Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 33rd IFPA-Fletcher Conference
on
National Security Strategy and Policy

October 16-17, 2002
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Transcript Session 4: Transformation for a Changing World

Perspectives from the Chiefs of Staff
Address by General James L. Jones, USMC, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: ... We open the presentations with General Jones, who, of course, is our co-sponsor of this conference. But I simply want to remind you that General Jones became the 32nd Commandant of the Marine Corps in July, 1999. He previously had served as Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. His other previous positions included Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, Policy and Operations, United States Marine Headquarters; Director of the Expeditionary Warfare Division in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; Commanding General, Second Marine Division, Marine Forces, Atlantic; and, finally, among the many other posts that he has held, General Jones served as Commanding Officer in the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit that participated in Operation Provide Comfort.

So, we have here not only the Commandant of the Marine Corps but also the person who will soon become Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. So, I call upon General Jones to give the opening presentation from the Marine Corps perspective on transformation.

General James L. Jones: Thank you, Bob. And good morning, everybody. I didn’t have a chance to respond to General Sheehan yesterday when he accused me of, well, actually, I took it as a compliment, but since everybody laughed, I guess it wasn’t meant to be that way, of creating more commands than are perhaps necessary. But I would like to state for the record that one of the commands that came back was one of his old commands and was at his request.

Bob, thank you very much for your chair of this entire conference. I thought yesterday was very stimulating and at times riveting. And I’ve enjoyed every minute that I’ve spent here.

I was particularly taken by the Vice Chairman’s presentation this morning, because he touched on some of the issues that all of us who are privileged to be service chiefs have to deal with. And certainly this is not an all-inclusive list, and I’ll get to the transformation piece in just a minute. But it seems to me that in the 21st century in the near future, we’re going to have to come to grips with some of the things the Vice Chairman talked about. Not in any particular order, but it seems to me that sovereignty and access is certainly going to be an issue in the 21st century as old enemies perhaps become new allies and old tensions disappear. We’re going to have to think about how we want to remain engaged in various parts of the world, how we might want to be engaged in parts of the world that we cannot be engaged in today due to a lack of, limitation of assets, limitation on access and so on and so forth.

The sovereignty issues are very real, and they always manifest themselves when we want to execute our plans and operations, and they are going to be a fact of life. Each country can raise significant sovereignty issues in its own name and its own right and be perfectly respected in the world community for doing so. That makes our job easier. And, so, we will have to come up with a response to those challenges, and those challenges are going to be real and they’re not going away.

We have new challenges. The Vice Chairman touched on some of them. How much of our forces, what percentage of our forces do we want to be truly expeditionary. And, again, definitions are important there, but expeditionary forces are forces that, I think, can get there quickly, regardless of where they come from, that are immediately useable upon arrival, and that have a certain degree of sustainability once they’re employed.

And then how much of our forces do we want to be in the deployable category. Speed is important, and speed is expensive. How much do we want and how much are we willing to pay for, and what are the readiness implications with regard to the total force. I view the Marine Corps as a tiered readiness force, and I have no problem in saying that. It is not possible to have the entire United States Marine Corps at C-1 all the time. We rotate forces, our culture accepts that. Today we have over 30,000 marines out of a 172,000-man force, forward based, forward deployed and engaged. We will roughly have that number six months from now, but it won’t be the same people, and those people that come back are going to go into a lesser readiness, stand-down period of time before they load back up. So, the overall readiness question for me, is it our goal to have the armed forces of the United States always at C-1? I don’t think that’s necessary, and I don’t think it’s affordable.

The impact of the defense of the homeland. Some 10 or 11 years ago, when we marched off to Desert Shield and Desert Storm, we really didn’t pay too much attention through our rearview mirrors to how our critical infrastructures, bases, and stations were protected. At least in the Marine Corps I know we didn’t, because it was like, you know, cowboys riding off to the fight. We didn’t worry about what was left behind because we weren’t threatened.

