National Stategies and Capabilities
for a Changing World

Panel 6: Implementing Needed Change - Reforms to Structure and Process

Moderator:

Michele A. Flournoy, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University

Panel Members:

General Wesley K. Clark, USA, Retired, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe; currently Consultant, Stephens Group

The Honorable John P. White, former Deputy Secretary of Defense; currently Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Ms. Flournoy: Welcome to the last panel on "Implementing Needed Change - Reforms to Structure and Process." I think the conference organizers clearly made a decision to save some of the best for last. We have an illustrious panel of exceptional experience and wisdom to address this topic and I thank you all for being among the survivors to come to the last portion of this conference.

But before I introduce the panel, I'd like to provide some context for this discussion. As you all know, one of the themes that we've been talking about is how the next administration will confront fundamental and very difficult challenges and choices on defense. Although defense was certainly not a high priority in the presidential campaign, it must be a high priority for the incoming administration. The next administration will have to address a mismatch between what the program is projected to be, and what our resources are projected to be - a mismatch that is estimated to be about 30 to 50 billion dollars per year. This mismatch must be addressed not only because it exists - many would argue there's always some kind of mismatch - but because of the potentially damaging consequences it could have to the U.S. military over time if it were allowed to persist. Things like serious tempo and readiness strains; inability to meet modernization and transformation objectives; deterioration of morale and the quality of life of the force. If these pitfalls are to be avoided and the unparalleled quality of the U.S. military maintained over time, the next Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) must be about hard choices, to close the gap between strategy, program and resources.

In practice, this means that the next administration will need to take substantial action in at least three areas, or some combination of these.

First, some increase in the level of resources devoted to defense. Now, I would argue that defense spending is likely to go up somewhat, but if you look at the rhetoric of both campaigns, it probably won't be enough to close the gap that I mentioned.

Second, work with Congress to expand and take advantage of what I call the "potential trade space" - actions we can take to reduce costs while maintaining an acceptable level of risk. We need to scrub every aspect of the defense program to find ways to save money consistent with this chosen strategy, be it further streamlining of infrastructure, adopting better business practices, or adjusting modernization and force structure.

Finally, the third element in this mix is reducing the demands placed on the force by ultimately changing strategy if we cannot get enough out of the first two. So in sum, either spend more, reduce costs, or do less. In reality, we'll be facing some combination of those things in the QDR. I like to call this the "Iron Triangle" of the next QDR, because it's something that we cannot escape, and it's something that will require substantial political will and leadership on the part of the new administration to address.

Now, implementing change, the subject of our panel, in this context, demands prioritization. Whatever strategy is chosen, the next administration must be as explicit as possible about where it plans to place emphasis and how it is willing to accept or manage a degree of risk. In articulating its strategy, it must be clear about relative priorities within that strategy. This is going to be particularly important in a resource-constrained environment in which not every element of the strategy can be resourced to low risk, and it's a critical step if the strategy is going to have teeth - if it's really going to affect how we allocate resources within the Department of Defense (DoD).

Now I would argue that this need for greater prioritization requires a different approach to developing both the National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Quadrennial Defense Review.

First, the NSS. I believe the next administration needs to make that review a rigorous interagency exercise to establish the new president's vision and priorities - one that involves the principals and the deputies of the relevant agencies, and one that sets prioritized objectives and provides clear guidance for planning, resource allocation, resource management among and within the various agencies. Too often in the past, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, the NSS has been a paper drill producing a public relations document provided to Congress. This time it has to be more than that.

Second, for the QDR, given the profound set of choices that this QDR has to confront if it's going to be successful, I would argue that the new administration would be wise to pause and reconsider both the scope and objectives of the review. Rather than striving to complete a comprehensive program review, it might be wiser to conduct a truly strategic review that aims at establishing a vision, setting priorities, setting direction, and deciding the biggest strategy and program issues, with a follow-on effort to flesh out a more refined implementation plan.

Finally, we have to address the question of how the new DoD leadership can ensure that the priorities they set actually drive the resource allocation process? That they are implemented in the most cost-effective way possible? And I'd offer several things for consideration. First, DoD leadership has to take ownership of the strategy early, early in the process. And they need to issue that strategy in the form of binding guidance to the rest of the review's participants. They also need to be clear about the specific challenges and scenarios that should drive DOD's planning. Here, I would make the case, as you might have guessed from my earlier question, to broaden the scenario set beyond the two canonical Major Theater War (MTW) cases to include a wider range of potential threats, MTWs and others, end-state objectives, operating conditions, and concepts of operation. They also must insure that the strategy and its priorities are consistently and rigorously enforced in the decision making of the review.

And finally, and maybe most importantly, they need to create an environment in which there is an open and fair competition of ideas, concepts of operations and solutions to priority challenges. Creating a culture that welcomes a competition of ideas and approaches will be key to real innovation. But this means departing from a consensus-based system and being willing to make some decisions where there will be winners and losers.

Now with that as an introduction, we've identified several questions for our panelists. First, and the most obvious, is what should the priorities be? Second, what changes, if any, to structure, organization, process, are required to actually implement these priorities? And who will have to take what steps? What's the action plan that we would recommend to the next administration? And finally, what are the constraints or obstacles that need to be confronted along the way, and how can these be overcome?

As I said, we have an illustrious panel with Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Joint, and Commander-in-Chief (CINC) experience here. The first speaker will be Dr. John White. Many of you know that Dr. White was the Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1995 to 1997. He is now a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He also chaired the Commission on Roles and Missions (CORM) and has a long career of service, both in OSD and OMB, as well as service as an officer in the Marine Corps and in the private sector as a corporate leader and manager. He has just published a book that I believe you'll hear something about today, called Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future.

Joining Dr. White is Admiral William Owens. Admiral Owens is currently the co-chief executive officer and vice-chairman of Teledesic. Before that he was president and chief operating officer of SAIC. But the job that many of you know him for is when he served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He, too, is a prolific author, and you may also hear something about his new book as we get into the discussion.

And finally, we have General Wes Clark, who was Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1997 through May of 2000. In that capacity, he was the overall NATO commander for both our operations in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Prior to that, he served as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Southern Command and also as J5, Director of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff. He, too, has much to say on these issues.

