-attached to them to make up for a relative dearth of organic armor capability.  I'm wondering if this is a problem that the Marines should address considering that it seems like that these sorts of operations we're engaged in now may become the norm. In the earlier panel, the need for advanced civil schooling in the Marine Corps was addressed, or a greater degree of that.  It was ironic that an earlier panelist mentioned that the Army does this better than the Marines, and that's ironic because I think the Army is doing everything in its power actually to shut down it's advanced civil schooling programs as rapidly as possible.  Is that something that would benefit the Marines and help the Marines keep their mental agility and ability to deal with unexpected situations? Lastly, sustainment.  There's an argument that goes back and forth, of course, the Marines are faster, lighter and of course smarter and more handsome than Army officers, and yet there is the problem that when the Marines want to conduct extended deployments, they tend to have to fall back on Army logistics systems.  This reflects to a considerable degree the expeditionary mind set of the Marines, the notion that we will go ashore, take the beach and then go back to the ships. I'm wondering in the age that we're entering now where it looks like the Marines will be involved in more extended operations perhaps the Marines need to think about beefing up their own organic sustainment capabilities to be able to do that a little bit more. I'd like to in general throw out the question what sort of larger operational strategic lessons can and should we be learning from recent operations? GENERAL SATTLER:  I'll go ahead and very hopefully succinctly walk down through each and every one of those. Before I roll into that though, I do want to state that out in the West, out where the Marines were located in Al Anbar, there were 8,000 U.S. Army warriors that were out there with us.  There were two Army brigades, one that came in, and this will address a little what you just talked about do the Marines need more armor.  The nation needs a balance and what a Marine battalion brings to the battlefield, somewhere close to 900 warriors, feet on the ground, M16A2 riles, 240G machine guns, automatic weapons right down the line, and to support an entire division, that's one battalion of tanks. The reason why General Metz and General Casey when we prepared to go into the fight, they knew this, they knew where the Marines' strength was and we knew where our strength was.  The Marines came forward and requested Army battalions and requested an Army brigade, requested Army MPs, to come in and facilitate the fight. Do we need to have that type of armor across our 24 battalion, do we need to armor up, or can we build the basic battalion and task organize and in a joint fight which we're always going to be in, we're always going to be in a joint fight, I'm not the first to say that but I certainly agree with it, we can then go to the Army or the Army can come to the Marine Corps and we can pull from each other, play to the strengths. When you take the deck of cards, if we have an Army deck, Navy deck, Air Force, deck, Marine Corps deck, we're not going to get the synergy that the nation expects out of its warriors.  But if you have smart commanders like General Abizaid, General Casey and General Metz who understand that, and you have supporting division commanders like Pete Chiarelli with the 1st Cav, John Batiste, Carter Hamm up in the North who understand that their warriors need to be in the fight at the time they're needed, for the time they're needed duration wise, and then they need to provide the violence that's needed at that particular point.  Ubiquitous presence just creates more targets.  What you have to be able to do is realize what you need at that time and then pull it in from the joint community. So concerning does the Marine Corps need more armor, I say when we need it we ask for it, and when it comes it comes from the greater armored fighting organization in the world called the U.S. Army, and when they check in there's no caveats, there's no we don't do windows, we don't do curtains, they just show up and they salute and say okay, boss, what's the commander's intent, and generals like General Natonski gave them that commander's guidance and intent as did the regimental commanders, and they did nothing but brag about the Marines on their flank and the Marines did nothing but brag about the fire and the capability of those U.S. Army soldiers. The same thing goes when an aircraft checks on station, do we need more fixed wing?  When we need more F16s, F15s, coming out of the Air Force, F14s coming off the carrier battle group, didn't matter.  All trained to a standard in jointness, when the JTAC picks up, he doesn't care who he's talking to, what type of aircraft.  Same with the Marine Corps forward air controller or a gun fire liaison team.  You want a capability and you want it where you want it and you want it now and it's delivered based on--took a long time, but it's here and it worked extremely well.  So that sort of addresses the armor. The language training.  The Marine Corps is going to open up a Cultural Center of Excellence at Quantico.  Initial operational capability will be this coming October.  That Cultural Center of Excellence will have road teams that can come to places like the 1st MEF or the 2nd MEF, when you're getting ready to go into a fight and they will help inculcate some of those nuances of the culture that you're going to move into and will be presented as opportunities, and through ignorance you won't make them challenges.  So that's going to kick off. It will also have the capability to train somewhere around 4,000 to 4,500 linguists on an annual basis, realizing that each and every officer, senior staff NCO, that that's a combat enabler.  If you can talk to me in my language and you're winning the hearts and minds working the street as a beat cop as you get out an engage, if you talk to me in my language, I warm up to you.  First of all, it shows that you took the time to learn it, you took the time to learn about my culture, so right away the door is opened up and gives you the opportunity to get in there and engage and make more hay. On the advanced civil schooling, I guess you mean like master's programs, et cetera.  You're talking to a guy whose B.S., B.S. meaning bachelor of science, my other B.S. is never questioned, but my B.S., my bachelor of science, probably is. [Laughter.] GENERAL SATTLER:  But we do still afford the opportunity and you can pick the time in your career when you finish doing those things you should do as a Captain and you have time to go out and get your master's degree in some of the skilled areas that we need to be deeper in for subject matter experts, we'll afford you the opportunity to go to Monterey, California, or to another institution.  You'll master's and come back and we'll put you to work in that particular area for a pay-back tour, and then we put you right back into your warrior outfit so you don't miss any of those key jobs that you need to pick up whether you're an Infantryman, an Artilleryman, an aviator, you're a combat service support warrior, it doesn't matter.  I have not seen a reduction on that. We're also taking a look now at our foreign area officers.  Those officers can go out and learn the language or culture and get steeped in that in a foreign affairs type master's degree.  They become great enablers.  When you're sitting and trying to build a city council in a place like Ramadi or in Fallujah or one of the other cities inside Iraq, they were tremendous advisers.  They thought differently, they saw things differently and they kept once again the commander just pure energy and enthusiasm from making mistakes, unintentional mistakes, obviously, but when you make a mistake out of ignorance it still impacts those you're trying to work more closely with. I think if I missed any it's because I didn't want to answer any more.  I didn't write them down, but I think that's where I'd like to stop right there and I'll push it over to Bing. MR. WEST:  Concerning the jointness, there was great tension in World War I, in World War II and in Vietnam to put it mildly between the Army and the Marine Corps.  Indeed, both General Westmoreland and General Abrams were severely critical of the Marines in Vietnam and the Marines didn't want to have too much to do with them or their attitudes as well. When you look now on the battlefield, there's such a vast difference.  Jointness is full, and there were three major battles in Iraq since the seizure of Baghdad as pointed out by Max Boot.  They were Najaf, Ramadi and Fallujah.  In the battle for Najaf, the first unit in was a battalion of Marines, Battalion 14, under Lieutenant Colonel Mayer, and then he was reinforced with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Calvary with their armor under Lieutenant Colonel Rainey.  The two of them worked hand in glove so that the Marines were providing the support for the armor on the flanks just like General Sattler said. Then when General Sattler went into the battle in Fallujah, he not only called on the Army, but the rumor is he said, by the way, 2-7 under Rainey might be just the kind of person I want.  So it got all the way down, and then he went in with Willie Buehl from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines and repeated what they had done in Fallujah. When General Mattis had that huge fight up in Ramadi, it actually was being conducted by an Army Colonel by the name of Connors who had under him a Marine battalion under Kennedy of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines.  So the battlefield when you get on there, it's all now one service.  I agree with General Sattler that you now say what kind of capabilities do I have and who can best provide them, and that's how it's done. The only other observation I'd make about language, and this gets back to the advisory thing, I do not believe, Fred, that the issue is first language.  The first issue on the advisory effort is that the American advisers do not have leverage over the promotions or the selection system of the Iraqis as a sovereign country.  That enormously limits what you can do because you can take some American advisers and after 3 to 5 months they can tell you who the good officers are, the good NCOs, and who really isn't so good.  They have no way of systematically influencing that and so it's not so much the language as the sovereignty and the promotional system and what being an adviser really means. GENERAL SATTLER:  If I could just add one quick point.  As we prepare to go back, the mission has changed.  When we were there the last time, it went from stability and support operations into a counterinsurgency.  Now that we've been fighting the counterinsurgency as Mr. West said, the focus is and it has been to train and mentor, our mission right now is train and mentor the Iraqi forces to be prepared to fight the counterinsurgency. The second part of the mission is enable and facilitate with fixed-wing aircraft, rotor-wing aircraft, vehicles, logistics, facilitate the Iraqi forces now to conduct the counterinsurgency.  Once we train and mentor, mentor being the key piece that Mr. West talked about, that takes people there, living with them, and that's being done now. We're building teams.  When we go back, each battalion will have the team built that will go into their partnered battalion.  So if I'm a Marine Lieutenant Colonel Battalion Commander or an Army Lieutenant Colonel Battalion Commander, what happens is I put the fire in the belly with enablers, smart, tough individuals who understand combat, who understand leadership so they can be watched and mentored and mimicked to help bring up that Iraqi combat leadership. Now when I get ready to move forward, it's two battalions up who happen to be Iraqis with my enablers and my mentors in there and one battalion back which happens to be my own battalion which is now sort in an overwatch position.  So that partnership, an habitual relationship, will be built.  It's being built right now and it will continue to foster that relationship.  These embeds don't go at 8:00 in the morning and come at 9:00 at night.  They go and they live with, they become part of the organization.  They are embeds, true embeds, and that's the way ahead to get the Iraqi forces to be capable, tough and strong and prepared to go ahead and take the enemy on until we get to the point where we can turn over battle space. I just wanted to make sure that as Mr. West said that everybody knew it's not only a concept, it's more than theory, it's in practical application now and we will follow that and that we're working and training our forces to be prepared to do that when they arrive and it won't be a surprise. MR. KAGAN:  Thank you very much.  I think at this point let's start with questions. MR. WHITTLE:  Rick Whittle, Dallas Morning News.  This question, I apologize, it's off the topic of the panel, but this is such a great opportunity to ask General Sattler this question and to ask Mr. West this question, too. General Sattler, you said today's great idea will be no good in 6 months, and that's sort of the message I think that I heard from one of the panel members in the previous panel about the V22 Osprey.  I'm wondering, as an operational commander, would that aircraft actually bring you anything that would make it worth the cost?  Mr. West, if you have any thoughts on it, I'd love to hear them. GENERAL SATTLER:  When you talk about transformation of warfare, the V22 Osprey with its ability to take off from congested areas in pads in the vertical mode and then to transition into the fixed-wing aircraft mode and cover great distances and will carrier a substantial payload, i.e., warriors inside, and its ability to refuel in the air, and then to transition back down if you're going into a tight zone where you can put those warriors on the deck out of place where the enemy did not think you had the capability to reach. In an area like Al Anbar Province, you've got a Marine Expeditionary Force covering an area about the size of the State of North Carolina with about 1,100 kilometers of border and those 1,100 kilometers of border, if you were some thug, some intimidator, I just can't even call them insurgents, but if you were one of those individuals who was preparing your nefarious scheme either in Syria or trying to work your way down through the Jordanian border or across the Saudi Arabian border and you didn't know where we were going to strike from with that kind of speed and violence, you can take that capability with some ISR capability, unmanned aerial vehicles, sensors, you name it. But once the sensors are tripped or the vehicle picks up the enemy coming through, at that point you can launch this quick reaction force without having to refuel en route as was mentioned on an earlier panel.  That gets there when you want it rapidly with the firepower that you need and it can bring the enemy to justice at that point. What I'm saying is you would actually be able to put yourself at the right place at the right time without having substantial forces, forward operating bases, forward arming and refueling points throughout the area by virtue of having the capability that an aircraft like the Osprey gives you. My answer would be absolutely yes.  I'd love to have it.  I'd like to have it right now. MR. WEST:  In 1966 as a grunt when I'd be going out on missions, it was a CH46 that would dump me off and Dick and Mack and everybody else.  Here as a grandfather I go back to Iraq and I go into Fallujah and it's a CH46 taking me in and out.  Let's get on with it and do something.  Forty years is enough. MS. LACKEY:  Sue Lackey (?) for General Sattler.  The increased responsibility in education of junior NCOs implies a greater time in service.  What changes to manpower policies do you envision to encourage retention and allow for that education process? Also under a MARSA (?) component, how would staff NCOs avoid any kind of hinderance to their career path by being isolated to one MOS and within one theater command? GENERAL SATTLER:  I think we're out of time. [Laughter.] MR. KAGAN:  Not remotely. GENERAL SATTLER:  The first question is a great one.  We talk about the strategic corporal, the noncommissioned officer, the 19- to 20-year-old who right now tonight is probably playing in a football game in some high school stadium who's going to be on the battlefield fighting this global war on terror in the next 18 months.  Or some young lady who's playing on a basketball team or in student government or just a fine citizen back in a hometown somewhere.  These are the individuals who are going to carry this fight forward.  They're the ones who will stand on the wall and they're the ones that will ensure that that old saying that all evil needs to succeed is for good men and women to do nothing. If good men and women are complacent to sit and home and watch CNN or watch Fox and not be on it making a difference, we're going to be in trouble.  So you have a great question. Other than sizing you up, lift that block up, run this 100-yard dash, you look pretty good, you're now a squad leader, and because I've put the platinum healing hand upon your head you are now a strategic corporal or strategic sergeant, and we picked up on that. General Mattis will tell you when he ran these lessons learned, they are hungry.  They know they're good.  The nation is providing some of the best and brightest to serve in our armed forces.  So this thirst for additional knowledge, I want to be the best I can be before I hit the first row of buildings.  I don't want to have to use my ability to adapt and learn and my leadership skills and how to be a better squad leader on the fly, I'd like to have it on the front side.  We're taking a real hard look at that. It was already stated that we only keep about 25 percent, a very young force.  We need a lot of Privates, PFCs and Lance Corporals.  It's a young man, young woman's ball game to jump the fence to go through the door to and make those kinds of things happen, guys like me just get in the way, sir, it's great you up here, but once you move off to the side, we got business to take care of. They just have the dexterity, they're courageous, they work as a team, and we're not going to change that policy.  We will continue to recruit these young men and young woman.  We will continue to return after 4 years 60 to 70 percent back to society hopefully better than we took them in.  That's also one of our responsibilities to the American people. The ones that we keep, how do we not then take them out of the fight and then send them to recruiting duty or down to the drill field, all those other things that we need to have done?  We're looking at it now very, very hard. I don't have the solution right now, but I will tell you it's on the table and some of our best and brightest are taking a look at how do we give them that opportunity to be schooled, to go to the squad leader's course before they've been a squad leader, to go to the noncommissioned officer's course before they've been a Corporal or they actually make Sergeant? It's tough.  It's very hard to do especially with the operational tempo right now because the same ones you need in the fight, the same ones you need out at the kitchen table talking to those parents with that young man or woman sitting next to them when they look at them and go wow, he could be that?  Unless you send your best and brightest out there, you're not going to be that bar steel that I talked about earlier. It's not an easy solution, but it has to be done.  It has to be done.  Once we solve it, General Mattis will go ahead and he'll tell me how he did it and then I'll give you a call and let you know.  But it's being looked at very hard and it will be solved. The other question was on the Marine Special Operations Command.  That decision has not yet been made.  Obviously, General Brown, the SOCOM Commander, General Hagee, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the Secretary of Defense, will take at least one more look at that. What that involves is it would involve some of the highly skilled warriors that we have now in the operational forces will be afforded the opportunity to work under Special Operations Command.  From what an operator's point of view, we will lose them.  Those of us who are out there now, we'd lose them meaning we don't own them, but they go to a bigger, higher cause to work under Special Operations Command. We work every day.  Every day inside of Iraq there's a Special Operations warrior working with the Marine or working with a soldier who's a straight-leg Marine, straight-leg soldier.  The old days of Special Operations in the back room, close your eyes we're coming out, we'll tell you when to open them when we're doing with the operation, those days are long gone.  We talk ahead of time.  We share intelligence.  We help prosecute targets.  We provide enablers.  We'll cordon the area off.  We'll put a couple F18s up, an F14, an F16 up in the stack if you need it. If you have to do a sensitive site exploitation, we'll come in with the manpower of strong, tough warriors who aren't trained quite to the standard, and it is an extremely high standard that our SOF warriors are trained to, so you don't ant them doing these other things.  You want them doing the direct action. We do work with them now, so this isn't a big culture shift, but if we take those Marines out and move them over, there will be a career pattern.  It will be a career pattern for those Marines who say I want to be a special operations warrior if this comes about.  If it does, they'll be taken care of, they'll be able to move over and they'll be able to have a career path as Mr. West said, that same type pyramid inside that community that they enjoyed when they were outside in the traditional Infantry.  That hopefully answers your question. MR. WEST:  The proposition of your question is interesting.  The hypothesis that you have to have longer than 4 years in service in order to develop cognitive skills defies I think the definition of college which is only 4 years, and that's the same time frame that these young men are in the Marine Corps. If we relaxed some of the administrative trivia that we put on these Lance Corporals and insisted on higher cognitive skills, I think the Marine Corps would be better off and the individuals would be better off. MR. KAGAN:  Tom? MR.          :  I also wanted to change the subject a bit.  We've talked a lot about tactics in Iraq on the panel, but General Sattler in particular has experience with other theaters in the larger war in the Middle East.  I would like to invite him or just ask a question, again, as important as Iraq and Afghanistan are, there are places like--or Southeast Asia.  