Part of the justification for any Reserve call-up these days is to take care of that critical infrastructure. How you guard it, how you provide for its security is very definitely a 21st century issue and it’s manpower intensive. Because, as we now know, our homeland is not quite as invulnerable as we thought it was. Obviously, how we integrate our forces to provide them in real time, adequately trained, ready to execute the Combatant Commander’s plans is one of the fundamental reasons we do what we do as organizers, trainers, and equippers. I would submit that all of us, all of services can take great pride in bringing the forces that we’re privileged to lead to the joint line of departure today. I think we do a great job doing that, and I think we’re going to get better at it. It’s not perfect, but I think Operation Enduring Freedom was a powerful example of how far we’ve come in training our forces to think and operate in the joint environment.

And I think it’s very, very important to maintain our service cultures. In the rush to jointness and in the rush to interoperate, which I support, I think we have to make sure that we understand that the service cultures that provide those forces are very important. One way to put it is, I believe that young people join the Marine Corps, for example, to be United States Marines, not to be a member of the Joint Forces Land Component Commander’s forces. Now, they start out as marines and airmen and soldiers and sailors and Coast Guardsmen, and they might be used in a joint context, but that service culture and that crucible that forms their training and defines them as individuals and as part of something bigger than themselves that can be used in the joint force is what we should celebrate. But we should be careful that we don’t do damage to the culture that they came from, because by looking at things slightly differently, we can provide solutions to common problems that are much more powerful and much more valid in the 21st century and I think of much more help to our national decision makers.

Transformation. Transformation is a key word in the national security strategy, and we take it very seriously in the Marine Corps. And I will tell you that credit should go to General Rick Shinseki as the first of us to use that word. There’s no doubt about that in my mind, and when Rick laid out the Army’s transformational program three and a half years ago, I think I was one of the first ones that he came to see because he knew that there would be the inevitable comparison between the Army and the Marine Corps and so on and so forth. And I stated then and I continue to feel that this is not about competition, except in the healthy sense, and it’s about being complementary. And, so, I applaud him for using that word, because now it’s a word that all of us are using.

I don’t have a problem defining it, to be honest with you. I think transformation is one of two things. It’s either something that is completely new, that you didn’t have before, that enables you to do some things that you could not do before. For example, the invention of GPS, a piece of technology that we all are critically dependent on. God forbid that we run up against somebody who could ever jam it, because we’ll be in very, very big trouble. But GPS really changed a lot of things dramatically, in terms of giving us a capability. So, it’s something that’s completely new that we didn’t have before, or it’s something, it’s a change that we did to what we already had that allows us to do it exponentially better. And, in my opinion, everything else-- If it doesn’t fit in those two categories, then it’s simple modernization. But if you can take a capability like a bomb and make it a smart bomb, that’s an exponential leap and that’s something you couldn’t do before. So, it’s either brand new or it’s an improvement to something, a dramatic improvement, exponential improvement to something you could do before. I would also tell you that I don’t believe it’s restricted to technology, even though I just gave you two technological examples.

So, transformation is both evolutionary and revolutionary, but it is a process and it’s not an end state. And the reality is that you never get there. I mean you can do this, you should do this as part of a process, but you should be able to tell what is transformational and what is purely modernization.

So, we keep that process rolling forward and continue to adapt and continue to be innovative, a mindset that sees change as an opportunity and not a threat. And inculcating and educating and cultivating the mindset, in my judgment, is the role of leadership and the life spring of transformation, which is something that all of us can play a part in.

For the Marine Corps, we have defined transformation as proceeding along in four pillars. And as I said, it is not just about technology.

The first pillar is obviously harnessing that advanced technology. I make no secret of the fact that I consider tilt-rotor technology to be transformational. We are committed to successfully bringing that technology into the joint war fight and capabilities. We think it goes hand in hand with Stoval joint strike fighter technology. The logic of one kind of helps you understand the logic of the other. I believe that we can get transformational in terms of a family of high-speed vessels that are currently being experimented with. The Marines and the Army are both having great success and saving a lot of money, by the way, in terms of reducing our dependence on strategic airlift. We have a high-speed vessel leased from the Australians that operates from Okinawa to Japan to Guam. It can lift an entire battalion and all of its gear overnight to go to mainland Japan, and in two days take that same battalion and get it to Guam at about 40 knots. And, again, at a fraction of the cost that we spend for strategic airlift. Precision targeting, surveillance and reconnaissance and intelligence information exchange networks, all those things are changing the way we do things and changing our abilities.