So with that as a short introduction, let me turn it over to Dr. White. Thank you.

Dr. White: Let me begin with a short, important announcement. Brent Scowcroft gave me his list of Pentagon satraps that have to be eliminated. And I'm going to pass it on to the governing authority when they show up. I hope they show up soon. Secondly, I want you to buy a copy of Bill Owens book. I did, and I think you should. It's insightful, thoughtful, provocative, like Bill, and therefore well worth it.

Now let me turn to the subject at hand. This is a subject which I have spent a lot of time worrying about, as Chair of the Roles and Missions Commission and as Deputy Secretary and most recently, as Michle mentioned, in a study effort, a bipartisan study that was done with a number of people including Brent Scowcroft and Bill Perry, John Deutch, Dave Chu, Sean O'Keefe, John Shalikashvili, and a number of others called Keeping the Edge, as she mentioned, and edited by Ash Carter and myself.

The basic thesis of this book is quite straightforward. It is that we have the finest military in the world, but the support system behind that military is antiquated and often dysfunctional. And furthermore, if we don't fix the back office, we will erode the capability of our fighting forces. This is a discussion about means, not ends. It's a discussion about programs, not policies. And it's a discussion about low politics, not high politics. It does not make it any less important than it is because it seems to us that it is fundamental to the future effectiveness of U.S. military capability.

The next administration has an opportunity, and I would argue an obligation, to continue to deal with this difficult and unglamorous subject, including following up on efforts that have been put under way by Secretary Perry and Secretary Cohen. The book is filled with specific recommendations, on a wide range of subjects, and I'm pleased to say there's not one recommendation to form a commission. (Laughter)

I cannot summarize a 300-page book in the time I have, so let me give you selective examples so that you have an idea of what's in the book. And I'm going to organize them around three categories. The first category is new missions, where we need to develop an edge. The second category is old or continuing missions where we need to continue to upgrade our edge because of changes in the world around us. And the third category is chronic problems where solutions are long overdue.

First of all, in terms of developing an edge, we have to address new missions, often called "homeless missions." You all know the list from info war to bio war to peacekeeping and so on. These missions are multi-agency, and yet there is a lack of a developed practice and authority across the government in terms of integrating programs to deal with them. We would recommend that the new administration, as Brent Scowcroft mentioned here, charge the NSC, while working with the OMB, to develop an inter-agency program with strong central management in the White House to ensure an effective, multi-agency program.

Let me move on to joint operations. There is a need to develop and acquire key systems that are truly joint. We think that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ought to be required to develop an annual force development roadmap regarding joint requirements and architectures for such functions as info operations, intelligence, and precision strike, among others.

We also think that the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) CINC should be responsible for supporting the Chairman in this regard. To that extent, he should join the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) and the Defense Resources Board (DRB). And because of his special responsibilities regarded these joint roles that we've contemplated, we think that he ought to be appointed from either having experience as a CINC under a different command or as a service chief or a service vice chief.

In addition, we think that there are also problems in the range of command and control capabilities across the department. And we recommend, again, that the JFCOM be strengthened and become a true joint force integrator and conduct continuous exercises and experiments in order to upgrade our capabilities in command and control.

Let me turn to maintaining the edge for continuing missions, beginning with strengthening our industrial capabilities. I discussed last year at this conference a need to adapt to the globalism and commercialism which we face in the world. Those are certainly still true, if not even more true. In this new world, we must remain the fastest integrator of commercial technologies. There are a range of recommendations in the book regarding how we ought to do that, including several on the issue of export controls and making drastic changes in the paradigm under which we operate export controls because basically the system is broken. It addresses an antiquated and largely irrelevant set of concerns.

In addition to that, we need a strong core defense industry, one that's supported not by an industrial policy in the traditional sense, but through policies that reward industry for sound business performance including shared savings and higher profits for better value.

Also, we ought to encourage further consolidation at the second and third tiers of the industry itself, and we ought to also have a more robust transatlantic set of linkages than we have today.

Let me turn to quality people. The all volunteer force is a remarkable success, but one that we need to keep on the edge by making the adjustments that are needed because of changing times as reflected in changing demographics, increased college attendance by young people who we wish to recruit out of high school, and new values and goals in the civilian workforce. Again, there is a set of specific recommendations in the book in terms of how to modify but continue to support strongly the all volunteer force.

The civilian structure that supports the national security community, that is the civil service system, is not a continued success. Rather it is in need of restructuring and reform. We call in the book for new legislation to give the Secretary of Defense control over DoD's civilian personnel. We would envision a new system under Title 10 which would provide for flexible pay and hiring rules, encouraging movement between the public and private sectors across careers, compensation tied to performance, rank the person, and greatly increased professional education. The civil service should be a key change agent for the secretary as we move into this new era. But to be effective it must be reformed.

Next, competitive sourcing. The DoD has been hamstrung for too long by OMB and Congress in our quest to focus on core competencies, shed unneeded public functions, increase innovation and cut costs. The new secretary should establish as policy that the private sector is the preferred supplier, just as Secretary Perry did with respect to commercial provision of acquisition requirements versus military specifications. He should also obtain relief from OMB A76 constraints and Congressional limitations and conduct a broadly based set of functional competitions in areas such as communications, financial management, depot maintenance and common skills training.

He should also learn from Secretary Cheney's experience. Secretary Cheney, when stymied in trying to force through base closures, went ahead and acted aggressively in drawing up the list of bases that he thought would be good candidates for closure and made the Congress realize that he was serious about such an effort. And as a result, we know that we got Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) legislation, which turned out to be very successful, but now must be reconstituted. So I would urge the new Secretary to go forward with such a list, as painful as it is. But at the same time create the new legislation that is called for in order to have a long term, effective BRAC system, which we need so badly in order to save the money that Michle was talking about. Hopefully, he will get the necessary cooperation from the Congress.

Now, I have only skimmed the surface of what's in this book in terms of a large number of recommendations, but I think you get the idea. We must continue to change the Department of Defense. This means leadership from the new administration including the President and the Secretary of Defense. Which again I think follows on the tradition that we've seen with the last two secretaries.