How are these things tied together operationally, or how should they be tied together operationally, or how are the various theaters of action inherently interrelated to the central theater.  Again, building on that, what does the Marine Corps need to do or what can the Marine Corps bring to the table to particularly make us successful not only on the central front as it were, but on these peripheral fronts that are multiplying so rapidly? GENERAL SATTLER:  We have military training teams that are out there right now.  They school up ahead of time.  They go to a particular training session where they learn how to work with other country militaries and we send them forward.  There's one in Georgia for instance right now that's doing that military training. The concept on that under the theory of security cooperation is to get into the countries.  I'll talk a little bit about the Horn of Africa where General Franks established a Combined Joint Task Force in the Horn of Africa and General Abizaid has put his full energies behind that.  The Combined Joint Task Force of a limited number of all services and our coalition partners that are out there, the goal is to work, and they work out of a small country called Djibouti, but what do is they engage.  They engage with Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia.  They're working around Somalia but obviously it doesn't have a government you can work with, so we're not inside of Somalia.  But they also work with Kenya and the Sudan. The intent is rather than wait until things go way south, get in early.  They're doing the same kind of things that Mr. West talked about by training all their militaries, to train their special forces individuals to get higher skills.  They're sharing intelligence to make sure that a potential breeding ground of terrorism, i.e., the Horn of Africa, is neutralized by the countries in the Horn of Africa with assistance from the U.S. and our coalition partners. That's one of those cases when you take a look at it you say wow, so many countries, so many people are impacted by such a small group.  There's a two-star general and a staff out there.  The whole crew is probably somewhere around 12 to 1,300 total, but they have the ability to influence all those different countries with the goal being let the countries give them--inculcate the capability and the confidence and the skills so that they can continue to keep any terrorists who might want to come down there off balance.  They have done this.  They have brought a number of justice over the course of the last 3 to 3-1/2 years. MR. KAGAN:  Other questions? MR. HOFFMAN:  George Hoffman, adjunct faculty at George Washington University. Mr. West, you mentioned the fact that we are losing the information war and I would agree with that.  I think the reason we're losing it is because a lot of the press consciously decides not to report good things, individual acts of heroism, humanitarian activities, infrastructure improvements and things like that. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the worst kind of a press is a free press, except for all the others.  We have to live with the press we have. My question to you, sir, and also to General Sattler and also to you if you'd like to answer is, how do we put forward to the press all of the good things that are happening in a manner such that it will compel to report them? MR. WEST:  General Mattis quoting--has said the noblest deeds if left unsung go unnoticed.  I believe for the United States Marine Corps, for instance, I came in because of my uncles but also because I always was reading his book Follow Me about the 2nd Marine Division.  So we all have books as something we've gone back to. It does concern me that in this war our soldiers and Marines are portrayed more as victims and all the heroes that we have out there like this Corporal Connors or this wild man we have now down in Quantico, Captain Oshkosh, is that how you pronounce his name?  His bravery is extraordinary.  We don't hear about them with some exceptions for a while, but I think I don't have an answer for that.  I think it has a lot to do with the editorial boards.  I just think it requires constant pinging away at people. I meant something larger, sir, relative to the information war.  What I meant was, at a strategic level before you go into battle when you're looking at something and you're saying what's going on here and figuring it out strategically.  The classic example in Iraq is, to a large extent, the radical imams in Anbar Province hijacked the religion and put it on the side of the Sunni insurgents.  So they attack you yelling God is Great and the Iraqi security forces to a large extent do not have a corresponding rallying cry.  That makes a big difference. It's that ability also to anticipate what's going to happen on the battlefield as it's going to be portrayed because every battle now is seen around the world within 24 hours.  I think that we just have to think more creatively or put some of the more senior people to work on that dimension of the problem rather than the individual press stories themselves. GENERAL SATTLER:  I realize we're short on time, but very quickly, during the first Fallujah fight, the courage, the valor and the tactics were there to actually probably roll Fallujah up in you could guess 5 days or 4 days or another week.  But what happened was, it was already mentioned, the information operations campaign painted such a bleak picture in some cases of B-roll or backup roll that was not even in the town of Fallujah, it was shot in other parts of the country, it was dated, pictures of people going into hospitals. You can say all you want, once the enemy throws the first punch, it's like a boxing match, if you're on your back in the information operations war, you can throw punches all day long and they won't even reach the opponent's knee. We took a lot of the lessons learned and as we approached the second fight for Fallujah, it was more deliberate where the prime minister was on board, he put some emergency law into place, gave us all the things that we knew we needed to have ahead of time.  One of them was not the information operations because you're allowed in information operations to put spin on, et cetera, but the public affairs side which goes to the part of your point, we had 91 embedded media that came out and that stayed.  You had to sign up for that.  You couldn't just blow in, grab and story and blow out.  You had to come, you had to work with the unit head of time, you had to get to know the unit.  Then you cross the line of departure, you live with them and you stayed with them, and we would facilitate getting all your footage, all whatever you had to press back to the home front, we would facilitate you doing that. That transparency, when we went in, when the enemy then attempted to come up with the back roll of civilian tragedy, of chaos in the streets, we had actual folks with cameras shooting, as Mr. West said, real-time footage that showed the streets were clear, there was no humanitarian crisis, it was mano a mano combat, it was tough, but there was not the civilian and collateral damage that was projected in the first one. I'm a big believer, firm, firm believer, that you got to have the media with you.  It's great.  And the closer you work with them and the more transparent you are, expect to get the bad because it's going to happen, but demand that also the good be placed out there. It's just hard when the fight ends, and now you go into the reconstruction phase that cataclysmic event--that combat is not there.  So it's just human nature that the 91 rapidly fell off after we got to the southern side of the town and swept through. Now you're building a town council.  There's something that ought to be on the front page of the paper.  It ought to be because it's critically important.  We got the water out of the streets.  The electricity is now in grid 4, it's heading to grid 5.  These are all great things that motivate and energize the Iraqi people, but as hard as we want to try, those kinds of things don't stop you when you're clicking through your channel changer or make you grab a paper and buy it. As a nation we have to understand there's good stuff going on out there.  Our responsibility as the folks that are out there to continue to press stories forward to have our public affairs put it out there hanging on the Internet, hanging on the Web and somebody will pick it up eventually and the story will be told.  That's the best I can give you on it. MR. KAGAN:  I might comment on that a little bit, too.  I'm generally agreeing very much with what General Sattler and Mr. West said about this.  I think the embedded reporters are critical and I think it's critical for a number of reasons.  I think not only does it give the reporters the opportunity to get the right story, but it also acclimates the reporters to dealing with the military and helps to bridge a gap that had developed in American society between the media and the military, and I think that we've gone a long way in this last war toward bridging that gap and that's something that needs to be continued. It is of course natural and also unfortunate that a lot of the embeds go home or go away when major combat operations stop and they don't cover things that are more prosaic like building sewers and hospitals and so forth which is perfectly understandable. I think there is something that the military and the administration can do that would help in this regard.  That is, to the extent that we allow the criterion of success in Iraq to be measured by either day-to-day casualties or military operations per se, we're going to be losing the info war.  When you're dealing with an insurgency and what you're trying to do is establish a stable new regime, any military operation that is being undertaken is pretty much bad.  What you're trying to get to is a situation where there are no military operations being undertaken and the country is peaceful. If the highlight is on the violence and if the administration is focused on here is our military strategy and this is how we're doing all of this and this is how the military is going to succeed, I think we're going to have a problem winning this argument.  I think the focus needs to be on this is the political program, this is the political progress that's being made, this is how we're going to measure success along those lines. I would say in all fairness there is a problem there, too, because the Iraqis have a certain way of tending to negotiate through their political problems that creates a sense of constant crisis and near disaster even though it almost invariably works out at the end, and the media has shown itself to be very skillful at focusing on the constant crisis, near disaster and not on the fact that it works out at the end. I think that the administration and the military could assist with this if we focused a little bit less on the fact that we've got warriors fighting insurgents and a little bit more on the fact that we've got these things going on and our own thinking and what we're saying. If you want to add to that you can, or we can go to the next question. GENERAL SATTLER:  That goes back to the information operations theme.  The theme that's developed at the top that cascades down will be the theme that the warriors on the ground will speak to when afforded the opportunity.  But we all know you put a soldier, a Marine or a sailor in front of a microphone or an airman, they're going to tell you what they believe.  They're not going to go to some theme and figure out what's going on, they're just going to tell you what's on their mind.  That's another great reason to have embeds out there because you get ground truth and it has credibility. Somebody who sits up here on a mike in a uniform who has a book in front of him sounds like there's a party line, but there are no notes on my book.  I can swear.  But when you get a young warrior who just speaks from the heart enthusiastically, I think that the nation and the international community really believes that that individual is, he or she, being sincere and just laying it out from their perspective, so I agree. MR. KAGAN:  Next question? MR. SCHISLER:  John Schisler, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.  What's the future of Marine aviation, and specifically, fixed-wing aviation?  Given the types of operations that you've been talking about, additional types of threats that aviation has been deployed--available only in a very limited way.  Given a joint fight, do we need it? GENERAL SATTLER:  That's a great segue and chance to comment on that.  The question had to do with the future of fixed-wing Marine Corps aviation. If we start to judge the impact the effect that fixed-wing aviation has, be it Navy, be it Air Force, be it Marine Corps, based on how much ordnance was dropped, and it goes back to what Fred start, if we start to look at show me how much ordnance, show me the little film on the camera where I see the cross-hairs and it's the bad guys that are in the building and the building disappears and you get that kind of rush going, yes, that needed to be done and it was done precisely and it was done by I believe the world's greatest whatever uniform was worn to drop that bomb. The part that doesn't again get the coverage is what fixed-wing aviation does every day.  Every day there's aircraft up there flying the crown jewel routes, they're flying the convoys, they're overseeing where in fact the convoys are and there's direct communications to them.  They have capability with their lightening pods to look down at areas where improvised explosive devices are being put.  If a mortar fires and you get a fix on where the mortar came up from a countermortar radar, you can vector in aircraft over there like that and the aircraft can slew on down and actually acquire and positively identify, deconflict to make sure it's not friendly forces, and then you can either put ordnance on the target if the deconfliction and the collateral damage piece justifies it, or they can radio to a quick reaction force, somebody who's right down the road. Multiple, multiple times we had individuals who fired mortar rounds, took their little tube, ran back, put it in the shed in the back, went in their house and sat down, and next thing you know there's a knock on the door and it's a quick reaction force because the aircraft was able to follow them right back to where it was, knew where the tube was right on the ground. There's a whole lot in this asymmetric warfare that's being done by aviation.  There's other things being done that I really don't want to get into right now concerning improvised explosive devices.  I just don't want to talk about some of the other capabilities that are from the sky not seen, not even heard about.  But the fixed-wing warriors as well as the rotor-wing, the rotor-wing is a lot more visible, obviously, but even though they're not dropping bombs, they can do everything from a show of force, just come on the net and say, look, something is going on down there, how about coming down to about 500 feet and kick it in?  And they come roaring on down, has a calming feeling to our warriors and it has an oh-oh to the folks on the other side.  No ordnance dropped.  You don't get to go back and paint something on the side of the vehicle or put a little note in your log book, but I will tell you it's hard to prove what didn't happen, but it's being done every day over there on the crown jewel routes, for the convoys, on the pipelines, on the key infrastructure and also when we can take somebody who's firing a mortar who thinks they're going to retire at age 65 because this is a low-risk profession I'm in and we can take them out of the gene pool and they go I don't know how this happened, who are these guys?  Well, they're up there, they're not seen, and we're using the aviation across all our forces in a very, very creative way, so that it is playing in this warfare. MR. KAGAN:  Max? MR.          :  Max is getting ready.  The other thing I'd say is that the AC130 at night is a fearsome, fearsome weapon.  Combined with the UAVs up there, our forces just own the night. MR.          :  Just two small questions picking up on things that have already been said. One was on the question of why aren't there more heroes coming out of our current wars.  I think Bing and the General are absolutely right in talking about the lack of interest in a lot of the media in reporting on this, whereas they'd rather report on Jessica Lynch and portray soldiers or Marines as victims. I think there is also some responsibility here on the part of the military as well because I think there is a deep reluctance in the military to promote individuals over the larger unit over the larger service.  I'm wondering what is the Marine Corps doing to promote its own heroes and to make the public aware of its own heroes coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan?  And why isn't there anything comparable to the bond drives that Audie Murphy undertook in World War II, the kind of publicity that Sergeant York got in World War I or previous Marines like Smedly Butler or Chesty Puller achieved?  Is that all just based on society or is the Corps or is the Army or other militaries institutions taking comparable publicity campaigns to let the public know about these heroes that we have? The other question I have is we've been talking a lot about Iraq and I don't want to get this completely off on Iraq, but I would be curious given the vast wealth of expertise on Iraq that we have sitting on the panel there for your comments about what are the top two or three things that we could be doing better, that the Marine Corps could be doing better to win the war or the U.S. in general could be doing better to win the war, and especially on the subject of standing up the Iraqi forces, the very interesting point about American advisers not having control over the career paths of the officers that they're tutoring. I'd be curious if there are other things, and if you want to expand on that in terms of what could we be doing differently to better win the war. GENERAL SATTLER:  On the promoting our own heroes, from the time you come into any of our armed services, I won't speak for the Army, the Air Force or the Navy, but I know it's so, but in the Marine Corps we preach selfless service and you take the personal pronouns out of any sentence.  The word is only used in I screwed up, don't look any further than me to find out why this didn't go right. But when it's something that's good, something that happens that brings glory upon the unit, no one wants a leader up front that said look what I did.  It is immediately passed on to those inside the command, wait a minute, I just happened to be in this place at this time, but where the rubber hit the road, where the door was kicked in, where the individual was cared for, where the call for fire came from, was out here, and we believe it. It's not phony.  It's just the way you build a command.  It's the way people want to fight for each other.  They don't want to fight for me or I, they want to fight for us.  We don't do things as leaders for me and to self-promote, we do it for the organization because we really believe in the organization. It sounds schmaltzy, but it's the truth.  It is the damn truth.  You can go in any unit that has a self-serving leader and you can smell it, you can sense it, and you know it's there before you even get the second leg in the door.  You can go into a unit that's selfless that has built this kind of an energy, this kind of a bond.  Why does somebody run from the safest place they're ever going to be in their life and run down the street to grab someone they know is Lance Corporal Brown who grew up in Texas and I grew up in Maine and we've known each other for 4 weeks of training together, but that's my fellow Marine that's part of the team and I'm going to go this? We do this.  When we have Silver Star ceremonies, Bronze Star with Combat V, we hold ceremonies because warriors want to see those who excelled and they want in their little culture to pat them on the back and to thank them.  Every time you do that, it's a humbling experience to see these young men or young women standing there giving you a thousand reasons why this should be broken into 400 parts and passed out. That's part of our problem, it's a great problem to have, but that's part of the problem, and that we don't even own a horn and we shouldn't own a horn, let alone take it out and start playing it.  Somebody else has to play that horn for us. I will tell you, we, not me personally, but we create that environment where those warriors do it because it's the right thing to do and because their fellow warriors are counting on it.  So we're our own worst enemy in self-promoting those who do great things. We'll take a look.  It's probably being looked at.  I know the Commandant will be here and General Mattis will be here a little later.  I'm probably just out on the edge of the empire and there's probably some things being done.  What I'd like to see is some of these unbelievable tales of woe and daring to make you look at and go this individual was delivering my newspaper 18 months ago, couldn't hit my front porch twice in a year, and look at this.  Look at what they just did in combat.  Hit, fell down the stairs, got back up, knew Lance Corporal X was still on the upper landing, threw a hell fire and brimstone, continued the attack, threw two grenades, one came back, three times knocked down the stairs, still; when we get up, get away from me, I got a Marine up there I got to go take care of.  That's over and over and over again documented in citations. So it's there.  We just have to take a look at how we market it.  I'm so fired up I can't remember the other question. [Laughter.] MR. KAGAN:  How do we win in Iraq? GENERAL SATTLER:  How do we win?  What else do we do?  What can we do better?  We initially 18 months ago, I was General Abizaid's operations officer.  I take the blame for this.  We started to look at Iraqi numbers, how many are in uniform, how many showed up today, and we weren't looking at Iraqi capability.  We weren't measuring the capability of the Iraqi forces.  Nor were we measuring the leadership capability. We had leaders in place, we had Iraqi warriors in uniform with weapons in place.  But if you don't build and inculcate that warrior spirit where the warriors know that the leaders are going to take care of them when it gets tough, when the guns fire, you do one of two things.  Your feet tell you to fight, you get the adrenalin rush and you move into it, or they tell you flight.  Two words that sound a hell of a lot alike, but they're diametrically opposed on the battlefield.  