The second pillar for us is developing new operational concepts which are transformational. This isn’t just about tools, it’s about how you employ those tools, harvesting the intellectual capital of our marines and allowing them to fight more intelligently. The command element of the First Marine Expeditionary Brigade that went ashore in Afghanistan had 65 people in its headquarters. Ten years ago, it would have maybe been three, four, five times that number. Most of the operational support, the intelligence operational support that the unit received on a day-to-day basis, originated from Quantico, Virginia, in real time. And that allowed him not to have his entire panoply of S-2s and G-2s and J-2s forward deployed.

We have made tremendous progress in what we call the integrated logistics concept, which allows us to have a lesser footprint than the old 20th century model of stockpiling equipment and supplies on the beach. Again, reduced number of personnel exposed, reduced number of headquarters, much smaller size.

Expeditionary maneuver warfare allows us to use the sea base as the power projection base and only put those things ashore that you absolutely need. And we are codifying this in new concepts, Naval concepts in partnership with the United States Navy. And the CNO is working magic with redefining what the amphibious ready group for the 21st century will look like and with the advent of the expeditionary strike groups that I’m sure the Vice Chief will talk about a little bit later.

The third pillar for us is instituting organizational realignments. When you think about the all-volunteer force in the last 50 years, that’s the most transformational thing that’s happened, in my judgment, in the armed forces of the United States. Going from a conscripted force to an all-volunteer force has yielded tremendous benefits. The educational level of the force is higher. The fact that everybody in the force is an all-volunteer is tremendous. And it mandates that we look at this force differently, because we now have a staff NCO Corps, for example, in the Marine Corps that is college-educated, and increasingly so.

And, so, what does that mean in terms of divesting some of the traditional responsibilities normally held by officers and pushing those responsibilities down? It mitigates, it also mandates that we manage the force differently, from a 20th century Cold War model of the service headquarters knows everything all the time, everything that’s good for you, and we’ll tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and how many times to do it. To be able to transform that headquarters to writing good policy, good policy that can be interpreted by bright people further on down the chain of command and enacted in ways far better than any service chief had ever thought of doing if you tried to write the definitive document that told everybody how to do things, when to do things, and how many times to do things. So, there are some transformational concepts there in just how we manage this wonderful pool of talent that we have. Integrated logistics concepts, I’ve talked about. But those things are changing our institutions and changing the way we do things.

And, finally, the fourth pillar, and one that I feel almost more passionately about than anything else, is the necessity to do true acquisition reform and better business practices. We have found savings through the A-76 competition, the activity-based cost and management. We have questioned assumptions from the bottom up, in terms of how we spend our resources. And we’ve tried, in the Marine Corps, at any rate, to make sure that the old way of doing business is simply not good enough.

There are some things we can’t change. General Jumper and I were just talking about the fact that acquisition laws have to be changed, because the five of us that you see here, by law are excluded from the acquisition process. And, yet, when something bad happens to a program, especially a program that has maybe an accident involving loss of life, the first person that will be hauled in front of the witness table, in front of a committee, a jurisdiction, will be a service chief. And, yet, the law says that the service chief cannot interfere with the acquisition process. We should guard, in my judgment, against an acquisition community that becomes too isolated from the rest of us and can make decisions independently without coming back to those of us who are responsible for essentially organizing, training, and equipping the force.

Those are things that I think need to be done. They are really the unintended consequences of legislation that is what I call pile-on legislation that happens over the years. But it makes our jobs different, and we can transform the acquisition process to make it more responsive and to end this 10-year cycle for major programs, and 10 years is probably generous. It’s probably considerably longer than that.