But remember, these problems are largely institutional and the changes needed are deep and pervasive. That means sustained leadership must come from the civilian leadership and the civil servants as well. But most importantly, it must come from the uniformed services. The real change agents in this institution wear uniforms and need to accept the challenge to change the institution. Thank you.

Admiral Owens: It's nice to be with you here today. I just encourage you all to buy John White's book. There wasn't any collusion, really! I guess I have become almost fanatical about the need for profound change in this institution we all love so much even at the expense of the things that we have loved most about it as we have grown up inside it.

And so whether it's my nuclear submarine with its 4,236 valves in it that has to be salvaged for the system, maybe dozens of them, or whether it is the system itself, or whether it's the Army-Navy game or whatever, this is a time when I think we need to have profound change in the way we do business.

I should tell you that during the last Army-Navy game when I was the Vice Chairman, I went over and did the rocket cheer with the Army generals, and there's this wonderful picture of all these coordinated Army generals. I don't know what this rocket cheer is all about. It doesn't matter. But they are all marvelously coordinated, and there's this Admiral who is 180 degrees out. And they happened to catch me while an Army cheerleader was up in the air with her skirt flying and well, anyway - it wasn't - none of it was true. (Laughter) But we lost that half of the Army-Navy game!

But I do think that this is a time for real cultural change. You know, we have to get really excited about the opportunities and we need to fix it - we together, whoever we are, we in uniform, we out of uniform, to find the solutions. Because the worst possible thing, I think, to do with this beloved institution, the institution that is the core of America's ability to have effective diplomacy, effective markets and influence around the world, is to NOT change it. I think we're in deep trouble. And so my ranting and raving and radical positions are not to say they are the right positions. They are intended to simply say we really need to talk about this a lot because it's "going under" - it's going under. And we need to change it. And so if we were here fifteen years from now, and if it was left on its present course, I believe we would be looking at an Army of six divisions or maybe seven, a Navy of less than two hundred ships, and an Air Force of twelve or thirteen tactical fighter wings of forty-eight airplanes each, not seventy-two. And on, and on.

And we can't let that happen. We can't afford to cross over that threshold where we're not able to do even the next Desert Storm and when our children and grandchildren will never be the same as a result of that inability to perform. And we've got to fix it. And I think it's very important that we look at all kinds of possible changes.

I like many of the suggestions that John mentioned. I am a big believer in the joint requirements process. That is, not to say "separate from the services" - they need to be engaged in it. But the joint requirements process is the core of where we spend our money, and I think the time has come when we need to stop making the best Navy we can make and the best Army we can make, and let's make the best Department of Defense capability we can make.

Now how we do that - whether it's an enhanced JROC or another similar high level joint group - I'm keen on a joint requirements management board which has some high level civilians, civilian leadership and four-star representatives from each of the services with the Chairman or Vice Chairman. And to look at this as a part of the "science of joint requirements." There is no existing academic science of joint requirements. We have wonderful academically-based processes for how the Navy does anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and how we do land warfare and how we project mobile land forces, but we don't have any science based analysis of Joint requirements. There is no academic discipline. There is no money going into this area, and we need to do something about that. We need to put money there. We need to work on it, because it is the whole that we're interested in, not the individual services.

And I believe if you had a true joint requirements process that you could sweep the acquisition decision process immediately under it and use the output of the requirements process to immediately put in place the acquisitions process. And there are many layers in the services and the DOD and the joint world that could be eliminated as a result of that. This has to be done carefully, but these are important changes that should be made.

And I believe that more money needs to go into that joint analysis structure. I may be a little off on these numbers, but about twenty million dollars a year goes into joint requirements analysis. Something on the order of four or five hundred million dollars goes into the services' and the agencies' requirements. There's something up-ended about that basic statistic.

I believe there is a new world out there in commercial technology. And I'm sorry, I don't think DoD understands it, even the dimple of what's possible. I am very excited about what's going on in this area that is part of America's greatest strength today - that is the information technology revolution. Shame on us if we stick with our legacy systems, if we don't take advantage of the opportunity to bring this commercial technology along. And so I just ask you, where do you go to have a discussion of TCP-IP? or XML? or OC192? SAP web-based business enterprise solutions? or Java or C++, and God, isn't it boring? Right? Who cares? It's our future. It's the strength. It's the stuff that we have to understand in DoD.

So ask your communicators, do they really understand this stuff? Do they understand how to bring it together? Because if you can understand the range of these information technologies, ranging from the sensors that can see a battlefield to the wideband communications to deliver the information to the warrior, there's some remarkable stuff. Anybody know anything about the ballistic laser that can lase through clouds by using a Pico second shutter to get images back through it? That kind of stuff is out there in the marketplace today. And you can find lots of sensor technology that's in the civilian marketplace. You can integrate legacy systems with Java and C++. You can use the Internet to revitalize that infrastructure that John was talking about to get more "tooth" and less "tail." We're doing it in industry. It's enormously important that we do it in defense. It has $50 billion of savings in it!

So that we can have that money to re-capitalize what is today unable to be capitalized under the present set of circumstances. So could we put together this joint information umbrella to replace a nuclear umbrella over an entire country like Iraq or North Korea, so that you could see everything that mattered in that battlefield? Every armored concentration, every vehicle in that armored concentration, every truck going down a road and identify it and have it done to a locational accuracy of ten centimeters, twenty-four hours a day, real time, all weather? Absolutely. So why don't we do that? Some people think we have got that now. We in this room know that's not the case. We don't have that capability. It's there for us. All we have to do is organize ourselves culturally so we get the EP3s and the rivet joints and the Guardrails and the JSTARS and the fopen radars and all of them integrated together. But you can't do that if those all belong to individual services and we control them service-by-service, and the data links don't come together. And besides that we don't know how to use C++ or Java anyway.

So it's a really boring discussion. But it's terribly important if you see that battlefield. And it seems to me that it's the one certainty that whatever that battlefield is, if it's the next Mogadishu, or if it's the next Desert Storm, or if it's Korea or Iraq, the one thing that matters most is to see the battlefield. And if we can and the enemy doesn't, then you have dominant battlefield awareness, and if you have "good enough" platforms, you win! So that's a big deal. And we should do something about it. And we should organize ourselves to realize that capability, but I don't know who in Defense would carry that burden.