If you don't have that strong leadership, strong training and confidence when that round goes off, you're going to move to the other safe area.  I don't fault them for doing that.  I think that they got put in the big game way too early.  What happened as Mr. West mentioned, that they just didn't have the capability. Now we have changed that.  It's Iraqi capability.  It's Iraqi capability with Iraqi mentored leadership that understands and has the confidence of its warriors.  It doesn't happen overnight.  You can't build that kind of an organization and take your hand off the bicycle seat and let it go until it's ready.  If the wheel is getting there, they're up on the bike, it's just going to take a little more time, and it won't be a light switch.  It'll pop up in little areas around the country because some units have been formed longer than others, some have been mentored longer than others. I think over the course of the next year it's going to happen, the light switches will change, the Iraqis will take command of battle space, police will move in, and then as you adroitly mentioned, we're not going to win this with our military capability, it's their successes, it's getting the Iraqi folks forward, and that's coming. MR. WEST:  I know heroes.  General Sattler had asked me earlier whether my forthcoming book has the lessons learned and I said, no, it just tells the story from the point of view of the battalions because both General Mattis and General Sattler let me go from battalion to battalion.  What I quickly discovered was when you get below the battalion level, battalion and below, after a couple of days they'll say to you, you have to talk to Connors or you have to talk to Ackerman.  Peter Ackerman is here and his son was a Lieutenant and his Captain said to me, you got to spend some time with Ackerman's platoon and get their story down. Then when you gather them all together as a group and you say look guys, let's just talk amongst us grunts what happened today, what you did and how you did it.  Then I discovered with the Internet that if I went back to them with my drafts which I started to do to the different platoons, as a group they'd sit down and cross it out and I began to collect more and more information from them that was all resident, but as General Sattler indicated, it was resident at the lower levels and it would be the company commander or the battalion commander saying, you got to go and talk to Corporal Gomez or something. So within the battalion they know who the real ones are that have the toughest fights.  Once you it them coaxed out of them, then you can get the stories, but it takes a while to coax the stories out. Concerning Iraq, I would say that the biggest thing I could possibly do, Max to stand back here and have some group write is it possible for Americans in this case or British to inculcate what General Sattler says is the essence of battle which is the warrior spirit?  If so, how do you do it? We know how to do that in Vietnam.  I don't think I have ever seen a document that tells me how you can and how you cannot do it in Iraq, and by now we have enough experience to have an idea that if you got the right people together maybe they could tell you, or maybe they'll just be honest and say under these constraints, I'm not sure we can get there, sir.  I would love to see that real effort because if everything depends on standing up the Iraqi armed forces, and we are now mentoring them, but we're always there. With the battle of Fallujah in November, I was with the 2nd Battalion that had fled General Mattis in April.  I went back to the same because I had been with them in April, I went back in November.  In November they had stuck and I knew two of the company commanders and the lieutenant colonel who had taken over because I'd seen them during the summer and I knew all the advisers.  But when I really probed, do you know why they were really sticking, when the sticking points in Fallujah hit in November?  It was because they had that backbone of those American advisers right there. I think the real question is how do we move from having our guys right there to where we don't have them there at all.  Can you actually infect somebody else with a warrior spirit?  Can you do that?  Or do you have to select people who have the warrior spirit and rise them to the top?   We know how to do that, but under the current constraints, that's what we cannot do.  We have to try to make better what has been handed to us, but we can't replace them.  That's a toughie, a real toughie. GENERAL SATTLER:  Just one quick one on that.  The thing that makes it really hard is when you go into a society that's been oppressed for 30 years that what the call the charismatic leader, the emergent leader, if you had a great idea and you had great initiative you didn't last long.  You either went over to this team and now you probably have blood on your hands and you can't be part of the new Iraq as it moves forward, or you were moved out, or you're in one of the mass graves somewhere. When you're looking at the old movie Spartacus, Spartacus is out here, he's in this unit somewhere, we just need to find him.  We need to find him and you're looking for that individual to slowly come up.  As you create the climate and as they see soldiers or Marines that are in there doing the embedding and the mentoring, they watch that and you'll start to see the mimicking.  Then you'll start to see the emergent leader.  Once that oppressive blanket is gone, they start to rise on up. Then as Mr. West said, you need to have the capability to tag them and go over to the Iraqi Minister of Defense, it's a sovereign country, they have their own promotion system.  Nobody comes in and tells who should get promoted in the Marine Corps, the Army, the Navy or the Air Force from one of our allies, although we work closely together, but we need to come up with a way that we can influence them making that decision as to who is this individual that ought to be over here in this glide path so that some day not too far down the road they will be that Spartacus standing at the head of the unit. GENERAL SATTLER:  Notice that General Sattler gave you a model, and this is an inherent challenge in Iraq.  He gave you the traditional systemic model where you have an organization and you're working within that organization and you know that that organization has impediments, bureaucracy, et cetera, tradition, lack of initiative. Now contrast that with how the insurgents fight.  The insurgents fight as spontaneous gangs and the leader emerging from any gang just happens to be the tough guy in the gang.  Those gangs are like a swarm of bees that will get together and cooperatively attack you and so they naturally allow their best leaders to bubble up in these tiny little gangs.  Then when all the gangs get together and they clash, then you really have a challenge on your hands. Fallujah was classic.  The two son of a guns who emerged over time in Fallujah was one fellow by the name of Jenabi (?) who's still on the run.  He has a $50,000 price tag on his head and people think he might be near Ramadi, and his henchman Hadid (?) who was a psychopath.  Over the course or 4 or 5 months Hadid became so fearsome in his society that he bubbled up in that particular society until finally he was killed by this Corporal Connors down in Queens. You have two different structures that are fighting one another.  You have a gang structure that allows for the immediacy of the local leader, and you have the systemic structure which over time is going to give you a better system but at first is going to have a hard time going up against these gangs. MR. KAGAN:  I'd like to add just a couple of points and disagree with the tone, although not I suspect with what you two gentlemen believe. What I hear frequently as a big problem with the Iraqi military is that it is insufficiently courageous and that what we need to do is we need to get them to be more brave and we need to inculcate the warrior spirit meaning we need to get them to fight. I'd like to just make a couple of points about that.  There is no rifleman in the United States Marine Corps today with the exception of anybody coming out of Iraq who had to worry about being blown up while he stood on the recruiting line.  The recruiting lines for the Iraqi Army have been a major target and nevertheless there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who braved the danger from simply standing on the line in order to get into their units.  That's a pretty dramatic statement of courage. Even after they have joined, they're not safe, and the danger doesn't come only from combat, it also comes from insurgents deliberately targeting their families and making it clear that they put their entire families' lives in danger by joining the Iraqi Army.  That is also calling for a very high degree of courage.  I don't think that the problem in Iraq is that the Iraqi Army is insufficiently brave. I also think you can go back and you can draw some wrong conclusions about the conventional wars that we fought against Iraq including that Iraqis are lousy soldiers and don't have the warrior spirit.  It depends on who you look at.  There were Republican Guard units in both wars that were driven over by M1 tanks, lay down and stood up after the tanks went and started firing at the grill doors with AK47s.  That's a deeply stupid activity to be engaged in, but it does demonstrate a fair amount of warrior spirit. I think that we can really make a mistake if we imagine that the problem with the Iraqi Army is that it's insufficiently brave and insufficiently imbued with the warrior spirit. Having said that, there is a lot that we need to teach them and it does include how to harness that courage and how to use it properly, and also how to function in a democratic society because it's not enough for the Iraqi military to be courageous and have warrior spirit, they also have to be an effective army in a democratic society.  The best way that you can do that in my opinion is to maximize contact between American soldiers and Marines and the Iraqis. There are no better role models anywhere in the world both for how to be a warrior and for how to be a warrior in a democratic society than American soldiers.  I've heard this over and over again, when American embedded soldiers show up at an Iraqi unit and start walking around, what the Iraqi soldiers say is I want to be like that guy.  Of course, that's just the same process writ large that goes on in American training every day in the American military anyway.  That's one of the reasons why you want to make sure, and while I think numbers are important, why you want to have a lot of American soldiers for these guys to model themselves on. I've pretty much taken for myself the last word here.  I'll give you one shot.  Go ahead. GENERAL SATTLER:  No argument on the courage.  If I came across indicating the warrior spirit is different than courage, warrior spirit is being as you said, Fred, able to harness it and have to focus it in a direction.  But during the fight just for Fallujah, there were a significant number of Iraqi soldiers killed in that fight in the town and a more significant number wounded.  So there was no lack of them going in the building prepared to take it on. But they didn't want to always follow the advisers.  What they want to see is they want to see Iraqis being those advisers, to actually lead them and help them move forward in their country.  So that's what we need to do is eventually over time put those adviser groups, embedded teams, ASTs as they were called during the fight out, because they were superb.  Those soldiers and Marines that were the advisers on the front line in danger constantly.  But the Iraqis, they've got plenty of courage, they do, but we just need Spartacus. MR. WEST:  Iraq is an officer-based system and so when we talking about imbuing the warrior spirit, we are talking about imbuing it into a system of officers who are not selected by us and they are different than their troops.  You give me 700 Iraqi officers with imbued warrior spirit and we wouldn't need 138,000 Americans there today. MR. KAGAN:  I'm just going to take one last chance to draw one other point out of this discussion. The point I want to draw out is a point for the Marine Corps and move away from Iraq.  That is, while understanding and fully agreeing with what both General Sattler and Mr. West said about the virtues of jointness and the Marines' ability to draw from the Army and from the other services that need the capabilities that they have, that means that the Marine Corps requires an Army of a certain type in order to be a Marine Corps of a certain type. I think that that's a very important point because there has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the virtues of trying to make the Army more like the Marines.  I think it's worth considering that the more we make the Army more like the Marines, the less the Marines can continue to be like the Marines. In any event, I'd like to thank our two panelists for an excellent discussion.  Please join me in giving them a round of applause. [Applause.] MR. KAGAN:  We have I believe lunch set up outside.  General Hagee will make a presentation at 12:30, so please try to be prompt getting your food and enjoying it, and then we'll pick up with the third panel at 1:30. LUNCHEON SESSION MR. DeMUTH:  My name is Chris DeMuth.  I am commandant of the American Enterprise Institute. My colleagues and I are proud to be hosting the United States Marines at AEI today for this conference on the role of this very special and very brave fighting force and the future of the U.S. military and security strategy around the globe, and we are honored that the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Michael Hagee, would be here to give this keynote address at lunch to our conference. General Hagee is a graduate of Annapolis.  He has had a highly distinguished and highly decorated career since his graduation in 1968 in the Corps, rising through a variety of increasingly responsible staff assignments and command positions before his appointment as commandant of the Marine Corps in 2002. He has, in the past few years, been in the thick of the momentous debates about the reconfiguration of our military forces and has been a leader in many important initiatives involving jointness and other matters, and we're delighted that he would be here with us today. General Hagee, the floor is yours. GENERAL HAGEE:  It's really my pleasure to be here this afternoon.  I know John Sattler, I think was here this morning, is that right?  Lt. Gen. Sattler?  So I don't have to tell any jokes then.  Those of you who know John, he's the funniest man in the Marine Corps and so I'll leave the joke telling to him. I'm also glad to see that you have our little brochure here.  This is where we are going in the Marine Corps and we worked very hard on this.  Now I'm an infantryman, and so you'll find that it's not very long, the sentences are short and declarative, and it has pictures. We want individuals to read it, talk about it, to discuss it, to argue, and to see what is the best way to implement this guidance and intent, and not just the officers but down at the corporal and sergeant level. I think that this body here knows what we do for the nation.  Number one, we are, in my opinion, the nation's force in readiness, and I think we have demonstrated that quite clearly over the past couple of years, whether it was putting 60,000 plus Marines and sailors into Kuwait in less than 60 days, sending a Marine expeditionary unit 400 miles into Afghanistan in very short notice, conducting a noncombatant evacuation in Liberia, putting Marines on the ground in Haiti in less than 36 hours. When the combatant commander asked, putting the Marine expeditionary unit, a regimental command unit, an extra infantry battalion, and two reserve aviation squadrons into Afghanistan in less than two weeks.  We are the nation's expeditionary force, and as part of the United States Navy, the other capability that we bring is the projection of sustainable military power ashore.  That's what we do, across the spectrum of conflict, I would argue, and I'd be happy to talk in more detail on that during the question-and-answer period. So how did we get to this?  First, let me describe how the Marine Corps sees the strategic battlefield out there. First off, on the nature of war, contrary to some organizations and some individuals, we don't believe that the basic nature of war has changed, and we don't believe it will change.  What do I mean by that? Number one, in war, whether it's low-intensity conflict or high-intensity conflict, we are going against a thinking enemy.  He has a vote, he has a choice, and we see that in Iraq today.  They respond, the insurgents in Iraq today respond very quickly to a change in our tactics. In fact we've determined they can respond if we change a tactic on how we're handling improvised explosive devices.  They can change within seven to ten days.  That's pretty darn good. We're going against a thinking enemy. Number two.  The battlefield of today and battlefield in the future, at least we believe, is going to continue to be uncertain, is going to continue to be chaotic, is going to continue to be plagued with fog and friction, and it's going to be very dangerous. Now I'm an electrical engineer by education, I like technology but I firmly believe that technology is not going to solve any of those four problems.  It's going to help but it's not going to solve the chaos, it's not going to solve the uncertainty, it's not going to solve the fog and friction. So what does that mean?  Well, to me, it means that we need individuals, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors, who can work and thrive in that particular environment, who can make decisions without having the full picture, who are willing to make decisions, even though they know that probably some of the information they have is incorrect, and wrong.  And I'll talk a little bit more about that when I talk about three or four of the things that we are doing in the Marine Corps to address that particular situation. So if that is the environment, where are we going to be operating? Well, if history is prologue, we are absolutely incapable of determining where we're going to fight.  I remember, it was 2001, the summer of 2001, we had a group of colonels come back to headquarters Marine Corps--this was before 9/11 of course--to talk about the future of the Marine Corps and where we were going. We have a big map up on the bulkhead and this one colonel stood up and said, well, I don't know where we're going to fight in the future but I know for sure we are not going to fight here.  Where did he point?  Afghanistan.  We projected a Marine expeditionary unit 400 miles into a little place called Rhino [ph], less than six months later. Most of you are probably familiar with Dr. Barry Posen's work, Command of the Commons.  I actually believe that he has it right there.  In that particular work, he argues that the United States is dominant, supreme in what he calls the commons, and that is space, air above 15,000 feet, and at sea, blue water.  I don't think anyone here would disagree with that. In my opinion, in the near term, midterm, and far term, I don't see that changing.  When you think of the amount of resources, the amount of money that we put in just to research in that particular area, dwarfs some of the entire defense budgets of several countries.  I don't think we're going to lose that preeminence and I don't think we should lose that preeminence. But below 15,000 feet, in the littoral, on land, especially in urban environments, I think those are going to be the contested areas.  I think that is where we are going to be fighting, is where we are fighting today. Now we talk about not wanting to do the home game here.  Well, if we fight in that area, we're doing the home game as far as the insurgents are concerned. Their environment, their culture, their background, and it presents particular challenges for us.  So that's how we, the Marine Corps, how we see the strategic environment, and where we might be fighting.  So how do we respond to that? Well, we've done a couple of things.  Number one, about two and a half years ago we did what we called a force structure review.  We took what I just laid out and we looked at all the capabilities that we have in the Marine Corps and we said, Do we have the right capabilities? and are there some capabilities, even though they are not bad, that we would be willing to sacrifice, take those resources and have additional capabilities in other areas?  And we found the answer to that was yes. So, for example, over the next couple of year we're going to stand up two additional infantry battalions.  We're going to stand up additional light-armored reconnaissance companies, both on the active side and on the reserve side.  We're going to stand up two additional force reconnaissance platoons.  We're going to stand up additional battalion reconnaissance companies.  We're doing that both on the active side and on the reserve side. WE looked at the entire Marine Corps.  We are taking down some of the reserve artillery battalions and we are turning those battalions into anti-terrorism battalions, and we're doing it without any increase in end strength, by reducing some capabilities that we have, that we don't think will play on this battlefield that I just laid out for you. A couple of other things that we are doing.  We believe that this nation needs a sea-basing capability.  It's a national capability and it's a joint capability.  I believe that the Navy and the Marine Corps should be in the lead on this.  I mean, this is what we do for the nation.  But it must be a national and joint capability. And I know when I say sea basing, what jumps to your mind?  Logistics, stacks of boxes and containers; right?  I'm not talking about platforms and I'm not talking about logistics. Now my very good friend, Vern Clarke, and now Mike Mullin, would say platforms are important and I would agree with them.  But from a conceptual standpoint, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm essentially talking about erasing the traditional barrier between oceans and land, between sea and land, actually using the sea as maneuver space. Why can't we cross the line of departure at Diego Garcia?  And we are maneuvering forces as we approach wherever we need to go.  We don't think like that today.  I argue that we need to think about that in the future. To me, sea basing is a set of four capabilities.  It's a set of strike capabilities, and strike is just not kinetic weapons from fixed-wing aviation.  Strike is putting Marines ashore somewhere.  It's a set of defensive capabilities that will protect not only the platforms that are bringing in this joint force but also securing areas as they go ashore.  