So commercial technology is enormously important. It is the key to joint and combined operations because every one of our NATO allies, the Partnership for Peace nations, the Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC), could all of a sudden be on the same kind of high bandwidth, global telecommunications systems using commercial technology. And yes, we could put Link 16 and SCIDL data links and SINCGARS all over the same network if we just asked for it to happen. So why wouldn't we do that, and why wouldn't we bring the commonality to combined forces capabilities that is just asking to be implemented?

I want to just ask a general question about whether we, if we were doing a zero-based review today, would have a Navy and an Army and an Air Force and a Marine Corps? Is that what we'd come out with? I don't think so. I don't think that's the way we'd organize today. I'm not saying we should do away with the four services. But if it functionally is optimal to do things differently, maybe we should think about what that means. Maybe it would be (and John White alluded to this a little bit), a force that sees and transmits the information of the very large battlefield, maybe the second force would be one that has a precision joint strike capability with Apaches with Hellfire missiles, or Long Bow, and Navy Tomahawks and Air Force B2s and a variety of other strike forces brought together in some kind of coordinated way.

And the third force might be something like a cooperative defense force. How do we defend the force together? And a fourth force might be a mobile ground maneuver force encompassing a new Army and Special Forces and Marine capability. And a fifth force might be a smart logistics force. It's interesting that those are basically the pillars of Joint Vision 2010.

So if we would "do it" differently, how would we do it? I think it's an important question to culturally ask ourselves. However I should add that if for some reason we are unable to "change," and given that we may stay pretty much the way we are today, the Army is the most relevant service and needs more money, even if we don't get more money for defense. So why doesn't that happen? And we need to do whatever we can to get more billions from the other services and agencies into the U.S. Army because it needs it, and it's more relevant today. Even at the expense of that favorite submarine or a thousand other things that are too expensive and were built for a different world.

So I salute General Shinseki for his work with revitalizing the thinking about the Army and Force XXI and the many things that are going on there. I do think that we have to realize that we are going to go broke if we don't fix this system. And we need to profoundly change it in radical ways. The answers are, I believe, increased jointness, taking advantage of that special information technology that America offers us, and innovation, true innovation in things that we haven't or wouldn't think about, whether it's the arsenal ship or whether it's, God forbid, airships. People said, "who would fly airships? NO self-respecting pilot would do that." And it was suggested that that's a good mission for submariners since they're shaped the same way. You know? (Laughter)

So there are answers to these kinds of questions. And we have to understand that this is a matter of process, not reorganization. We have to put in place a process that makes the right things happen and work together to make it occur. And cultural change is the biggest issue, not an increase in tens of billions of dollars. I don't think we're going to get a lot more money in the defense budget despite all of the speeches and the promises. After all is said and done, the issue will be the balance of what is there, who gets what inside that budget to do what, and I've alluded to where I think some of the priorities should be. We need to even look across other cabinets' budgets. If you look at the ratio of State Department money versus Defense Department money during the Cold War it was seven dollars in Defense for every dollar in State. Today it's thirteen in Defense for every dollar in State. Who's running that railroad, and shouldn't we change that profoundly?

We have a lot of things to do in front of the Department of Defense. This is the time to change it, and I hope all of you will talk about radical change as we go forward to save this great institution.

Ms. Flournoy: Great. Thank you, Admiral Owens. General Clark?

General Clark: Well, thank you very much, Michle and I want to associate myself with what Dr. White and Admiral Owens have said. I agree with much of what they said, but I also agree with the need to come at it from a radical perspective. And so Bill, I'm going to come at it from a radical perspective.

See, we each have to talk from what we've done, and I haven't been inside the Department of Defense and the Joint Staff in some time, but I have been involved in trying to fight a war that we couldn't quite call a war. And I've thought a lot about how the Armed Forces are organized, trained, equipped and led as a result of that.

When we came out of Desert Storm, we'd had in a twenty-four month period two entirely different models of war fighting. We had Operation Just Cause in Panama, where we went in to a cluttered environment: lots of civilians; difficult terrain; lot of vegetation; collateral damage constraints; neutral and friendly forces on the ground. We ran a very complicated operation. We took risks. We took some losses in that operation. We made a Seal assault over the beach. We did twenty-seven simultaneous or near-simultaneous airborne and air landed insertions. And at the end of two and a half weeks, we were incredibly successful. As General Thurman [General Max Thurman, then Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Southern Command] said to me when I called him on the telephone from the National Training Center (NTC), he said, "Not bad for a manager, huh?" It was a great model.

General Carl Stiner came out to the NTC and we ran our first heavy/light rotation in April of 1990. And we had Delta Force there and Wayne Downing came, and we did a practice operation out there of an airfield takedown. And when it was over, we got in the conference room and we sat around and talked about it, and I remember General Stiner saying, "There will be another war, lads," and he said, "When it happens, it'll be forces just like this operating just like this that'll be required." But you know, it wasn't.

Five months later, we had forces going to the Saudi Arabian desert. They were heavy forces. They came from the United States, and later they came from Europe. They had nothing to do with Operation Just Cause, although we did have some of the 82nd [Airborne Division] there, sitting outgunned and out-manned in the desert, quite alone and vulnerable, for the first three or four weeks of Operation Desert Shield. We had two different models. A model of risk taking, bold maneuver, insertion of ground troops, and a model of something else. It was large forces. It was heavy forces. It was a forty-four day air campaign. It was precision strike. And public attention and imagination was captured by the picture of that laser-guided bomb going down the ventilation shaft in the bunker. It was really impressive, even though that was less than ten percent of the ordnance dropped. And we said we weren't going to attack until we had destroyed fifty percent of the enemy forces on the ground with air power. But a subsequent survey determined that only about ten percent of the force had actually been hit by aircraft. The ground forces on the ground did the bulk of the work.

Now, they didn't exactly maneuver in free maneuver style. They swung like a door. It was very carefully controlled for most of the VIII Corps. It was "advance by a kilometer" or two kilometers. There are a lot of people here who were part of that. It was done with artillery out in front. We took care of our troops. We tried to avoid fratricides. We had a few, but we knew that was a tremendous risk. After it was over, we had a lot of parades, a lot of recognition. We went into the Desert Storm model. It was in many respects the ideal model for our war fighting.

I remember being at NTC in the spring of 1990 and a German three-star came by and he said, "It's a pity," he said, "that in the spring of 1990 that you all are training out here. It's a wonderful training environment, and you're really doing it well, but it's the wrong terrain and you're not ever going to fight in the desert." Well, he was wrong. Because exactly one year later we did fight in that desert, and we liked it so much that it captured our imagination and it's what we built our forces for.

Now I fully support integration of joint systems, high-powered lasers, battlefield information dominance. I like the idea that Admiral Owens and I used to talk about, when I was on the Joint Staff working for him, of the 200 by 200 kilometer box, in which we could see everything, and what we could see, we could hit. But there were two models, and we focused on one to the exclusion of the other. It led to the pinprick raids in Bosnia in '95. They were adequate. They helped us get the Dayton Peace Agreement. It led to the strikes we called Desert Fox in December of '98. Three and a half days, three or four hundred targets there against Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). I guess we set him back. And it led to the Kosovo air campaign, seventy-eight days of gradually escalating air power in which we tried to pull together joint systems in which we used high performance aircraft. We used one MTWs worth of reconnaissance. We couldn't see what was on the ground in Kosovo. We used every JSTAR, couldn't see. Couldn't make the Guardrails interact with the Rivet Joints. Couldn't work the Rivet Joints and the Guardrails with the JSTARS, couldn't get the information to the pilots in the cockpit. And when we did all of that, and all of that could be done and should be done, and it would be exactly what Bill Owens says, it's doable. But we still have a problem beyond that.

You see, the battlefield on the ground is not just comprised of targets. There are lots of people down there. They're in buildings. They're underground. They're in villages. And you know, it's against the law to bomb civilian facilities. I know a lot of people in the Air Force and Army and Navy and Marine doctrine business don't fully appreciate this. We certainly wiped out cities in World War II. We did it in Korea. We did it in Vietnam. But I'll tell you, we had a hard time doing it in Kosovo. It was not easy. We were going against the full weight of international law to attack a tank parked next to a building. Especially when you didn't know who was in that building.

And so what I'm saying is that while I fully believe in precision strike, we've got to have the capabilities to go in there on the ground in more high risk, as we call them, solutions. More like the Just Cause model. It's a different technology and a different mindset. And it means that we're not so much Clausewitzian - we're more like Sun Tzu. We want to get in first. We want to get in underneath. We want to get in quietly. We want to be able to work so there aren't climactic battles if we can make that happen.

So I would submit that we need to first, before we can do any reforms, we've got to understand the nature of the battlefield that we're going to be committed on. And right now there's too much weight on this side and not enough attention to the other. And we've had both examples.

Now with respect to the very challenging questions Michle has asked us, I would like to just sketch out some inclinations that I've formed after looking at this process. First of all, I do think that we are over structured on the precision strike side. Right now our ability to deliver killing ordinance is far greater than our ability to detect what needs to be struck and killed. We're guilty of safe siding in all of our war gaming and projections. We put so many careful assumptions in there that we built up such enormous requirements that we squeeze out important and necessary functions. We've got to be very careful about doing that in the future.

What we've underestimated is the need for reconnaissance, the need for joint synchronization, the need for people on the ground, the need for multiple platforms. We can't do everything from a single Global Hawk. It's still only a soda straw looking down. It's much better to have ten JSTARS each less capable than it is to have one that can do everything at once, because the human beings inside and the best technology and so forth cannot do it that way. We tried it. We looked at it. It's just not as easy as it should be.

So I think we need to look at increasing or supporting more effectively the structure for the desert, for the Just Cause type of operations. For the reconnaissance, for the insertions, for the lighter forces, for being there on the ground to head off trouble or to call in the precision strike. And we need to be very cautious about over investing in precision strike. Because a little of it, if it really strikes what needs to be struck, can go a long way.

I think organizations need to be more "tailorable" and more joint. What I discovered was despite ten years of jointness, despite the fact that people can't get promoted unless they're joint qualified and they've all been to Capstone, or they can't get their first star pinned on, and they had to have a joint yes, all that's true. But submariners don't understand Apaches and Army people don't understand the way the Air Force doctrine works. And when it comes to putting a joint fight together, we're not very good at it. We need to be a lot better at understanding the joint business. And it's just as bad in the support areas as it is in the combat arms areas. So when I'm talking to Air Force intelligence people, they don't understand Army intelligence systems. I'm talking about general officers now. And Army intelligence people don't understand Air Force intelligence systems. And down into the technicalities of this.

So that when you're trying to pull something together and adapt and be flexible, under the urgencies of combat what you get is nothing but fog and friction and delay after delay after delay. These things can be fixed and worked out. But they can't be worked out unless we create more flexible, more "tailorable" organizations and put greater emphasis on jointness.

Now in terms of the process and how we're going to get there, well let me start at the bottom and work to the top. First of all, I do believe there's a lot more that can be done with joint experimentation and I'm delighted to see the way we're going with ACOM [U.S. Atlantic Command, redesignated as U.S. Joint Forces Command in October 1999]. ACOM needs more enhancements. He needs more authority, and he needs the ability to get inside the services and pull together especially some of these early-in-war sequence activities like joint reconnaissance and information flow.

Secondly, I have real reservations about the National Military Strategy. I wrote it for General Shalikashvili. He called me in when I was there about two months and Bill Owens had just become the vice chairman, and he said, "Wes," he said, "What is our national military strategy?" And he said, "I hired you to be the strategist. Tell me what it is. Is it containment?" I said, "No, sir." He said, "Is it deterrence? What is it?" So I got with Mike Ryan. We did draft after draft on this thing to produce what we call the national military strategy. We ran it upstairs through Ted Warner. We ended up with "two major regional contingencies (MRCs) fight and win," and then the idea was we could do everything else as a "lesser-included problem" if we had the structure to do two MRCs. But let me be very clear. Two MRCs was never a strategy for the employment of forces. Never. Never. Never. The way it got there was when we put it in, it was only designed to ensure we could retain the force structure we had.