It is a set of logistics capabilities.  We call that the sea base.  There's no doubt that logistics are really quite important. And it's a set of command and control capabilities, and depending on the scenario, whether you're doing high-end operations or you're doing low intensity, or even cooperative security operations, those capabilities, the size of the capability set would change.  Let's talk about high end just for a moment. Let's take Operation Iraqi Freedom as an example.  What would happen if we did not, if we had not had Kuwait in Operation Iraqi Freedom? Now some would argue we have to go take Kuwait.  I would argue with sea basing, we would not have to do that.  We would bring the joint force in to Diego Garcia, as an example, we would put them on ships that we don't have today, but three months ago the Navy and the Marine Corps slapped the table on what type of ships that we need.  We know where we're going on this. And we would bring the joint force in, or the Marine force in to the North Arabian Gulf.  We would do the reception staging, onward movement and integration at sea.  We'd cross the line of departure at sea, and we would not project combat power into Umm Kasar.  We projected all the way to An-Nasariyah.  Can we do that today?  No.  But we can in fact do that and I would argue that is a capability that this nation needs, especially when you think about the anti-access problem that we could have. We know that we had some access problem during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In my opinion it is going to get worse, not better. Now what about on the low end?  Let's talk about cooperative security which I think is unbelievable important, so-called Phase Zero.  If we do Phase Zero right, then I don't think we'll have to do Phase I, Phase II and Phase III, major combat operations, and if we don't do that, we don't have to do Phase IV.  And Phase Zero is cooperative security. We can bring in a force anywhere in the world.  We can send the capability that's needed, whether it's humanitarian relief, whether it's training other armed forces, just the capability that's needed.  Very small footprint, less force protection, leave the logistics at sea.  We don't aggravate the sovereignty problem in any country.  That is what sea basing brings down at the lower end. Let me talk just a little bit about distributive operations, which is also in here. Distributive operations, in my mind, as this lays out, is an additive capability and it's a logical extension of our warfare philosophy and that is maneuver warfare, and what we're talking about is taking several squads and rather than putting them ashore as a platoon, they may go to shore as a platoon but they would be spread out over a large area, and that squad leader would have the capability to call in kinetic fire, whether it's from air, sea or land, and coordinate those fires.  Can you do it today?  He has the capability but we haven't given him the education and training, and we are absolutely committed to doing that. You take several of those squads and you can spread them out over a large area.  You've got eyes on target.  You can bring in kinetic fires, if so desired, and if it's high-intensity conflict, you find the gap in the enemy's lines, and here is the part that's different.  You reaggregate that force as a platoon, as a company, as a battalion, as a regiment, and you shove that combat power through that gap, looking for the enemy's center of gravity. It's a little bit what we're doing today.  We don't have all the technologies.  They've been invented, they're out there, we just don't have them yet.  The technologies to enure those squads are connected together.  And we haven't provided the education and training to ensure that squad leader has everything he can to be that strategic corporal, to be that strategic sergeant on today's battlefield. And then finally, I absolutely believe that education and training can be transformation to use the T word.  In fact in the battlefield that I just described, it's probably one of the most important transformational things that we can do for the young Americans that sign up to join our armed forces.  Just a couple of things of what we're doing in the Marine Corps. We have stood up, or it's going to have its initial operational capability on the first of October, a foreign military training unit.  Phase Zero.  We want to go out, we want to provide a capability to each combatant commander, to help countries in the combatant commander's AOR, help them train their armed forces and to understand how a armed force works under a democratic, civilian-led government. We haven't had that capability before, not focused, the way that we intend to focus.  We have stood up at Quantico a center for advanced operational cultural learning.  It will have its initial operational capability on the first of October.  It is going to inject cultural learning into all of our schools, starting at boom camp and at the basic school. WE have decided that every Marine, whether he or she is enlisted or officer, is going to be assigned a region in the world, and they're going to be tasked with learning about that region in the world and even learning one of the languages in that particular region, and we hope to be able to give them the opportunity to serve in that particular area. Now is everyone going to be able to do that?  No.  But at least we are identifying how important that is.  Two, three years ago, we probably sent 20 some individuals to Arabic language course.  Last two years we've sent four thousand Marines.  Now are they fluent?  No.  But at least they're able to start to communicate, they're able to start to understand the culture, at least in the area that we are fighting in right now.  Some examples of what we are doing. I would just end by saying that in my opinion, the most important weapons platform on any battlefield is a well-educated, well-trained United States Marine.  We have not always provided him or her everything that they need, and in line with this particular pamphlet right here, we are absolutely dedicated to do that, and with that, I'll turn it over to you for any questions you may have. Yes, ma'am? QUESTION:  Sir, given the time it takes to print up the Marine Corps organic special operations [inaudible], do you anticipate or could you address any short-term implications that may occur by [inaudible] force and battalion recon resources on short-term basis, should a [inaudible] component be stood up?  And are you wrapping up the [inaudible] training pipeline in anticipation that that may happen? GENERAL HAGEE:  Well, my job as commandant of the Marine Corps is to organize, train and equip as you know, and that's to provide capabilities to all combatant commanders, including Special Operations Command, and as you know, Sue, we haven't always done that with Special Operations Command.  We are absolutely committed to doing that.  If we stand up, and as you know that's still in discussion, if we stand up such an organization, it would not happen overnight. We would have to properly train, properly equip, actually properly recruit individuals there. So we are not going to do it in such a way that it would be detrimental to the capabilities that we have internal to the Marine Corps right now. What else? QUESTION:  So you would be standing up from the ground up, in other words? GENERAL HAGEE:  I'm sorry? QUESTION:  You would stand up a MARSOC [ph] from the ground up, in other words? GENERAL HAGEE:  I, I-- QUESTION:  Would basic USOC [ph] training as opposed to drawing from the Marine Corps Special Operations-- GENERAL HAGEE:  Depends on what General Brown wants as far as capabilities are concerned. QUESTION:  Thank you. MR. DONNELLY:  Could I ask questioners to please wait for the roving mike and introduce yourselves before your question.  Thanks. QUESTION:  I'm Ben Wattenberg from the American Enterprise Institute.  I'm a so-called hawk on Vietnam [inaudible] on Iraq.  I was on-- GENERAL HAGEE:  That's all right.  When I was talking this morning, I talked about rotation into Vietnam. QUESTION:  I was in Vietnam as well.  And I've been trying to follow and understand what's going on in Iraq, and there is this argument that is made, that we ought to have more boots on the ground there, that we never made a sufficient commitment.  As I understand the nature of this terrorist technique, it seems to me that would we increase the number of armed forces personnel in Iraq, we would in effect be doing--well, what we would be doing is adding to the number of potential targets of getting young Americans killed and wounded, and I wondered what you thought about that. And I had a second speculative question, I don't know if you choose to deal with it, is why, since 9/11, haven't the terrorists tried to hit America on the homeland?  I mean, it is not--it is for me--but it is not that difficult to roll a grenade into a pizzeria or whatever, and so those are my two questions. GENERAL HAGEE:  I'll take the last one first.  I'm, I think, as surprised as you are.  I am very thankful that it's not occurred.  As we continually improve our intelligence capability in this particular area, but I obviously, just like anyone else, I don't have an answer.  I can't think like they do, even though I can tell you, we're trying  hard to think like they are.  But I don't know. On the first question, in my mind, the most important thing that we're doing over there right now is training the Iraqi security forces. I think Lawrence of Arabia, in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, laid it out, that the Arabs, in general, will allow you to go ahead and do the job.  You've got to put them forward.  And as I said, I have been over there several times.  I was just over there two weeks ago and the Iraqi security forces want to do it and we're seeing that they're going to be capable. Right now, at least in our area, at the platoon and even some of them at the company level, they are able to operate. We are operating with them, coalition forces.  In fact the majority of time, if not all the time, when we go out on operations we in fact go with them, and the Marines are starting to really appreciate their capability. They don't have to think, Do you spell Mohammed with an a or do you spell it with an o.  They know.  They know whether Sam here is an Egyptian, an Iranian.  As soon as he opens his mouth they know which tribe he's from. These are capabilities on this battlefield that you absolutely have to have, and regardless of how long our guys and gals were in Monterey, they are not going to get that.  I talked with one patrol leader and he said, sir, we were out in downtown Ramadi and we were moving down a street, and as we came to this one block, we saw all of the Iraqi security forces bring their weapons up and get ready.  And within about a block we were hit. If we had not had them with us, we would not have been as ready as we otherwise would have been.  That's what they bring.  So there is a competence being generated between our two forces. Much more importantly, there's being competence generated between the Iraqi security forces and the citizens of Ramadi, and the citizens of Fallujah, and the citizens of Hitt [ph]. The citizens are starting to give the Iraqi security forces more intelligence information.  So that's the most important thing that we can do right now, is to train those Iraqi security forces and let them provide the security for their country.  Over here.  Sir. QUESTION:  Thank you, Commandant.  [Japanese name] Japan Broadcasting Corporation.   I'm wondering if we could share your future vision on the Marine Corps presence in the Western Pacific, especially [inaudible] Okinawa.  Do you believe that you still need that big size, I mean the Marine Corps [inaudible] size, whether you need it in Okinawa?  While the Marine Corps needed on the, for, I mean all over the world for the war on terror.  And do you think that their missions can be repressed [?] by the Air Force or Navy, if their missions are deterrence against North Korea or China? GENERAL HAGEE:  I'm happy to address that question.  First off, as I'm sure you know, the question of the number of Marine Corps on Okinawa, or in Japan, in general, or any of the armed forces in Japan, is being negotiated right now between the Japanese government and the American government and that's exactly where it should be.  So that we can determine what is in our, Japan and the United States, what is in our best interest as far as the footprint and as far as security, for both countries are concerned. If you want my personal opinion, I think right now there needs to be a presence.  I would argue for a presence over there in Northeast Asia. Having said that, I talked a little bit about in my opening remarks about the importance of Phase Zero, cooperative security. So as we come out of Iraq, and I believe that we ultimately will come out of Iraq, how do we best station, position is the better word--how do we best position Marine forces in the Asia Pacific to respond to the environment in the Asia Pacific, not just Northeast Asia. Where are the four or five largest Muslim countries in the world today?  They're in the Asia Pacific.  Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia.  All of them democratic countries.  In my opinion, we should be engaged with them.  We should be providing support to them, helping their armed forces, once again, understand how an armed force works in a civilian-led democratic government. What is the relationship between an armed force and its people in such a government? We have certain capabilities in that area.  Can we best do this cooperative security by having all of Marine forces positioned in Northeast Asia?  Maybe not. What other capabilities do we need in the Asia Pacific area in order to carry out Phase Zero, be much more effective in Phase Zero? I would argue that we need shipping.  We go back to my few words on sea basing.  So that wherever the Marines are there, wherever they are positioned, we have the capability to move them around.  Right now--well, when we had significant Marines in Okinawa, I think you know right now that the three battalions that were in Okinawa are no longer there.  They are in Iraq and they have been gone for some time. I would argue that regardless of where we station Marines, they're probably not going to be on that particular plot of land very much while they are forward-deployed.  They are going to be out and about doing cooperative security throughout the Asia Pacific. So I think with the Japanese government, negotiations between our two governments, we're ultimately going to work out what should be the proper footprint there. Sir. QUESTION:  General, I'm Sean Littles [ph] from the Chief of Naval Operations staff, and my question deals with roles, missions and capabilities within the sea services, and whether or not you envision there being certain roles, missions and capabilities that the Navy could be taking over from the Marine Corps in the Iraq scenario and beyond. GENERAL HAGEE:  Well, the most obvious one of course is the Navy provides significant TAC air capability.  There is one--you know, "take over"--those are very black and white terms.  I would argue, how can we work together better on that. I think that you know that there is movement in the Navy as far as riverine operations are concerned.  My sense is is that, I mean the Navy is, and sailors, are the very best in the world on the water, in boats.  They should be doing that. We are pretty darn good, coming from the sea.  I would argue that Marines should be on those boats, and so that we have, not the Marines running the boats, driving the boats and doing everything, but there is a synergy between the capabilities that the Navy has and the capabilities that the Marines bring.  What else? Sir? QUESTION:  Sir, Byron Callon [ph], Merrill Lynch.  I'm analyst.  In the spirit of the last question maybe, we're in the midst of a quadrennial defense review.  Do you expect any major issues or new vectors to emerge for the Marines out of the quadrennial defense review? GENERAL HAGEE:  I wish I knew.  I had not been involved in one before.  I think the way that this one is being attacked is really quite good.  To maybe simplify a little bit, essentially we're putting, the Chiefs have, are in agreement.  We'll put our capabilities on the table.  Let's take a look at those capabilities.  Are there areas where we are spending resources such that we have so much capability in a certain area, that we can afford, pretty much like the Marine Corps did in its force structure review, we can take some of those resources and point them in another direction? And I think that is being done right now.  I think it's still too early to tell exactly what is going to come out of that but I think the process is really quite good.  Is there concern? I mean, one of our core capabilities is paranoia, and I think all the services are getting that capability right now, and that's okay.  There should be some cognitive dissonance here as we work through this. Obviously I never served on the Joint Chiefs before, but the current Chiefs, we're after what is best for this nation, and we're going to work through this.  What else? Sir? QUESTION:  Bill Lawrence [ph], BBC.  I was wondering if you could expand, you were saying that you thought that this sea basing capability might be needed more in the future, if that has to do with areas that the U.S. military is going to be operating in, that aren't going to be hospitable to basing, whether you think that's something of a retreat in terms of hearts and minds, in terms of trying to come to a situation where having a base in some of these countries would be seen as an advantage, seen as a good thing to be interacting with a local population?  Or I mean, I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you. GENERAL HAGEE:  Let me just talk about the Asia Pacific.  That's probably an area that I know most about.  I've served several times out there, and we have some very, very good friends in the Asia Pacific, and we have some individuals we'd like to become friends with, and then we have some individuals that, who knows which direction it's going to do. But even our very best friends, they do not want to see the Stars and Stripes flown over a base.  Do they want to operate with us?  Do they want to do exchanges with us?  Absolutely.  And so do we. And so I think that's what we're looking at, rather than putting in a firm base in [place name?].  I said Asia Pacific, and so there are some areas up in Northeast Asia, which are, I would argue, because of the security situation up there in Northeast Asia, are an exception.  I was talking more down in the Oceana, Southeast Asia area. And I see us being able to operate down there.  In fact I would argue we should be able to operate down there without having a permanent footprint. Now that doesn't mean that we cannot put, preposition supplies, so that we don't have to bring them from such long distances, but that's going to be determined by negotiations between the respective governments.  I don't know whether that addressed your question or not. QUESTION:  I guess would this be in places something like Bagram, instead having--because it seems to me some of the bases I've seen on the ground are almost floating cities, apart from the countries they're operating in. So is it in some ways saying, well, if being on the ground has negative connotations, why not just pull it out and put it-- GENERAL HAGEE:  That is--if you're going to talk about Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm going to have to say that's going to be up to negotiations between our respective governments on what sort of presence we ultimately have there, or any coalition forces have there.  What else? Sir? QUESTION:  You alluded earlier to the question of force levels in Iraq.  I just happened to be at a dinner last night where General Schoomaker [ph] said that they've completed their rotational planning through 2007 and are beginning their 2008 cycle with the expectation that, at least for planning purposes, that they'd have to keep something like current force levels in Iraq. Where are you guys in that kind of a process and what are your expectations about levels of Iraq commitment?  And finally, sort of how low would we have to go for the Marine Corps to be able to get out of there? GENERAL HAGEE:  Well, this is a--great question, Tom.  As you know, this is an event-driven scenario, not a time-driven scenario, and in the military we plan for the worst case, I mean, cause we have learned if you don't do that, you're going to be surprised.  And no surprise, none of this planning for force rotation in Iraq, or Afghanistan, is being done by any one service. We are in there together, determining how we're going to rotate, because we are working very hard to ensure there's as much equity, especially if you talk about operational tempo, across the force. So we're right where Pete Schoomaker is, General Schoomaker is on this as far as the planning is concerned, but we have several subordinate courses of action that we hope can respond to any contingency that might come up.  And that's probably all I'll say about the future.  What else? Yes, ma'am?  Let me see if I can give everyone a chance here.  Was there one over here?  Otto? QUESTION:  General, Otto Kriser [ph], KOFE [ph] News Service.  You and the speakers earlier today have talked about the changes you have underway, training more of your people in cultures and language, the strategic corporalness sort of thing, indicates an emphasis on guys who have been around a little longer, and a little heavier emphasis on NCOs. The Corps has always been young and light, in and out, one term.  Are you looking at the possibility, the need of retaining of some more of your people to have these skilled individuals?  You don't want to train a guy in a culture and language and then lose him at the end of his tour. Do you think you see the need for retaining a slightly more mature force than we've had in the past? GENERAL HAGEE:  I don't think that you'll see--in fact, you will not see a significant--I don't want to say maturing--aging of the Marine Corps.  We have increased what we call our top six, the top six enlisted grades.  We've gone from 50 percent to 52 percent, which doesn't sound like much, but let me take the United States Navy, for example. Their top six enlisted grades--they have 75 percent of their enlisted force, are in the top six enlisted grades.  We have 52 percent in ours. So obviously 48 percent are in those bottom three, and we don't see that changing significantly.  I would argue that by educating and training, even the individuals who are not going to stay, they're going to be better American citizens and they're going to do better when they get out. What our focus is going to be on is up until now, quite often we've had corporals or sometimes even lance corporals as squad leaders. We want to put a seasoned sergeant in as a squad leader and this will be an individual who is on his second tour.  Reenlists for squad leader.  Reenlists to stay in the operating forces.  And we are ready to provide some incentives in that particular direction. We have talked with the NCOs and they are ready to, in fact, do that, and so when we identify such an individual, we're going to provide him the training that's going to make him successful as a squad leader. What else?  Right here. QUESTION:  [off-mike]  General, my name's John [inaudible] from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.  You talked a little bit about [inaudible] Goldwater-Nickles, and that kind of very early focus on joint military operations as opposed to interagency operations [inaudible]? GENERAL HAGEE:  Well, that is a--you covered a large area right there.  That's a seminar, in and of itself.  Let me just talk about retention, if I could, in the Marine Corps, and you talked specifically about officers but I may also talk about, just a little bit about enlisted retention too.  First off, we have never seen better retention in the Marine Corps than we do today.  Officer and enlisted. You may be a little surprised.  We just completed a study correlating a number of days deployed with officer retention and the curve looks like this.  There's no knee in it.  If you take it to its logical conclusion, if you're deployed a 100 percent of the time, everyone's going to reenlist.  Or it's going to stay. I was a little surprised at that but that is what we are seeing on the officer side.  On the enlisted side, we made our fiscal year 05 goal in June, and CNA has, the Center for Naval Analysis has also done a study that shows that we have retained the highest quality of individual that we have ever retained, this year, and we have a significant number of applications already in to reenlist for next year, just as soon as 01 October comes around. Individuals who have a high propensity to reenlist are those, once again, who deploy, and surprisingly enough, at least to me, those who are married, which also indicates that we're doing something right as far as taking care of the families. I know that did not address your question on up or out.  I'm not sure what--how to address that.  I'm not exactly sure what you were pointing at in that particular part of the question. QUESTION:  [off-mike].  [inaudible]. GENERAL HAGEE:  Do I?  No, I don't, and, in fact, in those particular areas where we have an individual who has been passed over for whatever reason, and he or she has some critical capabilities that we want, we would offer them continuation in grade, to continue to offer those particular capabilities, and the law allows that, and in fact we have individuals who have accepted that, at the grade of major, lieutenant colonel and colonel.  Yeah. QUESTION:  Sir, Nathan Hoff [ph] with Defense Daily.  You've already addressed this joint Navy-Marine Corps effort on sea basing.  Well, the Navy is now facing some questions as well on the [inaudible].  I'd like to see if you could just speak briefly to how important that program is [inaudible]. GENERAL HAGEE:  I absolutely believe it's critical for the future.  Our long-range artillery of course is aviation, but as much as we like to say the aviation is all-weather, it's not always all-weather.  But that DDX sitting out there is in fact all-weather and it can provide the fire support that we need, especially with the long-range munitions that we have coming down. Right there. QUESTION:  I wonder if [inaudible]? GENERAL HAGEE:  well, I'm not sure that we can say and I'm sure not going to say today what the right number is cause I don't know what the right number is.  Congress, as you know, gave us 3,000 additional end strength authorization last year, going to 178,000, being played out of the supplemental and we are using that very effectively. In fact four hundred of those individuals are how we're going to stand up the foreign military training unit.  As I have testified on the Hill-- [Start tape side 3B.] GENERAL HAGEE:  [in progress] think that we need additional end strength for whatever the case, I am more than willing to tell Congress that we need it and obviously, most importantly, first, tell my boss, the Secretary of Defense, that we need that. The good thing, as far as I'm concerned, is if we need an increase, I believe that we can recruit to it.  We are right now, as far as recruiting is concerned, we are about 103 percent of where we wanted to be at this time, and I am convinced that we're going to finish this year over, as far as putting young Americans on the yellow footprints at MCRD Paris Island, and MCRD San Diego. So the good news, once again, is that if we need it, I think that we can recruit to it.  What else?  Right here. QUESTION:  Afternoon, General.  Major Aaron O'Connell from Yale University.  Sir, an earlier panel today talked, in detail, about how the American people themselves are a center of gravity in the current fight and the importance of keeping the American people invested in the fight. You mentioned some of the things coming down the pike in the next 20 years or so for the Marine Corps. I'd like to ask about the future of public relations.  Is there a strategic vision for public relations?  Do we need to retool how we communicate with the American people and with the global media? GENERAL HAGEE:  I think that we have to continue to emphasize strategic communications.  We have to continue to get our story out.  I was telling several of the individuals outside, just before I came in here, that the majority of Americans, even though they support what we are doing over there, they don't really understand and appreciate how good these young Americans are, and what they are doing over there on a daily basis. Their morale is off the page, and every day they've put on, it just includes force protection, that's the outer tactical vest, the SAPE [ph] plates, the helmet, and the rifle, the ammunition and water--just that--that's 65 pounds.  They put that on every single day and they go out into temperatures 130 and 140 degrees and they patrol, and their morale is off the page because they know they are making a difference, and they are really quite proud of what they are doing. We are not doing--I say we--that's a big we, not just the Marine Corps, not just OSD.  I would argue that we are not doing a good enough job on getting that information out on what these young men and women are doing. That is why I am such a strong supporter of the embedded press, because that is one way to get that particular story out, by having individuals over there, seeing what they're doing and reporting what they're doing, and also being educated about what the--the service that these young men and women are performing for this nation.  What else? QUESTION:  Sir, Colonel Eric Ashworth, United States Army.  The Army initiative for future combat systems, how do you see that playing into the [inaudible]? GENERAL HAGEE:  Well, we're working very closely with the Army on that, and we want to learn as much as we can, and as technologies spin off of that, we want to be right there and catch them as they come off.  It is absolutely critical, in my opinion, that we are able to communicate with obviously United States Army. Now I can tell you a story.  I was the commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force before we went into Iraq,so I was involved in a lot of the planning.  At one point in time it looked like the war was going to start sooner than it ultimately did, and we were going to be the lead force.  Third ID, Third Infantry Division, United States Army, was assigned to us. I went down to Georgia and met with them, great soldiers.  They came out to Camp Pendleton and they worked with us.  And guess what we discovered? We couldn't communicate.  Now we could do it verbally, over voice, but we couldn't move data around.  Now, fortunately, we had some really smart soldiers and some really smart Marines and they worked that out. But we shouldn't be figuring that out as we're getting ready to cross the line of departure. So we are married with the Army in this particular effort, to ensure that we're going to be able to communicate on the battlefield, regardless of what comes out of future combat systems. What else?  Okay, Sue. QUESTION:  Sir, you've indicated that you wanted to increase foreign internal defense missions.  The foreign military training battalions that you are mentioning, are they going to be able to also conduct those FID [ph] missions?  And could you discuss, a little bit, the selection and execution process in determining those. GENERAL HAGEE:  First off, we're working, as you know, very closely with Special Operations Command in this particular area, even though we see these units going out and supporting the four combatant commanders, four deployed combatant commanders.  It is in support of Special Operations Command, and we're looking at whether or not we have to ask Congress to look at some of the laws in that particular area. To me, it's the importance of selection is subverted to the education and training that we give these individuals once they come in. And so that is going to be the focus.  We have the right individuals, and we know we have the right individuals because we, for the past two years, we've been doing the Georgia train and equip, we've done this in Chad, we've done this in Niger, and we have done it in some countries down in South America, where Special Operations Command there, they just ran out of forces. The combatant commanders needed more capability.  We had that capability, probably not educated and trained and organized as well as we would like to have had it, but they did a very good job. What we want to do is formalize that and provide that education and training, and the focus in a certain area of the world. Okay.  I think I have time for one more, if it's out there.  Yes, sir?  Right there. QUESTION:  Retired Navy Captain Bob Miller.  I'm involved with a nonprofit called Hope For [inaudible] we've been trying to understand what a moral component would be of historically novel phenomena and that is men actually sending women to war in their behalf. My question I guess really goes not to individual responsibility for it but to whether there is any discussion of the moral implications of single mothers sometimes deploying? In any event, it seems to formalize or normalize a revision of an historical and I suggest a valid, legitimate moral principal, and that is boys don't hit girls.  Little brother doesn't beat up on little sister.  Teenagers don't exploit teenage girls, and so forth and so on. But here at this point, we're actually sending women into harm's way. GENERAL HAGEE:  Yeah.  I'm not sure those analogies hold all the way through.  I can tell you that the women today in the Marine Corps, and in all the services, are performing superbly, absolutely superbly, and a woman who wants to step forward, and who wants to serve this nation, why shouldn't she be able to serve this nation? Now what we're not doing, and its accordance with congressional and OSD policy, we don't have them as infantry, artillery, tanks, maneuvering against the enemy.  There are certain intelligence MOSes, at least in the Marine Corps, where we don't put them because actually they would end up down in the battalions, and this country has made a conscious decision that they do not want that. But everywhere else, they are performing, as I said, admirably, and they are quite proud of that service. QUESTION:  No question about that.  I acknowledge it fully.  My question really was whether there is a moral principal in view as these decisions are made.  In other words, is this policy as we have it now informed by some moral principal?   Is that the reason we're not putting women's capability issue [inaudible]? GENERAL HAGEE:  I think that's really the sense of the Congress and the American people, that they do not want that.  Is that discussion going on inside the Marine Corps?  I can tell you no. When I go down to units and quite a few of our units, except for those infantry, artillery and tank units, women are there and there's no big discussion about that.  The picture on--I'm not sure what page it is, it looks like page three--this is a picture of a young Marine woman, lady.  She is Lance Corporal Ballis [ph], is here name.  She was standing post in Ramadi, I was checking posts, and I came up to her and said--she had a 240 Gough [ph] machine gun which is--you can see in the picture is not a small machine gun.  I said, You qualified on that?  Yes, sir.  When's the last time you fired it?  She told me.  Do you know what your rules of engagement are?  [Makes a whistling sound.]  She went right down.  I said, What's your MOS?  She said, Sir, I'm a supply warehouseman but every Marine's a rifleman. And she was very proud to be out there serving in the Marine Corps, serving this nation, and I support her. Thank you all very much. MR. DeMUTH:  General, thank you for a terrific and very informative presentation. GENERAL HAGEE:  I'd like to thank the American Enterprise Institute for holding this Marine Day.  We are absolutely convinced the only way that we can get it right is by having some of these discussions, disagreements, where we can push these issues around and come to a much better decision on how to address the particular issues.  So thank you very much for what you're doing. MR. DONNELLY:  Just a brief administrative note.  Let's try to get the next panel going in about five minutes; okay? [Break.] MR. DONNELLY:  All right.  That's close enough.  We're in the home stretch and probably, if we had been doing this conference a couple of years ago, we've been doing the transformation panel first.  So it's at least a measure of where we are in the world today, that in fact even using the term transformation is something we probably do a lot more gingerly and with a lot of less confidence than we did a couple of years ago. But in fact we're now probably actually more serious about the term, in the sense that we're including a lot of other things in besides simply technological transformation and I know that my colleagues on the panel today, while there'll be a fair share of technology discussion, will take a much broader view of the idea of transformation. And what we're trying to get at here is not simply the programmatics and the budgetary implications of transformation but, really, the question of how practically and structurally to reshape the Marine Corps for the kind of world and the kind of missions that we've been outlining in the first two panels, and which the commandant talked about in his presentation. So without further ado--again, I don't want to introduce the panelists in an excruciating way.  But Jim Mattis' reputation I think is very well-known to this crowd and I can't think of a better guy to be sort of superintending the department of change down at Quantico than himself. And then we have the contingent from across the street, my friends Mike Vickers and Bob Work from Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who have  established now a beachhead here at AEI and we'll try to drive them back into the sea before the panel's over with, but they're going to provide their view of this issue. So again, enough of my yakking.  General Mattis, please. GENERAL MATTIS:  Well, thanks, Tom, and I'd just like to say after some of my publicized remarks, I'm honored to be invited back to any polite company, so it's good to be here at AEI. Incidentally, I had no opportunity due to travel schedules for the commandant and General Sattler and I, and some of the other panelists, to discuss our remarks before we showed up here today, and I'm going to move rather swiftly through some of them, ladies and gentlemen, because the coherence--I'm just going to repeat a lot of things if I don't, and it says something about the lack of institutional confusion in the Marine Corps, we're really arguing about some things on the margins at times. But we will remain no better friend and no worse enemy in the same way that we have been for the last 200 odd years. There are some reasons why we need to change and the point I would make is we do not want to be dominant in areas that irrelevant to future security challenges. When you're dominant in areas that are irrelevant, you are irrelevant.  It doesn't matter; it doesn't play.  So we have some new paradigms we have to operate within, but I would also suggest that due to the nature of American society, of American culture, there is no culture that's more adept at change itself than ours. For many, many reasons.  It has to do with immigration, it has to do with freedom, and the free expression and the free competition of ideas that you and I take for granted. I believe, too, that those who hold the systems analysis, especially on these interactive systems, things like economies and politics and military, people who think systems analysis is going to give us a lot of answers for the future are "barking up the wrong tree." I don't think it's going to come from there.  I think national security in the future is going to be much less military centric, and I say that because it drives us toward change.  We've had military centric security in the past, and we've militarily defeated Hitler.  That will not work in today's new world era that we face here right now.  But I believe we will have to continue to project influence ashore, globally. I have to make a nod to doctrine, ladies and gentlemen, because I have said on occasion, in the past, that doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.  I now find myself responsible for Marine Corps doctrine.  That's part of the commandant's way of gaining some degree of revenge over me. But our doctrine's held up pretty well over the last three years.  We have been audited by war in the last three years, and that's what happened to militaries, we get audited, and either the doctrine holds up or it doesn't. Either we decided our doctrine was to pour cement in the Maginot Line and then later on read about how the German tank columns simply went around it, or it held up and we were able to confront the enemy and work our will against them.  Hasn't been perfect; no doctrine ever is. As we go into the assumptions here, I would point back that if we look back over the last three years, the nature of war, as the commandant mentioned, has not changed.  It's characterized by fear or by friction, by everything that can go wrong; uncertainty. So the nature has not changed.  The character of this war, like every specific war, is always different.  Different weapons systems, different tactics, and that sort of thing.  But I believe this war may well last for generations at different levels of intensity. And I'll tell you, after three years of fighting from Afghanistan to Iraq, one point I would make is you should not patronize this enemy.  They mean every single word they say and they despise any free people simply because of the freedom.  There's not going to be with the irreconcilables, there's not going to be any reconciling with them. They do not mean to reconcile with you and they don't care one bit how sincere you are about doing so. The war of ideas is to erode their support base and to use the concept of information warfare to make certain we increasingly isolate these people, so the people who want to live in a more tolerant world can do so. But states are only going to be part of the equation in the future.  We're going to see nonstate actors increasingly relevant and we have to adapt based on that assumption. Allies are going to be critical and our military must embrace coalition militaries.  I would say that most often victory is going to be symbolic, more than seizing a terrain objective, much more symbolism and we'll see that played out over the airwaves and over the Internet. The U.S. forces being tied down in Iraq lessens the enemy's fear of U.S. military dominance, especially in increasingly irrelevant areas, the areas over 20,000 feet, in outer space and on the high seas. So I believe the need for an expeditionary, highly maneuverable and sustainable force remains, and that includes an amphibious capax, a forcible entry capability with Marine aviation and an integrated combined arms team. You've all see this chart before, that's up here now.  I think it's a pretty good construct.  I would caution that irregular warfare is only irregular to you and I.  To the enemy it's very regular and we like to think we're going to address the enemy in most of our plans rather than drawing up our own constructs that ignore them. But war in the future I think, ladies and gentlemen, is not going to be as easily defined, and if we are going to retain our freedom, we have got to make certain we in the military carry out our educational responsibility to explain what war is all about.  Otherwise, we run the risk of losing the center of gravity in any democracy and that's the will of our people. Hybrids will be the norm.  I'll get to that on my next slide.  But they will deny us our usual advantages.  I think even major combat operations are going to have what some people would call irregular or catastrophic or disruptive dimensions to them, and like Frank Hoffman mentioned this morning, I too hear a lot about overmatch, and I know we can overmatch anyone in outer space or at 20,000 feet or on the high seas. I will tell you, as the commander of Task Force 58, as the ships closed in on the coast every night, and we were subject to what the enemy could put against us with small craft, when we flew helos in we dropped down over the desert for the last run-in into Afghanistan, and of course on the patrols out there, on the ground patrols, the overmatch was not obvious to us. It does help, if you're a general, to pick an enemy that's got generals who are dumber than a bucket full of rocks, it makes you look brilliant, and so we did okay at some things there but overmatch on the ground, I would tell you, outside of perhaps some armored corps, we do not have overmatch on the ground.  We simply have, in the Marine Corps, fewer infantrymen than New York City has policemen on the streets.  Next slide. What we're doing right now, ladies and gentlemen, is we're shifting back to the future for the Marine Corps.  Some of you are aware that we had a extensive small wars experience, interwar period, 1920 to 1940 timeframe.  The doctrine's robust.  I think most importantly what we have, being put up there, where we're at right now, that's where we've kind of been. You know, we're really into the traditional kind of fighting but we could also do the irregular.  We've done it a lot.  We consider it to be manly work.  It's not like we think that stability ops or small wars are somehow beneath us.  