It ends up in the National Security Council (NSC), in the staff meetings there, in the White House situation room. Day after day that Bill Owens, John White and I sat in, and all we did was ops. When I first came into the Joint Staff, I sat in and listened to the most incredible discussion of rules of engagement (ROE), and what it took to declare a hostile intent, conducted by the most learned lawyers in the United States government, none of whom had ever been in a cockpit. And this went on for three meetings.

And then my last duty in the Joint Staff, we were doing exactly the same thing. We'd never gotten beyond focus on the current crisis in the White House. In order to have a national military strategy that's part of the national security strategy, you've got to have a national security strategy. In order to have one, you have to have a planning section, a planned ops section, and an ops section. So that's it in terms of my structure and organizational process.

If I could take just two more minutes on the institutions themselves. Look, I'm no longer in uniform and believe it or not, people talk to you more when you're not in uniform. And a lot of young people have talked to me. And there are a lot of young people unhappy out there. And I've got to tell you straight, the Armed Forces have to let go of the quest for control, simplicity, and perfection that's driven us over the past few years. We've got to get out of trying to eliminate the negatives. Negatives happen. There will always be things that are screwed up, people that screw up, mistakes that are made and Congressional investigations, bad press and so forth.

We've got to work on emphasizing the achievement of the positive. We've got to bring in the right people, we've got to give them responsibilities early, let them grow and underwrite mistakes. God knows those of us who wore stars in this room have made a lot of mistakes. People have lost weapons in their command. People have had people murdered in their commands. People have had people killed in terrible accidents in their commands and still been promoted. I'm one of them. Somebody underwrote those mistakes.

But our junior leaders don't feel like we'll do that. And as a result, they just keep putting buffers in to protect themselves and their subordinates and their subordinates' subordinates. Until it's for them unendurable. Somehow we have to move beyond that. At the height of the Cold War when we worked every weekend to prepare for the Soviet onslaught, we said we had to be able to fight a "come as you are" war. But now we seem to believe that we can template, plan and work out every detail in advance. I remember being out at the NTC a few years ago and one of the observer controllers (OCs) saying to the company commander: "Did you deploy correctly when you received fire?" And the company commander said, "Well, I you know, obviously we didn't, or you wouldn't have asked me." And the OC said, "Well, the reason I'm asking is I'd like to know if you did an 'intelligence preparation of the battlefield' (IPB) on this mission. And I want to know if you planned to deploy in this position." A company-level IPB? What happened to company level drills? But they're not there. At least they weren't when I took off the uniform a few months ago.

And so I am concerned that we have gone too far in over-planning, over-prescribing and over-controlling. We have the highest quality armed forces in history. Is it a quest for efficiency? We're not going to find efficiency that way. We've got to focus on the objective, define how we want to fight. We've got to go after the missions when we're given the opportunity to perform them. We've got to articulate why we're doing it to the people that serve us.

Look, the United States Armed Forces have done wonderful things in the last eight years. We delivered relief in Rwanda, restored democracy in Haiti, provided stability in Northeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, fought drugs in South America, stopped a war in Bosnia, dampened a crisis in the Taiwan Straits, enlarged NATO, frustrated Saddam's efforts to get weapons of mass destruction, struck at terrorists, fought a war in Europe to prevent wholesale ethnic cleansing. We don't have anything to apologize for.

But the men and women in the armed forces, I think sometimes they don't understand that. I mean, I've actually seen emails where people say, "Hey, I didn't sign up for this. I just want to go people. Or I just want to do war fighting." I don't get it. But that's our responsibility. We've got to get them on our side. I think if we look at the structure and organization process we'll get toward the right answer. But I don't think we can get the right answer until we keep all of the right young people with us for the right reasons. Thank you.

Ms. Flournoy: Okay, we have some time for questions. So please.

Ms. Patty Enson, U.S. Commission on National Security Strategy: I'm wondering, General Clark, if you could talk a little bit more in depth about your Kosovo experience? My sense is that there's both lessons learned that people have picked up on, that are both correct as well as perhaps incorrect. And there are some subtleties there, in particular the use of stand-off air power and the relationship to the ground forces, the kinds of balances that we need to make as we get into the next QDR, and the kinds of questions about casualties and even perhaps approaches to future warfare as you discussed earlier in your remarks?

General Clark: Okay, well first of all, we went into that operation and, you know, my first thesis is it could have been avoided. If we had really put a strong, united front up by NATO, led by the United States. If we could have done that, we wouldn't have started that. That war would never have begun. But we didn't do that, and we let Milosevic inch us into a position where he eventually decided he'd just absorb the three or four days of air strikes and get on with it and finish the problem in Kosovo. He was mistaken, but we did have to use air power.

We used air power the way we did because it was the only way we could get political approval to use it. When we started, some nations wanted only one strike run. They wanted to just set off a bomb over Belgrade. And basically, if you could have a bomb over Belgrade, it was like a nuclear weapon. In the old days, we say we fired a "demonstration nuke" over somewhere. And they didn't understand that in conventional warfare, it doesn't work that way - especially when you're dealing with someone like Milosevic.

So we started with fifty-one strikes and then we had to earn the trust to be able to build the aircraft and the target list and go after war-intensive targets. We said we couldn't lose aircraft because if we did, we'd set a political dynamic in play that would result in the termination of the air campaign. This was never guidance that came from the politicians. This came from within the armed forces. In fact, John Jumper and I met about two weeks before the campaign. And he said, "Well, you know, boss, we're going to have to stay pretty high." I said, "I know. In Desert Storm you stayed at 8,800 feet with the A-10s." He said, "No, no, 15,000 feet. That's what the studies show and that's where we need to stay." Well, he's the airman and I supported him on that. And as a result, we were pretty successful. Because had we gone in and lost an aircraft or two or three or four a day, that air campaign would never have worked.

But we had to do something the air force wasn't quite ready to do doctrinally, which was to attack ground forces. And I had taken some of the lessons from some of the discussions that Bill Owens had had, and I wanted to take this concept and push it forward. So I brought all the reconnaissance in. I asked retired General Ed Berber to come over there. We tried to use the Army deep battle methodology and transfer it and apply it to the combined air operation center. And what we found was just a complete clash of cultures. It was extraordinarily difficult to build that kind of flexible mindset into the Air Force, and the equipment and the planning processes did not support it.