We do window and we're kind of proud of it.  I will tell you, as "Buff" Blount [ph], my very good friend, who commanded 3rd Infantry Division in the Army, got to Baghdad and I got to Baghdad, my infantry-rich formations where I could dump 7000 dismounted infantrymen on the streets of Baghdad overnight, and I could double it to 14,000 very, very quickly, by just taking my artillerymen and engineers, who were all riflemen, and throwing them out that, that quantity that I had had a quality all its own, and I don't think it's easy for me to convey to you just what a different it makes in constabulary type operations to have these infantry rich formations available to you. Afghanistan.  We did okay there, inserting 350, 400 miles from the sea.  It was pretty straightforward, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to our flexible naval organization and using some of our gear in ways we hadn't imagined before. But we are going to build this slide up, we're going to shift it more up into the irregular area, we're not going to give up some things but we're definitely going to make some shifts.  You've heard some of them here, this morning.  A lot more emphasis on small units, training and education.  There are some equipment changes too. Let me just talk about the origins of the current Marine transformation.  You know, we really changed how we thought about war back in the mid '90s.  We had a commandant named Krulak and he came up with a thing called the three block war.  You know, you're fighting like the dickens on one block, you're handing our humanitarian supplies in the next block, and the next one over you're trying to keep some warring factions from shooting each other.  Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it?  Sounds real familiar. He saw it ten years in advance.  But because of it changing the way we thought, and it's also been picked up I noticed in Canada's doctrine, Germany's doctrine, I hear it over in the U.K.l when I'm there.  A lot of people going to three block war at the very time we're transitioning to the fourth block, and that of course is the information ops. But it caused us to do some things, ladies and gentlemen.  For example, we divested ourselves of self-propelled artillery right coming out of the Gulf War where we used self-propelled artillery very, very well.  But it didn't meet our view of how the world was changing.  We got rid of it. We went without the F18 E&F upgrade the U.S. Navy went to.  We said there's nobody that can take us on at 15-, 20,000 feet.  So we're going to skip it, we're going to save some money, we're going to jump from the current F18s over to joint strike fighter and just save a generation worth of the government's treasury there. We lightened up.  We have more light-armored vehicles today and fewer tanks, by a significant amount, which causes us to go to the Army, if we need a lot of tanks. We recognized that war and transformation is shaped more by nonmilitary factors.  Next slide, please. Today, the primary transformation driving the Marine Corps again lies in how we think about war.  It is not technology as Tom mentioned in his open remarks.  Coalitions are going to be increasingly important, and in that regard, it's first do no harm.  The BBC asked the question earlier, the representative here, about why we are going with more sea basing. Just by putting a big heavy U.S. military footprint ashore, you can change a lot of dynamics, and not always for the better; just the nature of military forces. So coalitions are going to be important. We want to make coalitions but not do harm to those by coming in with a brittle military instrument.  It's been said the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.  That's even more important today I think because what's going to happen is that the importance of symbolism in the information age says that having countries on your side sends a political message and war is primarily Associated Press phenomenon. When I came out of Iraq, a little less than a year ago, I had Tongin [ph] troops and Azerbaijanis inside my division, for example.  Good troops, but their value I think went beyond the purely military. The transformation's not going to be a new tank or a new radio and I think there's no technical solution to this conflict.  Technology can assist, it'll enable, but this war is more art than science and it's always been that way, just more obvious to us now. Where technology enables the human interface, we'll be eager to embrace it, it can solve some specific issues, but war is really about peace, a better peace.  Technology is not going to be how we get there. I would tell you that on embracing coalitions, when one MEF attacked into Iraq, had two basic ground components, 1st U.K. Division and 1st Marine Division. Inside the U.K division they had a commando brigade, Royal Marines.  Inside the commando brigade was a U.S. Marine expeditionary unit of 2000 Marines and sailors.  I'm showing you the coalitions are going to be increasingly important.  We can do it.  One reason is our service polder, as a naval service, you are more apt to work in other people's back yards than go perhaps to another country and have your own cantonment that you operate within with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Baskin-Robbins there.  You're more apt to pull into port and you have to get along with people.  The same sort of thing applies when you're working coalitions and we found it quite easy to work with the magnificent British troops. How to transform.  You heard from the commandant what's going on with our own transformation efforts.  I'll just tell you it's focused on the individual Marine more than anything else. We want them to out-think, out-maneuver and out-fight any enemy, and it assumes a certain amount of risk with the transformation.  So we're not going to have as much capability to do as we shift over into the more irregular forms of warfare. If those risks are things we have to look at, evaluate, consider how long we can assume the risk, and then if it's the right thing to do, have the guts to do it. In the Marine Corps, it's back to the future.  I think as Max Boot put it this morning--by the way, small wars, as we call them in the Marine Corps, were called ordinary operations in the 1920's and '30s in the Marine Corps.  Ordinary operations.  You want a new idea, read an old book.  You know what I mean? But we've got to have people who are comfortable operating in austere, very complex environments where firepower is not the primary means to victory and you can see some of the things we're looking at there that allow us to transform the Marine Corps to make it even more relevant to what the nation needs from us right now. We do see the Army, the Special Operations Forces and the Marines as perhaps comprising a new triad.  Remember the old triad to make certain we didn't go into nuclear war were strategic bombers, you know, land-based missiles and the submarines, of course, out at sea with the missiles on them. We, to confront this new enemy, there may be a new triad that we need to put together.  Some of the things we're doing--distributive ops come into the forefront right now, robust, easily accessible command and control, communications, and those joint--I mean you can distribute people more liberally across the battlefield and operate deeper and faster. It also decentralizes decision making and I'll tell you that there is an aspect of improved command and control systems, and of jointness that can actually blur the reason why we need initiative on the parts of our small unit leaders.  Distributed operations will restore some freedom of maneuver under commander's intent to the most junior troops, if they are trained correctly. We will build on the strongest NCO corps in the history of the Marine Corps.  It has been enlisted at a very high standard for many years. I t's been retained at a higher standard and now it's got, in many, many cases, two and even three combat pillars, and that makes for a very, very robust field of NCOs to draw from. Sea basing.  Ensuring joint force access from the sea.  Ladies and gentlemen, all politics are local.  When I was ordered to go into Afghanistan, I flew in, I took out a map and saw this country called Pakistan between myself at sea and Afghanistan.  I flew into Islamabad and spoke with the Pakistani joint headquarters staff. They were willing to do a lot for us but they had to be very careful, early on, how much they exhibited their support for us.  The Pakistanis knew H Hour, D Day and the objective there weeks in advance.  They kept it secret.  They gave us a rather hidden little fishing village cove that we could use after dark, with an air strip nearby, about ten miles away over the sand dunes. And we worked together with the.  But had we not had those beautiful gray Navy amphibs out there at sea, and been able to hide during the day what was going on, because we'd pull back over the horizon, only come in and use the beach at night, we could not have pulled this off. All politics are local, not just in Chicago.  Everywhere.  As I recall, and one of you can correct me on this, i think we offered Turkey a total of $29 billion worth of aid, guarantees, grants, loans, whatever you want to call it, and from a country that stood by us through thick and thin, fought alongside us in Korea, been good friends with us, they were unable to give us one-time passage of one infantry division for $29 billion.  It's not because they hate us.  It's just tougher nowadays, in today's age, to show that kind of support. So I think what we're going to see is a continuing need for, an increasing need, excuse me, for sea-based forces.  Some things that have been brought up this morning about do we have to be ready to do an Iwo Jima?  Ladies and gentlemen, when you see those pictures of Iwo Jima's beaches, that's as good as the technology allowed us to do in those days. Today, if I'd had the MV22, I wouldn't have stopped at Rhino going after the Taliban.  I'd a gone straight into Kandahar and collapsed them a month and a half earlier, and created even more a sense of despair on them.  We're mostly out to break the enemy's will, not to kill people, and so the new capabilities from the sea are going to threaten more of our enemies, reassure more of our friends and do no harm to those relationships. It is not about unilateralism.  Coalitions will be more important than ever.  Next slide.  The culturally aware Marine Corps.  All career NCOs and officers, when the sergeant reenlisted, corporal reenlists for his first time to stay on, every one is going to be assigned basically from the arc of instability, one ethnic area or geographic area, however we break it up, to a steady linguistics, cultural anthropology, this sort of thing, and make certain that they are very, very good at reading the cultural terrain as well as they can read a map of the physical terrain. As we get ready to go into the future, if you and I were sitting here in 1805, in this town, trying to figure out what should we do for the future, you know, they were pretty smart back then too, from what I read in the old books, and not one of us would have expected that the British navy would sail up that river and their army would burn this capital down within ten years. Well, maybe you say they weren't that smart.  1905, we're sitting here.  Well, the Indian fighting army has basically spread from the Montana area down to Arizona territory and they're watching over the Indians.  Not one of us would think, with biplanes and machines guns and barbed wire, we'll be fighting in France in ten years; twelve years.  Don't ask me where we're going to fight ten years from now. I'll tell you this.  If we can get all those culturally adept Marines focused, and they've all read the terrain, the cultural terrain, whether it be in sub-Saharan Africa or North Africa, or the Middle East or Central Asia Republics, or Southeast Asia, the arc of instability, add a little bit of Latin America--once they've learned how to read that map, if they get sent somewhere else, then they'll know how to read it pretty fast. I won't get it right but I guarantee I won't get it wrong, either, by doing it this way. So that's where we're at, that's where we're going, and I think I'll just hold the rest of it here and give us some time for question and answer.  Turn it over to Mike. MR. DONNELLY:  General, I'd say that was a really superb performance, except I see Mike and Bob doing this a lot, and that's not good for panels, so-- GENERAL MATTIS:  I borrowed their notes and-- [Laughter.] MR. DONNELLY:  So Michael, it's over to you. MR. VICKERS:  Well, thanks, and let me note at the beginning I'm a former army, that is, army special forces officer and CIA operations officer, not a SEAL, and so I sure hope we're not going to be run off into the sea after this talk or I'm going to be in a lot of trouble. What I plan to do is really set the stage for my colleague, Bob Works' presentation, who's got a lot of detailed recommendations or things to say about a future Marine Corps force structure and modernization and really try to provide a strategic context that should animate what i see as Marine Corps transformation and force planning, and then pay a little bit of attention, or special attention to the irregular warfare challenge. And yes, I will underscore, elaborate many of the things that General Mattis just said.  Well, if we're going to talk about Marine Corps transformation, the first thing we got asked, naturally, is transform for what or to what and why, and it's very useful here to start with the DOD wide perspective, because there really is a dominant--well, there are many different ideas about transformation. There's a dominant DOD vision, and it's elements are essentially network centric warfare and joint integration, and then we've used technologies over the last 20 years or so, like Stealth and precision weapons, and the tactical exploitation of space, and it really is focused on creating the--and I emphasize "the" joint force of 2020, and the vision for that is basically, if you want to sum it up, it's basically attaching superlative adjectives to millennia-old combat functions like dominant maneuver or precision engagement, et cetera. And then since the mid 1990's, we've essentially accepted the service modernization plans without a lot of change, so now that either tells you that we really got it right back then or we're a little slow to change since 9/11 and some of the challenges we face, and that's where the QDR is all about right now, or quadrennial defense review. Now my critique about this is that this DOD-wide vision, and again, there's a lot of debate about this, suffers from two serious flaws.  First, it's disconnected from the strategic challenges we face.  What is it I want the military to do, or various services? And second, it suffers from a one-size-all mentality, that there's "the joint force" that will solve all those problems, or little league roles, everybody gets to play in everything, and it's just not true. General Mattis already covered how we're going to try to go about fixing that.  The 2005 national defense strategy is a real step in the right direction, in that it says look, we have these four persistent and enduring challenges, traditionally regular, catastrophic and disruptive, someone that could change the rules of the game on us, and we may be a bit oversubscribed in the traditional area. And so this quadrennial defense review is about trying to shift some resources, orientation, as General Mattis said, from the traditional area to those other three areas. Now an important point is that the services will likely move or place different emphasis on different parts of those other three boxes. Now this has been operationalized in the four focus areas of the QDR, and a little more detailed.  Defeating Islamic extremist networks, defending the homeland in depth, shaping the choices of countries at a strategic crossroads, the biggest one of which or the "800 pound gorilla" is China, and then preventing the acquisition or use of WMD in a variety of scenarios. The next point I'd like to make is that I hope by looking at these problems, you come to the conclusion, as I have, that a single joint transformation vision is highly suboptimal here. My good friend here and colleague, Mac Owens, wrote a wonderful piece about a decade ago, about the dangers of strategic monism, having a single strategic view of the world or a single strategy or set of capabilities. And I think that was never more true today and you can just substitute the word transformation monism for strategic monism, and he'd write equally as impressive an article. The idea that the same capabilities that we would need to deal with a rising China are those that we will use to deal with radical Islamic networks distributed across 60 countries is just laughable, I mean, and we're essentially stuck in the middle there right now as a department and need to move in both directions. Okay.  So what does that mean, to narrow it down to the Marine Corps first? The services will likely pursue differentiated-- [Start tape No. 4.] MR. VICKERS:  [continuing] information path.  For the Air Force and Department of Navy, they have to keep their eye focused on the rise of China.  That's a big air/maritime problem of the future and there's a lot of worrisome signs on the horizon right now. As General Mattis said, this new triad, which is a wonderful term of the Army, Marine Corps, and SOF, really are going to be more focused on GWAT [ph] and the various WMD challenges, less so on China.  Now that doesn't mean the Air Force and Navy don't have a role to play in the GWAT.  They do.  They've got to stretch in both directions.  But their primary effort will be one place and the ground services and special operations will be oriented in another. Now for a long time in warfare there's been a secular trend toward more capital intensity.  You know we substitute capital for labor.  We're at a point where we need to retard that a bit, in the sense that our ground forces actually need to look very hard at where they can squeeze more labor, re-rolling some capital-intensive formations into infantry for the problems they face, and, if anything, the Navy and Air Force may need to become more capital intensive. So, again, I'm just trying to make the rubble bounce on this one-size-fits all myth that we've been operating under. So what should the Marine Corps be focused on?  I think it flows from the strategy that both transformation and force planning ought to be one, focused on war on terror, and it is a war, not a struggle, an irregular warfare, and then second, projecting major combat power in ground-intensive campaigns against the WMD-equipped adversary and there are some already and more on the horizon and we're running out of non-WMD adversarial "rogue states" that we might beat up on, and we're very, very good at it already. Now a third category that really applies to both, which the commandant mentioned and General Mattis mentioned as well, and probably talked about this morning, is urban warfare.  There's both an irregular challenge in urban warfare and a challenge in conventional campaigns. So what does this mean in force planning terms?  Greater commitment to the war on terror and irregular warfare, in all its manifestations, I would suggest has several implications. First, we're going to treat it as a war and not as a small-scale contingency and that means we're going to resource it but there's a real sustainment base issue there. Now some think the level might be something like two-thirds of a MEF for the Marine Corps to do the sustained presence but that doesn't mean two-thirds of a MEF forward all the time.  It means a quarter or that or so that's distributed around the world and the rest of us allowing to do that over 20 years. A big part of this is going to be building partner capacity.  If you've got a problem of al Qaeda cells in 54 countries and a war of ideas that's global and Islamist insurgencies going on in eighteen, can't concentrate your effort in two, you've got to be lots a places. And so this MARSOC [ph] plus, and small-scale counterinsurgency operations like we did in the Philippines, are going to be more the norm, and it was mentioned this mentioned this mooning about Marine efforts to take over some of the training mission in Georgia and in the Ponsa hell [?] and elsewhere.  That really is a signpost of the future, in my mind. Another issue that may come up, and I think my colleague will talk a little more about this, is if you're going to shift the emphasis to a regular war a bit, we may want to relook at the balance between rotary wing and fixed wing a bit and shift a little more toward rotary, but there are big cultural, training, PME implications.  The shift is far more about software than it hardware. So where does the slack come from?  If you're going to take the same Marine Corps and do more in irregular warfare, where do you get it? Well, because we're so good at major combat operations, we may be able to do, against WMD-equipped adversaries, with a slightly smaller force but a still robust force, what we've done in the past. So instead of using two MEFs minus, we might use one MEF plus in the future to deal with the Korean Peninsula, or an Iran, or elsewhere, and maintain the capability to do major combat operations against one of those, or a large protracted stability operation as we see in Iraq. The sea base will be very relevant because if we think we have political access problems now, wait till our adversary can shoot nukes at us and neighbors, and then people are going to be even more reluctant to say here, join in this fight, unless they're being invaded. And so the sea base will provide freedom of action, but given the depth of some of these countries, Iran, for example, we may have to project power far from the sea base. To wrap up, there was a discussion this morning about, okay, if the Marine Corps is something like 70/30 conventional versus irregular today and we want to move that balance to 60/40 or 50/50, what does that mean in force terms, in that rebalancing. In my judgment, you can't get away from the idea that we're going to have general purpose Marines and Army soldiers. The notions that we had in the 1990's, of creating a specialized peacekeeping division, one out of ten in the Army, are laughable when you look at Iraq. If you've got to put 100,000 troops on the ground and sustain them over several years, you need your ground services, not some specialized element, and so we're going to need general purpose Marines, that can go both ways, that can project power against the WMD adversary, operate in urban environments and do the irregular, which is going to be their primary business. Now let me talk finally about how you're going to pay for this transformation across DOD and with special reference to the Marine Corps. First, I think we're going to have to do this largely within each of the services.  There's probably not going to be the big cross-service trades that someone would hope for, and I think there's going to be modest growth, or no growth in the defense budget. We're going to have to do it on flat defense budgets, and we're going to have to do it while a fighting a war.  So that's a tall order, which means end strength's probably not going to grow all that much.  And while you see debates, some factions in the Pentagon who shall remain nameless, say we'll never fight China, don't worry about it. Or others then, with different equities, will say irregular war is a passing fancy, you know, it'll go away in two or three years and we'll never do it again. We've got to be prepared for both.  Former Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage had a very good piece in the Daily Yamjori [ph] in Japan last Sunday, saying that it's possible, 50 years from now, people will look back, and say the central strategic problem of the first half of the 21st Century was the rise of China and we didn't pay enough attention to it.  I'm agnostic about that. I think we're going to have a big radical Islam problem and may or may not have a China problem, but I want our military to hedge for both. Now for the Marine Corps, the challenge is particularly acute I think because you have one department, the Department of Navy that's trying to move in two different directions, and I think there is a danger, particularly on the capital side, of either crowding out or optimizing one or the other, and that will be a challenge down the road. Bob. MR. DONNELLY:  If that was a setup job, Bob, you've got to be pretty darn good. So I'm really looking forward to your presentation. COLONEL WORK:  Thank you for inviting me back, Tom, it's really good to be here, and both Mike and Tom asked me to kind of look at the more programmatic side and make some recommendations here, but I'd like to start off with a little personal anecdote to set this up. August 1994, I was the training and exercise support officer in the office--operational support officer for the NRO.  I couldn't even say at that time that I belonged to the NRO but I was responsible for all training and exercise support of NRO assets with theaters.  I got my orders. Fourteen days later, I'm in the field as a regimental S3 of an artillery regiment, and I'm in a TOOT [ph], a division staff exercise.  Two days after we hit the field, we got an exercise order to go to Wanatchee, Washington, and fight the biggest firefight that had been in that state since 1938. I flew in as the jump CP on that Friday and we had a 1200 Marine firefighting brigade on the ground fighting fires by that following Monday. I say that because I didn't feel that my experience was remarkable, at all.  I went from being in a NRO, very geeky, you know, talking with space geeks, going to talking with my brethren in the artillery, shifting into an interagency, all within a period of 17 days, and the Marines that we led, you know, into that firefight shifted into the fight and the only thing that you had to do was make sure you told them what they needed to do. Every day, I had to do a little after-action report to headquarters Marine Corps to say what the Marines were doing in this fight.  There was an awful lot of interest. And every day we'd get calls, "Oh, we want to see the after-action report, we want to see the after-action report."  One morning, I was getting ready to go to the head, the latrine, the bathroom, and I said, God, I just wish everybody in the Marine Corps could see this, and I went to the head.  I came back and a young lance corporal said, "Done, sir."  And I said, "What's done?"  He said, "Everybody in the Marine Corps has your after-action report." And I do, "How'd you do that?" and he goes, well--he explained it to me--"Well, I hit star, star, asterisk, and it went everywhere.  So for the next two weeks, I was answering questions from a general in Japan, Why are you telling me about this firefight? I want to tell you this because the Marines, when people say, hey, we ought to have 21 bombers, 21 B2 bombers, and I'm going to talk about three MEBs or something like that, really, all I care about is do we have 175,000 Marines, cause every single one of those Marines are an asset to the nation. So although I will talk about programmatics, I wanted to tell you where I was coming from. Now everyone has said--Mac said this morning, that there was a 1954 article written by Huntington, and he described these broad national security areas, and each of the national security areas caused the services to change, and he called the continental--essentially all of our fights are on the continent but the Navy and the Marine Corps are overseas.  We start our great expeditionary tradition, and if you read The Savage Wars of Peace, you'll see that the Marines and the sailors fought side by side. They were ship's crew and they all fought together.  Huntington called it the Oceanic era.  I called it the First Expedition era.  We started sending troops overseas, and over that era, we became a battleforce asset, a Department of the Navy asset in which we seized advanced bases. And then we retransformed again in the garrison era, the Cold War, what Huntington called the Transoceanic Era, and we became a national asset, an expeditionary force in readiness. So just as Mac said, we have constantly rechanged ourselves over time, and as General Hagee said, our core capability is paranoia, the Marines are constantly changing but each of the threads of these things can now be seen in the transformation of the Marine Corps. So now we're in an era which I'll refer to as the joint expeditionary era.  We're inherently joint from the beginning, as all of the speakers have talked about, and everyone is talking about going overseas, primarily from the CONUS base of operations. The Marines found it very easy to shift into this era because really, we continue to do our expeditionary nature which we had been doing for some 200 years, but it really began to become evident that how do you, how are you, the expeditionary force in readiness, when everyone, the entire joint force is expeditionary, and the entire joint force is ready? So what is the niche?  Do you concentrate on forcible entry?  Do you concentrate on the GWAT?  Do you align yourself with SOCOM?  So in the mid 1990's, you saw all sorts of things like from the sea, operational maneuver from the sea, shift to objective maneuver.  We really were focusing on how you operate from the sea differently. Then in the mid to late '90s, we started talking about the strategic corporals and the three block wars that General Mattis talked about and chaos in the littorals.  And then we started talking about sea basing. So if you look back, I think ten to fifteen years from now, historians will look back and say the Marines, once again, were trying to figure out what niche they fit within this great force we have, this great joint force. But I would submit that the transformation plans of the Marines, as you have heard all of the speakers talk about this morning, it's not as disjointed as they might first appear, we will be a joint asset now instead of a national asset, and I like Frank Hoffman's kind of three different Marine Corps. But, really, what's going to happen--you know, we talked about the three block war.  I think the Marines are the three challenge force.  They will be applicable in traditional war, they will be applicable in regular war, and they will be applicable in catastrophic challenges such as Mike talked about going against potential adversaries that are armed with nuclear powers. So we will cultivate, the Marines will cultivate their natural linkage with U.S. SOCOM and prosecute the GWAT. I think several of the speakers have pointed out the Marines are very good at helping to build partner capacity.  We will provide an able combined arms forcible entry force, and I'll talk about that in a second, but we should really start to think about okay, what's different about this future? Max Boot said, well, we haven't done a real operation since 1950.  That's true.  But we haven't fired a torpedo at an enemy submarine since 1945.  You don't look back, you look forward.  So you see Iran getting a nuclear weapon possibly.  North Korea maybe already having it.  Other nations getting nuclear weapons. How do you project power in that environment?  If we never do it, just thinking about it, like we did in the interwar period, it will help the Marine Corps towards distributed operations, you know, decentralized ops and all sorts of things. And finally, we'll provide a medium weight combat force in sustained operations, either be it a major stability operation in Iraq or in a major combat. It breaks my heart, though, when I hear Marines or anybody saying the Marines should become closer to SOCOM and less close with the Department of the Navy.  The Marines are soldiers from the sea.  If you ask Rangers, who deal with the SOF every day, ask them what they are, they will say I am a soldier, I am from the Army.  Well, the same thing with the Marines. We can be close with SOCOM but if the Marines ever delink themselves from the Department of the Navy, I believe we come less than what we are today. And that brings us to this talk about amphibious operations.  I like to think of OIF as essentially a breakout from an amphibious lodgment area.  If you look at Operation Cobra in World War II, the similarities are very striking. It took from June 6th to July 25th, about 49 days, to build up the force, to break out from the Kontinan [ph] peninsula; took us less than 60 days to put 70,000 Marines on the ground, and instead of moving from, 23 miles across the channel from a huge base, intermediate support base, which was an entire country, we brought these Marines from transcontinental distances. The Marines moved 400 miles in less than three weeks and they did it with a model which I think is very interesting. They had an armored tip of the spear, they weren't heavy like the 3rd ID but the moved as fast as the 3rd ID.  They put their tanks up front with close-running DS artillery which punched holes and did suppression fire.  Air was shaping the battlefield deep, air supplied the flanks.  And this is a much better model, it seems to me, than the air maneuver, which I consider to have been overhyped since the 1990's. The Army After Next Project really started to think about how do you project power over intercontinental distances with the air.  It's all great, and maybe we'll do it in 2150.  But we won't do it within the next two decades.  The best way to do it is to have these forces that are moving fast, moving deep, keeping the enemy off balance, and I would submit that we move this force faster than we could possibly have done it, by leapfrogging small units up the peninsula with helicopters. Think of this same attack coming from the sea and you see the power.  You don't go where the enemy is.  You go where the enemy isn't and pretty soon you're deep, and you're dictating the tempo of the operation. So the basis for transformation, in my mind, is a sea-based, tied with the Navy, cross spectrum, three challenges--combined arms maneuver force.  The Corps has to be this forcible entry capability. It is the most difficult military operation, if not the most difficult, at least one of the most difficult operations.  If you don't build up from that Corps and you lose that core capability, the nation suffers. Three MEFs of research lift.  That is your sea base from which you can operate, and let's set aside forcible entry for a second.  Essentially all this is is operational maneuver from strategic distances.  It's being able to project, intact, combat units with their basic load ready to fight. We don't have a lot of those forces.  We're moving to a force of approximately 88 brigade equivalents.  If we retain just three brigades of amphibious lift and six airborne brigades, only nine of those 88 will be able to project into combat fully operational, ready to pull the trigger as soon as they hit the deck. All the other ones have to come through this RSOI that the commandant talked about, where their equipment and their people are separated. You can get people there fast but they're not ready to fight once they get there.  So building around this amphibious operational capability is very good. Then a globally distributed GWAT base, a SOCOM detachment, whatever that might be, and continue to develop the small unit overmatching skills that the Marines have always excelled in, because that will translate across all of these problems. So recapitalize the amphibious fleet.  There is a renaissance in amphibious capability around the world.  Every other Navy in the world has looked at this and said what is the most efficient way to get forces across transoceanic distances. It's in amphibious ships with a well deck and a flight deck.  Everyone is building either LHDs or LPDs.  The U.S. Navy has two of the best in the world.  I think by far and away, the best.  The Wasp class LHD and the LPD 17. Regardless of the problems that you've heard, I as wa CO of troops on two deployments on an LPD 4 class.  I know LPD4s.  I've walked LPD 17 and down to the level where each of the compartments keep platoon cohesion and everybody has sit-up bunks, this is a truly tremendous capability If you built eight Wasps, threw away the sea base that is now being talked about, the 14.5 billion sea base that is being talked about, which I believe was chosen primarily for industrial base reasons rather than operational reasons, and bought fifteen extra LPD 17s, you'd have a force that would really be without peer. The second thing is you have to take Marine Corps aviation to sea.  Now we can argue about this.  There can be a case be made that the Marine Corps can give up fixed wing.  I don't believe that.  I believe that you should look to World War II and the LHHR, which is a new ship, which has no well deck, is really more of an escort carrier, and if you built four escort carriers, the Commencement Bay where the escort carriers had all Marine air wings in World War II, and you dedicated that force to the GWAT, where Marine aviation is totally ready and capable of moving off, to shore, back to sea, to shore, back to sea, it's a perfect GWAT support force, and you take the ten big carriers and focus them on China, I believe that is a very good way to go. That's a natural thing for the Marines.  They actually developed all of their close air support in Nicaragua in the 1920's.  Marine air is a very good GWAT support force. Now the LCACs and LCAC-Xes, it's just as--if you believe that you really want to move deep, fast, with forces, you have to have a means by which to get them to the beach.  So these first two things, the LCAC-Xes, and LCH-Xes, that's landing craft heavy, it just allows General Mattis to mix and match his force, so that he can have heavy forces to get to the beach quickly and start moving inland. The expeditionary fighting vehicle, the replacement for the Triple A-V that Max talked about.  This will be the only vehicle, teamed up with an LPD 17, which was designed to operate in a nuclear environment, it has nuclear blast hardening, it has over-pressure system to protect the Marines inside the ship and the sailors.  It has a special triage system where Marines who are contaminated can be brought in, cleaned up, taken into the hospital. It was over-specked, but heck, we've got it now, it's a heck of a platform, and the EFV has an over-pressure system too. So if you had to do a counterproliferation operation, or you had to go in and secure some WMD  warheads, this is the combination that you would do it with.  Or you would do it in combination with SO,F who would come in, obviously, and help. But I think instead of buying a thousand, if you bought one platoon for every LDP 17, you'd be able to lift 24 companies and that's a very powerful force. The MV22 is a tremendous vehicle.  But if you look at it, it's not that good for sea-based operations.  It is an exquisite rating machine, very fast, very deep.  It was interesting that the Marines, who just went through the APIVAL [?] said, well, you know, it was designed for 24 Marines in, one of the sergeants said I'd put twelve in there. I mean this thing--it's a very good SOF thing, SOF, but it's very expensive.  So what I would recommend is that you buy ten operational squadrons and call it the national tilt rotor force, and if it needs to support Marines, it would support Marines.  If it supports the national mission force or the SOF or the Rangers, it would do that. And the CH54 x-ray, which is a new CH53, which is a heavy hauler, it can carry 32 tons up to 110 miles inland, and three times as much as the CH53, into 200 miles, that's the heavy hauler that you would need for the sea base and I would take the money and make that as the primary ship to shore connector. In the garrison, the MPF was the primary means to get our heavy forces to combat.  But now, you have to say you might not have access, so that reverts back to the amphibious force, and I think that the MPF, you could take two of the squadrons, ten of the ships.  USNS Stockham just recently was modified, it was given a better flight deck, it was given medical facilities, it was given communications facilities. If you converted all ten of those ships to GWAT support ships, created five two-ship squadrons, put two on Asencion, two in the Med, two on Diego, two in Palau, two in Guam, you would be able to have Marines shifting all over this area supporting maybe a reinforced company fighting the GWAT, and when necessary, they would collapse and you could put up to two brigades ashore in the case of Iraq. And you'd maintain one six ship sea-based maneuver squadron on Diego Garcia and that would become the basis for sea basing. ladies and gentlemen, it took us over two decades to figure out how to launch aircraft off the deck of a single ship.  Sea basing is infinitely more difficult.  You would assume that you would take at least a decade or so to experiment before you locked into any particular avenue.  I believe that we're far too premature in the selection of the ships for the sea base. I believe that the Marines and the Navy should experiment, and, over time, choose it, and change this squadron to that sea-based squadron, but I wouldn't expect that to happen for a couple decades. Four key transformation initiatives.  Distributed operations, applicable to all there of the challenges--irregular warfare, operations in a nuclear environment and traditional operations. Sea basing, the thing that you really want right now is selective offload, and you can get that very easy, and naval surface fire support, we can talk about that in the questions and answers, if you would like. Urban combat.  Several of the speakers have talked about it.  I think the Marines could do well by substituting some labor for robotics. And the final thing is exoskeletons.  I'm a military sci fi buff.  I've been reading the books.  You know, my first book, I remember, was Starship Troopers, and you always hear about these powered armor, and it sounds so crazy, but if you could just see a movie of the Sarcos--I think--is it Sarcos? MR.     :  And Berkeley. COLONEL WORK:  And Berkeley.  This little thing right here, down here at the bottom, it's very hard to see, but it truly is equip the man, not man the equipment.  The Marine would just sit inside this harness and would be able to run over any terrain, with 200 pounds on his back--for 48, 50 hours? MR.     :  Something like that. COLONEL WORK:  It's unbelievable.  It's doing it today.  And so the Marines, who championed vertical development, who championed vertical jets in the military, the exoskeleton to me, based on their ideas on distributed operations and all of these other things, I can see a Marine exoskeleton battalion in the future and I will reenlist, if they'll have me, to be in it.  And that's all I have. MR. DONNELLY:  Bob, you're going to have to pry the exoskeleton from my cold dead hands. I thank you all for three wonderful presentations, and before we do audience questions, I have a couple observations and redirects, if you will. A theme that ran through everybody's presentation, to paraphrase General Mattis and a certain gentleman before him, as on the theme of quantity, and that is that particularly the irregular challenge is inherently a manpower intensive one, even if we do have exoskeletons. I'd like to go over that set of issues a little bit in more detail and I wanted to take it in two directions. The thing about the exoskeleton is is that it is applying a technology solution to this--and obviously, it would have applications across everything.  But, I think, you know, a rather ad hoc job of applying technology to the irregular challenge and I would just like to get reflections from everybody about untapped possibilities, you know, whether, you know, there's been some focus on IEDs and the rest of that stuff. But if we can make that a less--if we can bring some capital to bear on that problem, it would probably be a good thing. And secondly, this kind of war does seem to me to be about the control of terrain, in a large sense.  It's not a force on force fight, and it's not a march to Baghdad fight per se.  It's not a sack the capital fight. But it is--I think there was a bullet in Bob's slide about the denial of sanctuary to the enemy. So I would like to toss that out as a point of reflection for you guys, about ways in which, again it might not be traditional terrain control and it might--but it is, seems to be much more along those lines.  So those two themes, about applying technology to the irregular challenge, as kind of a force multiplier or a quantity multiplier almost, and then second, about the theme of terrain control as something that cuts across a number of these things. So we can just go down the batting order, if you want. GENERAL MATTIS [?]:  Sure, Tom.  As far as technology, I like high capability, but I don't want high tech just for high tech.  Where it enables the human interface, and I'd say that this, walking man is or whatever you've got over here, Bob, sounds pretty good, especially at my age, on the runs and all. But I would tell you that we've got to be very careful with our penchant for technological solutions, to think it's going to solve this problem.  It has more to do with reducing adversarial relationships, with building coalitions and that sort of thing. If there's one area that--and I put it out at every talk and I'll take advantage of this moment to say it--one area that we need a lot of attention and we are not getting enough. If we could prematurely detonate IEDs, we will change the whole face of this war, because now the IED becomes a threat to the person making it or transporting it or digging it in, rather than to us.  