So that's where we then recognized the Apaches were going to be the critical contribution. But the problem with the Apaches was that when we tried to integrate the Apaches, there wasn't the full understanding and acceptance of the Apaches inside the joint community, either in theater or in Washington. And the result was, and I don't know if Jay Hendricks is still here or not. I saw him this morning. Jay, are you here? He's gone. He's a lucky guy. He was moving in a resistant medium in trying to get the Apaches integrated. We were fighting a war. People were busy. People were concerned. And he was knocking at the door and saying, "Hey, would you change this? And could you just give me this asset, and I'd like this aircraft moved to here, and I'd like you to not do this tonight." And it was very, very difficult.

That relationship has to be worked and built in peacetime. But that's jointness, and it wasn't there when we needed it, in my view.

As far as casualties were concerned, we said at the outset - the National Command Authority (NCA) said - we were going to take casualties. But as the campaign went on, we got more and more reluctant to take risks. At the very time the air campaign was being crippled by the inability to inflict collateral damages in Serbia, we were becoming hyper-conservative back here about exposing our airmen and especially the Apaches to risks.

And so I think that what we've got to do is we've got to be able to transition from a political dynamic to a military dynamic in conflict. Once we cross that threshold to use force, we need to use it as decisively as possible, as rapidly as possible. We need to start in peacetime to build an understanding among the strategic communities and our allies that that's the way it works. And then we need to have the flexibility and the understanding back here to support that transition all the way through until the objective is accomplished.

Ms. Flournoy: Another question? Yes, right here?

Mr. Elliott L. Ackerman, Tufts University. My question is addressed to General Clark. Sir, at what level do you think the need to eliminate the zero-defect mentality has to be articulated?

General Clark: Well, I think it's been articulated at the top already. All of the top leaders in the armed forces have said they don't believe in zero-defect. This is something that somehow comes in, in my experience, at the Lieutenant Colonel level, and maybe the Colonel level. We've got to reach those people in that part of their career, and they've got to let the people below them have the opportunity to take action. I mean, after all, the people who are wearing stars on their shoulders can't affect lieutenants very much directly, or captains, one way or another. You see them occasionally. You pat them on the back. You talk to them. Somehow this has gotten embedded out there. People believe it. I mean, as soon as I got to Europe, I heard about it in the Air Force and what was going on in missions in Southwest Asia.

And so I want to make it clear. This is not an exclusively Army problem. I think it's service wide. And it's got to be worked on at all levels.

Ms. Flournoy: I would just invite Admiral Owens, if you want to comment on how this issue affects innovation and transformation? I think there may be a link there.

Admiral Owens: Well, I mean, I do think that it's necessary to have an atmosphere where failure is accepted and even valued. I just tell you a story about my own company, Teledesic, which was a great object lesson for me. This is a multi-billion dollar system that is probably not doable by the Department of Defense and so it's a significant sized global satellite capability. And we were building a system that was going to be zero-defect. It was going to be as good as science and technology could do it.

And one afternoon when we were meeting with Bill Gates and Craig MacCaw, there was this remarkable discussion of what the hell are we doing? We're building a system that is going to be better than fiber anywhere in the world. Why are we doing that, and how many billion more does it cost than it should? And why don't we change? And at that point we, including myself, said, "We can't change. We've got these contracts in place, we've got all these expectations. Think of the Wall Street analysts, etc." And they said, "Change it. Stop it. Don't ..." They didn't get too bothered about who was going to take care of these little details of contracts and lawsuits and whatever. "Just stop it and let's go in a new direction."

It was the kind of thing that I couldn't imagine in the Department of Defense: when we realized we were going off in the wrong direction on a multi-billion dollar project, we're going to shift and go in a new direction. This happened many months ago for us.

But I think the spirit of change and innovation, even if you've gone wrong, even if you believed fully but it was wrong, let's move in a new direction. Everybody's okay. Everybody pats each other on the back and we move in a new direction and we make it right. Seems to me that kind of a philosophy is a very important one for all of us as we undertake to change this Department of Defense.

Ms. Flournoy: Thank you. More questions? Yes, in the back?

Mr. Richard Jameson, British Embassy. First of all, I'd like to thank all three participants for a particularly stimulating panel. I found it very interesting this afternoon. Secondly, Mr. White spoke about the need to create more robust transatlantic industry or linkages in his presentation. I wonder if he could expound a little more on that point?

Dr. White: Sure. It seems to me that in a global world and a world in which we are going to all rely more and more on commercial products and commercial technologies of the sort that we've been speaking of here today, that we have a lot to share and that we ought to build specifically those bridges to make that sharing take place. This is not easy. In fact, it's very hard. It's very hard by this government. People have been working at it for some time. Rudy may want to speak about it a little later today. But it's possible, and we've begun to make some progress.

I think we need to do a great deal more in that regard if we're going to keep the Atlantic alliance together the way we need to have it. Brent Scowcroft talked about making sure NATO is strong. That is part of it. This is not just an issue around interoperability on a battlefield. This has to do with how culturally we build and design and create new technologies and new systems. So I think there's a great deal at stake here that'll take an enormous amount of energy, and it'll take a lot of educating to members of our legislatures, both here and there. I think it's well worth the effort.

Ms. Flournoy: Yes?

Ms. Erin Logan, Staff Member, Office of Senator Joseph R. Biden (D-DE) and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: General Clark, I was curious about when you talked about using Just Cause as the better model, how you align that with what everyone has talked about as the clear precedent now in the new world, of those working with alliances, particularly the aspect of surprise. How you enter into a surprise operationally when you have to work with an alliance?

General Clark: I think that's one of the contradictions you have to face as you look ahead. And it's one of the real problems we had in Kosovo. We basically started the Kosovo operation on a political dynamic. Everything was done by negotiation, consensus, compromise. The Serbs had the operation plan four months before we began the campaign. They didn't know exactly which targets, but of course if you say you're going to attack air fields, well that eliminates down to only about fifteen air fields in Serbia, so it's pretty clear what you're going to attack. And somehow you have to move quickly into another dynamic.

There are means for doing that. There are operational forces that don't get discussed publicly. There are things that alliances can do in private and have been kept very, very secret in this alliance that I'm not going to disclose today up here. So I know it can be done. But it's a matter, starting at the top, of political leaders understanding that they cannot run military operations on a political dynamic and be successful, ultimately. You can start it that way, but you have got to transition to the principles of war.

And that means it's up to the military leaders to stand up for those principles of war and insist that they be discussed up front, that they be accepted up front, that they be embedded in the national security strategy as we look at transitioning to military operations.

Ms. Flournoy: Yes?

Lieutenant General Charles S. Mahan, Jr., USA, Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics:. Secretary White, you made the comment earlier that the commercial sector should be the provider of choice. How do we square that with our current ability to execute downsizing of the infrastructure that we have already declared excess? We're having a pretty hard time trying to make the right decisions, and yet if I have an excess capability inside the organic capability that our 435 members of Congress and Board of Directors will not allow us to eliminate, then why should I go and pay for something in the commercial sector where I have an organic capacity to do so?

Dr. White: Well, let me do it in two parts. First of all, I may unfortunately be proven incorrect in this regard, but I think when we have a new president, we will get new BRAC legislation and more support from the Congress with respect to what is an obviously chronic problem of wasting money on excess bases.

My second point, even more importantly, has to do with commercialism. The world has gone to commercialism, not just us, and we have to keep up. Secondly, in doing it this way, it isn't just that we're going to have more efficiency, which I think we will. It is rather that you will have more innovation, because you'll be driven by a market dynamic. It is that you will have more latitude in the longer run from your legislative oversight committees, because the dynamic of the way it will be done doesn't single out these 425 people who were in some city or some district. And therefore, you can adjust more correctly and easily.

Thirdly, many of the adjustments will take place because of imperatives in the marketplace, which are to your benefit. So it seems to me, consistent with what Wes Clark was saying about focus, we ought to be focusing on what we do here, which is joint military operations, and we ought to find ways to get the rest of what we need done by people elsewhere who know how to do it far better than we do. And that is as much to our advantage as to their own. In other words, outsource wherever appropriate.

Ms. Flournoy: Okay. Yes, in the back?

Mr. Jim Thomason, Institute for Defense Analyses and the Hart-Rudman Commission: Dr. White and Admiral Owens, General Clark, you've all in one sense or another spoken about the importance of increasing joint experimentation and joint training for appropriate operations. Is the forthcoming QDR a good venue in which to increase the priority, the level of funding, for such activities? And if so, what kinds of increases over current levels of joint experimentation funding and joint training make sense to each of you?

Ms. Flournoy: Okay, Admiral Owens, do you want to start with that?

Admiral Owens: Well, I think there are opportunities in the QDR. I suspect that if you see a new administration coming to the Pentagon that they will have thought quite a lot about the subject of general thrusts of where they want to go when they arrive at the river entrance. And so working with the next administration to define that set of characteristics for the QDR, that will define both the new administration as well as incorporate many of the views of what the institution and the department would like to do as important.

I do think that some thrust towards jointness is going to be a part of that without regard to which group comes into the Pentagon. And you know, I believe it's important to set a long term goal of where you want to go, and then a plan for how you're going to do that over a period of months or quarters or years. And so how much can the traffic bear without breaking something right away? You don't want to break anything as you come into this new experience. So I think as much as the traffic will bear without hurting something. And the ability to absorb the funding would be the right amount of money.

I do think that this ability to bring together the joint systems that Wes Clark has talked about, the joint data links, the ability among the services to work together genuinely is terribly important and we have to get on with it. When I was a Vice Chairman, I had dinner with twenty parents of kids we had killed in Desert Storm. That was a real awakening for me about my own role in white-collar crime. It's the Navy F18 that's going in for an attack on a tank that is certainly a T-72 [a Russian-made main battle tank, exported widely to Soviet clients] but "oops," it's not really - it's an allied tank. Or a variety of other kinds of things.

And you look at those parents and you say, "Is it the fog of war, or is it management not getting our act together jointly to make sure that doesn't happen to the next son or daughter that goes into that battlefield?" So I think we need to move quickly. We need to move smartly. And we need to do as much as we can. I'd certainly think about doubling it, as a starter.

Dr. White: I agree with doubling it, and even that is not very much money.

Admiral Owens: It's not very much money.

Dr. White: That is to say, in the larger scheme of things we're talking about tens of millions, not billions. And it seems to me not only is the QDR an opportune place to do it, the QDR is going to be the critical place to do it. If we can't create these kinds of changes in a QDR environment, then we don't have another vehicle in which to do it. This is the vehicle we have, recognizing the difficulties, and I know them well from the last QDR. And we'll have difficulties in this one as well. But we must use the vehicles we have to create the changes that we all know are necessary and to start the momentum with respect to those changes. This has to do with a long list of issues of which I would put joint capabilities at the top.

General Clark: I think you have to have a concept based experimentation system. You have to start with the problems you need to look at, and you need to find out where the experimentation is already under way to fix it. And you need to capture the lessons learned. And we have a joint lessons learned program. It's been in place for a long time. Many of you have probably moved into it and looked at what comes out, and it's not very useful. And that's really unfortunate. Because we could make it very useful. We do exercises that could easily put together, for example, Guardrail and Rivet Joint and other systems several times a year and build a system.

But we didn't ask the question at the right time to drive the people to answer it. We didn't have a mechanism that held the people who owned the service stovepipes accountable for answering the mail from the CINCs. If you ask the question, you get a one-time answer, but you wouldn't get a system change because that has to go through a service funding cycle and it gets bounced off other priorities. It gets lost. This is back into the JROC process.

I think you have to start with the concepts first. They have to be JROC-approved so they've got all the services signed up for them, and you have to work through the existing exercise and do it. I'm not sure it's even a matter so much of money as it is a procedure and command attention.

Ms. Flournoy: Gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for putting so many provocative ideas on the table. I know we could continue this discussion if we had more time, but I am told that Deputy Secretary de Leon is here. So please join me in thanking our illustrious panel for a very good discussion. (Applause)