We need to reverse this. And a country that could put a man on the moon in ten years or build a nuke in two and a half years of wartime effort, I don't think we're getting what we need from technology on that point. So I believe in technology.  I just think we have to be very careful thinking we're going to solve this issue with technology. As far as your point about terrain, when we came home, ladies and gentlemen, in October, a couple years ago, from Iraq, after, you know, they pulled the statue down in April and then we were there for about five and a half months, came home in October, I got the warning order on the 7th of November we're going back in, and by basically--the gear was still at sea, coming in to Southern California, we repaired it over the holidays, put the ships back to sea in January and flew the troops, started flying the troops in in February to take over Al-Anbar. During that period, I met with the Royal Marines and the French Marines and the Los Angeles police department.  Never were all three in the same room at the same time.  And their point about terrain was that you have got to have patient, persistent presence when you're doing community policing, counterinsurgency.  Patient, persistent presence and there can be no sanctuaries. So I'm not denying the value of terrain but terrain is neutral compared to the ideas that will govern the people who are the real center of gravity in that fight.  I'll pass it over to Mike. MR. DONNELLY: Is it affair to call it the cultural terrain or the social terrain or something? MR.       :  I think that's a very valid point, but at the same time, if the enemy gains sovereignty over some of the trends, they did when I was initially ordered into Fallujah and we had to strip assault battalions away from other areas, when we tried to leave detachments left in contact holding those areas, the enemy had an increasingly robust and mature assassination campaign, and they went in and murder and terror works against innocent people who have no defense. And the next time you come back to town, say hey, we're back, Fallujah's over, we want to work with you now, and they look at you, say no, you're going to leave us again, I can't support you. So the cultural terrain is much more important to a naval control over the physical terrain.  You can gain control over the physical by putting a soldier or a Marine there with an M16.  As soon as he walks away you lose control.  If you can't sustain your influence, and that's patient, persistent presence, or patient, persistent, what eventually became influence. MR. DONNELLY:  Thanks.  Sorry, Michael. MR. VICKERS:  A brief comment on applying technology to irregular warfare.  Yes, we need to do that, we've been moving in that direction some, the past couple years.  I would add, besides the technologies that one could do, counter IED, robotics, various things, the intelligence problem, our intelligence assets really need to be shifted more toward irregular warfare and that affects every intelligence discipline, from various collection disciplines to analysis, where you're trying to understand social groups more than opposing armies order of battle, and you're trying to find individuals. That's one of our fundamental problems.  If we solve that, we will go some way, not the entire way, towards solving some of the irregular problem.  The persistent presence and the building capacity is the other side of it. Now as far as controlling terrain, which relates to this, I think the problem that we see in Iraq, and Afghanistan, really may be an anomaly in the long-term war on terrorism, in the sense that we overthrew two governments and we're now trying to make suer those places don't go bad. But the long-term problem is really shoring up lots of governments across a global landscape.  As I mentioned, there are cells in some 55, 60 countries, there are insurgencies in eighteen, and so the only--and they swim in a sea of people, remember all the Mao stuff, of 1.2 billion people, including lots of folks in Europe where the problem is getting worse. And so the idea that you can do this by physically controlling--with any amount of U.S. forces--is ludicrous to me. I mean, the idea that you--the long-term GWAT problem will be working with locals in smaller groups, to make sure that these problems don't rise to a certain level, and so the terrain we're trying to control, in a sense, is really global and the only way to do that is with an indirect approach and with this low visibility but persistent and culturally sensitive presence. COLONEL WISE:  I think you started out by asking capacity, Tom.  I don't think I can add too much to what the general or Mike said on control of terrain.  You know, the Marine Corps I believe at one time got up over 200,000 or pretty close to 200,000 active duty in the Cold War period.  Right now, I believe 178, sir?  Is that about what it is? I think the Marine Corps is pretty close to the right size.  I think it could grow up to maybe 185,000, especially if once we start developing a SOCOM type debt, I think that should be additive to the entire package because there is so much. The problem the Marine Corps faces of course is it's in a war and it doesn't have a lot of money to spend.  We don't think a minute about spending billions of dollars on the V22 or the JSF but if you think of the infantry squad as a weapons system, we are very reluctant to spend money, and the Marine Corps, unfortunately, doesn't have a lot of money to do that. So I think the Army and the Marine Corps both will need to have some money shifted from some of these high capital-intensive programs into the enhancement of the Marines and the soldiers who are fighting this, to figure out the technologies that really do help them to prosecute this war.  So it might be more UAVs, which the Marines are very heavily into. It might be more ground robotic sensors.  It might be the exoskeleton.  It might be something else.  But the Marines don't have a lot of flexibility to pursue these, so I thing some shifts are going to have to be made. MR. DONNELLY:  Thanks, gentlemen.  The floor is now open for further comment.  Let's go here.  Just to give everybody a head's up, we've got slightly over 15 minutes, so let's try to keep it short and sweet. QUESTION:  General Mattis, Dave Garner from LMI.  The question has to do with improved coalition and interagency warfare.  One of your slides had the comment on there about the need for improved interagency cooperation in conducting the operations of the future. I wonder if you could comment on both how we, from a Marine standpoint, can take the lead in working those kinds of issues and what you see in the future in terms of the interagency cooperation? GENERAL MATTIS:  Well, you have to go back to the Federalist Papers to understand where our real problem lies, and we did not set up shared power,k we set up competing powers for a reason, and we have to respect our roots. Anyone who thinks you can start over is someone who thinks you can just, you know, cut off some flowers, as one person put it, plant them and they'll take off.  Cut flowers don't grow well.  We have to grow from where we came from. That said, we need to have some kind of integrated approach, because like I mentioned earlier, non-military aspects of national security are increasingly important, and even dominant.  If we were to look at the--General Hagee made a point at a conference we had a little while ago with Ambassador Pasquale [ph], who's charged with some of this responsibility of tying together the interagency effort, and he noted that if you look at the one MEF staff that he commanded, I was his deputy at that time before the attack into Iraq--there was all military people there and a handful of civilians.  We had, you know, not very many people. He asked for a political adviser.  That was denied.  Really, this may be the kind of uniform we see in the one MEF staff in the future.  Probably a few more Marines but most of them are out there with the units and the staff itself may be largely civilian suits and guys and gals who can think and tie together and integrate things in a much more coherent manner than we have proven to be able to do so far; somewhat understandably. We are given budgets and they're governed by the Congress for a reason.  So power does not accrue to any one element.  But I think that we have got to break through this and address the needs of the current strategic situation we face.  One point to make is, I think it was written a while ago, that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.  We don't have to sit here in love with our organization because that's just the way it's always been. We've got to be able to integrate the softer forms of national power.  I mean, I had people, I spent millions of dollars of the American taxpayers money in Iraq, when we went back during the stabilization period, and I'd like to tell you we got our money's worth. We checked out people, we made certain they were delivering when we had a paving contract, and we'd go out and we'd follow up on schools that were being rehabbed, and this sort of thing. And yet, I cannot tell you, after two years in Iraq, what the economic model that CPA was following.  I can't tell you what it was, and in the military we love to nest our operations into the next hire's operation.  How can I do that?  Is it supposed to be revitalizing national industries or is it to be micro loans to help entrepreneurs?  I don't know? But this integration that did not happen in Washington followed us into the theater, where I had Marines trying to figure out if we should spray date palms instead of someone from the Department of Agriculture, and there's only a certain period when date palms are maturing as a crop that you can spray them.  This is not what Marines ought to be doing.  Now we figured it out on the Internet and guys whose brothers are with the Department of Agriculture in the State of Texas were able to help us, but that's not the way the greatest nation in the history of this planet ought to be integrating. So I know what ought to happen.  There ought to be, you know, some banging heads together, and somebody put in charge, and I'd suggest it's not a military person when we go into this situation. If you want to see how to do it right, look at how the British went into Malaysia and what they did there in order to integrate Scotland Yard, the military and the civilian, and the military wa snot always in charge.  They were not in charge. COLONEL WORK [?]:  Actually, can I--I'd like to examine this a little bit more and there are two things in my recent experience, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan that have struck me, and they are these. First of all, you do have in Afghanistan in these provincial reconstruction teams something approximating an interagency thing at the, really, village level, which is where you need it. But even in those circumstances, and despite, you know, the sort of politically correct way that these things are supposed to go, still, so much of the actual responsibility and decision making devolves to the soldier, because it's still a dangerous environment to be in and you have agencies that just don't have, you know, kind of a well-developed decision making process, and so they kind a naturally look to the military commander to, you know, to make things work. And in Iraq, you know, out in the provinces, and despite the fact that soldiers and Marines aren't, you know, ideally supposed to be making the date palm, you know, spraying decisions, or decide who's going to be the dean of Mosul University or something like that, the big advantage of the military in this regard is they're just there, they're in big numbers, they have capacities that they can call on simply within their own organization. It may be true that we need to create other agencies that can better cooperate in this but that--you know, we've built a military, really a power projection military for decades and decades, and that's where the capacity and the culture to do that now lies, and if we want, it will be a huge task to recreate that or supplement that capacity in other agencies. I'm not saying that that's the wrong decision but we shouldn't expect that to be a quick fix kind of answer.  Maybe we must go there over the course of time.  But that's been my experience. MR. VICKERS [?]:  I suggest in this world that we face right now, the idea of expeditionary diplomats and people from Department of Treasury, they could come in and get a monetary system working again, and really, the ability to engage our friends or people, coalitions, dynamic coalitions, to bring in people that we're not irritating, that are willing to work with us to do these kind of things, where the military, yes, it's there, and we can do anything. We've proven it.  But are we really optimally organized, and I think that was the nature of the question here, and I don't think we are and we can do better without, I think, creating a new force, just by expecting that we've got expeditionary people in Treasury and Commerce and everywhere else here. MR. DONNELLY:  Sorry for that divergence.  There's a gentleman right--and there was another hand over here.  I'll be sure to get to you. QUESTION:  [inaudible] with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. General, could you talk a little bit about the Marine Corps reserve roles, missions, future force structure, and if in the process of transformation we're going to transform the reserve. GENERAL MATTIS:  Yes, I can.  The Marine Forces Reserve, under which lie all of our reserve elements, are there to reinforce the expeditionary capability.  They're not Title 32 forces, so we don't see them doing homeland defense here inside the continental borders. They're there to ensure that we've got a shock absorber, so when we get committed to a long-duration fight they come in and pick up the tempo. They've performed superbly.  I think everyone's aware in the country that they've taken some severe losses.  This last month, at least one of the battalions, their ethos is holding strong, they're right back in the fight, nothing's diminished as far as their willingness to close with the enemy.  They're in good shape.  We are adapting some of the organization to give us some capabilities we've not had before, but overall, they have proven their value in this war. So there's some changes on the margin, we're adding reconnaissance troops, light-armored reconnaissance troops, we're shifting one artillery battalion to an anti-terrorist battalion, and that sort of thing, beefing up some of our civil affairs folks.  We have a few more to draw on, but so far, again, the audit seems to have proven that they're pretty well-organized for the fight. Does that address your question? QUESTION:  [inaudible]. GENERAL MATTIS:  Right.  I'd talk afterwards about a couple of those probably; but they're relatively minor. MR. DONNELLY:  What's the name of that terrorist battalion?  We've heard that a couple times today and I'm not intimately familiar with it. GENERAL MATTIS:  Right.  It's one that does not have the heavier weapons and this sort of thing of an infantry unit, that closes with and destroys the enemy, that can go in and stabilize situations, reinforce Navy bases that get in trouble or are threatened, that sort of thing, or perhaps help out on State Department where it's more than what we need for a Marine security guard, Marines in dress blues outside the embassies, when you need something more than that. MR. DONNELLY:  Okay; thanks. I believe there was a question over here.  Did I see a hand?  I owe this gentleman from this morning. QUESTION:  Jerry Thompson from CNO Resources, and General, in particular, I want to commend the Corps for sharing with us some really creative and forward-thinking ideas about how we ought to operate.  That's personal, from me.  But the question is, the message I'm getting from today's discussion is, that the Corps seems comfortable within the current resource allocation, and one of the things we're looking at here is, you're talking enormous change. We've got a force that--I'm more familiar with the Army situation but I suspect the Marine Corps is similar in terms of needing overhaul, refit, replacement. Just to keep, just to sustain the current force, much less make this change that we're talking about. And there's investment in a number of areas.  I'm not going to try and recap over everything that you discussed.  I commend you for the overall modesty of the program but I still don't see where the money is going to come from. Can the Corps do what you're talking about within the boundaries that we're hearing that this QDR is being discussed within? GENERAL MATTIS:  Well, it's going to be a wrestling match amongst a lot of folks.  I'll tell you that between the Army and the Marine Corps right now, there's common efforts and common priorities about small units, about vehicles that can maneuver troops in the future with more protection.  We work very closely with them. So any time we can get efficiencies based upon joint programs, we do that where we can. You know, the point to make, though, is America can afford survival and without being melodramatic, and without thinking that we can just build up the military and solve all the problems either, I mean we've got to keep it all in balance, but we are up against a pretty ruthless enemy right now and if they get their hands on our nukes, we'll lose a city, I garnet you. You know, we have got to stop these people-- [Start tape side 4B.] GENERAL MATTIS: [continuing] --do that, and as you all know, those of you who work here in the city, it's challenging to shift priorities around, because when you shift those priorities you're taking risk. It's very easy for Bill to say I'll accept risk but when one of my staff officers used to come to me and say, well, if we do this your battalion over on the right flank is going to be at risk, I'd say for how long.  I'd want to know how long the risk is, and which battalion, and really define what the risk is. Because as we go through here, there's probably not one templet for the future and so it's up to us to try, in a dynamic world, to sort through it, like here at the institute today, which is an advantage for us all getting together, because I don't think all the answers to this are going to come from military people. I'll just tell you that we are too busy.  So in this wrestling match, we're going to have to prioritize and make some decisions about where we're willing to take risks and where we're not, and if that means shifting resources, I'd tell you that I'm very comfortable that the U.S. Congress is willing to do it. Unlike my friends in the European militaries, where the parliaments are almost all downsizing ministries of defense, except, I might add, on amphib ships, where they're actually increasing them there, our Congress is out to help us, and this is not a political statement, this is not Republican or Democrat.  They are equally concerned about the troops and about what we need to do to help in this current fight and the fight tomorrow. So I'm optimistic that we can get it, if we have a coherent message that can stand on its own in terms of logic and relevance. MR. DONNELLY:  Bob. COLONEL WORK:  I mean, the very thought that you talked about informed a lot of the recommendations that we made, and that the Marines are going to have to at least consider shifting monies from within their own program. So therefore, when you look at the V22 and the CH53 xray, and you say, wow, I'd like to have both of them, and I'd like to have 360 of these and 154, that's why, you know, you might have to be driven to a situation where you say I'll take fewer MV22s so I can get the CH53 xray because I'm going to have to shift that money. Instead of buying a thousand EFVs, draw that down to 336, which may free up money on the ground side to buy more Cougars or more up-armored Humvees, or to help recapitalize the equipment that's just getting beat to death in Iraq. And instead of the sea base, which is 14.5 billion, maybe you buy 15 extra LPD 17s, it's neutral as far as the Department goes.  But the key thing is that the Navy/Marine Corps split, I believe, was set far before the GWAT, and we're in a war in which every day, the ground forces are very, very important.  So I think it's time that the Department at least look at the Navy/Marine Corps split and say of the departmental money, is it appropriate to shift some of that towards the Marine Corps? But the Marine Corps is going to have to make these juggles a lot on their own because there just isn't a lot of money. MR. DONNELLY:  Michael, we don't have a whole lot of time left but I would like you to weigh in on this and to build on Bob's last point.  If we can't see the difference between 2001 and today, in a way that allows us to at least marginally shift, you know, slices of the budget pie around, you know, what will it take? I mean, what's a reasonable expectation of a good QDR, not one that's "pie in the sky," but realistic? MR. VICKERS:  Well, I think if we do something in each of these areas.  You know, this QDR is very focused on these four focus areas--the war on terror, homeland defense, shaping countries like China, and WMD, and, you know, most people who look at that say, yeah, those are really big problems and they're hard problems, and so we have to look at all the other stuff we're doing to see where can we get the slack to do some of those. So I hope we make progress in those areas.  They're tough.  It doesn't mean, again, that the answer is just more force structure or larger budgets.  It may be shifting, you know, from one kind of airplane to another. The deputy secretary has said, you know, not only do we have enough but are we buying the right things? and that's all in play right now and everything is on the table as it should be, because it's certainly clear, if you look, that you have basically the same program you had from the 1990's and the strategic outlook is very different today and looks different for the next 20 years; something ought to be changing here. MR.     :  What's wrong with this picture? MR. DONNELLY:  Gentlemen, it's always difficult to be the last panel but you guys have excelled yourselves, and, you know, kept our attention, and in fact riveted my attention throughout the hour and a half.  So I want to thank you and call upon the audience to give you a round of gratitude. I also want to thank the Marines for being extraordinary helpful and forthcoming in this event. This has been possibly the best of our service reviews and I hope that the Air Force day, which is coming up, we hope in October, will be at least half as good as this was. So thanks to the Corps and thanks to the audience and thanks to all the participants.  See you again shortly.  Thank you.</body></html>