I will close by just mentioning three major movements, the directions that the Marine Corps is moving in, somewhat related to transformation. One is a reinvigorated partnership with the United States Navy to make sure that the sea-basing and the power projection capabilities are fully complementary, and we’re doing this together, not separately. And there are several cornerstone documents that have either been signed or are about to be signed that will capture that.

The second piece I would just signal to you without going into great detail is the absolute validity and wisdom of going into an integration of Naval tactical aviation. This will dramatically transform the capabilities in both the Navy and the Marine Corps and make it much more responsive to the joint war fighter and be much more economical in terms of how we spend our resources.

And thirdly, the last one that I would mention is the current examination and the memorandum of understanding that the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command have recently signed that is built to explore ways in which we can build the bridges between Special Operations community and the Marine Corps in such a way as to exponentially increase the capability and meet the answer to the requirement of more soft light forces without breaking the bank and going out and buying it when you might be able to find ways to augment the force with the forces that you have already have.

Thank you very much, Bob.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Jim.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: So, we now have some opportunity for discussion, for questions, very limited, unfortunately. So, what I’m going to propose is that those who would like to ask questions do so, and then we give the last five, six minutes or so to the panel for a comprehensive response, if that will work. Let’s hope so. Let’s go to the back of the room. I see a hand up back here, all the way back. Please identify yourself now.

Dr. Jon Czarnecki, Naval War College: This is for General Jumper. In the past days, we’ve heard a lot about preemption in our doctrine now. How is the Air Force going to use preemption in a kind of proliferation intervention? How have we enhanced our capability to target and destroy NBC facilities, especially those that are deeply buried?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: How about some more questions for the panel.

Dr. Jon Czarnecki again, still with the Naval War College. A very quick comment and then a question concerning your education, concerning professional military education. I know that many of you, all of you mentioned the importance of personnel and training. And I just give a word of caution as a professional educator for some quarter of a century, that the cheap ways that people are advising many of you concerning CDs and web-based learning, there is no cheap way. And I don’t want to take up too much more time on that, it’s just a word of advice.

The question, though, is what, and it’s really to anybody on the panel, what is being done to develop common recognition of professional military education across the services? We know about JPME, but in terms of-- If I go to an Air Force school as an Army guy or, more importantly, as a non-resident member, is there going to be common recognition as a way of achieving the jointness, achieving true transformation in terms of mindsets?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: So, how does professional military education fit in with transformation? Next question.

Karen Johnson. I’m with Old Dominion University. And my question is for Admiral Fallon, and it’s kind of a two-part question. First, what benefit does the Navy leadership hope to achieve in transforming its carrier aviation force from a force of multiple aircraft with specialized capabilities into a carrier force of a single aircraft expected to effectively perform a variety of critical tasks and functions?

And second, will relying so heavily on a single aircraft decrease or harm the Navy’s ability to successfully carry out its mission?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff. Next question is all the way over here, I believe.

__: Just like to expand on the first question a little bit and direct the question to all of you on preemption. What sort of capabilities from a service standpoint, from a joint standpoint, do you think we’re lacking or need to further a little bit to implement a strategy of preemption?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Right down here, please.

General ...(inaudible), Sandia: I’d like to hear anyone talk about integrating the intelligence community and real-time situation awareness with our war fighter capabilities.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Maybe one or two more questions. Who else would like to?

Jacquelyn Davis: You all mentioned the importance of reforming the acquisition process. I wonder if you have some specific ideas, and in that context, how can we more effectively use the JROC process and integrate CCNC requirements, Combatant Commander requirements, and service requirements as defined by OSD? How can we effectively get that done and marry up requirements with the budget priorities?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Now, I know we have enough questions for about five hours more of discussion and presentation. But is there one more now, because this is your last chance?

Okay, then, let’s start with the panel members and ask each panel member to respond to any or all of these questions. Shall we start with General Jones?

General Jones: With regard to the education question. I think that’s a good question, and I take the full meaning of your statement to heart. The challenge of professional military education is that we have to figure out a way to transform it in such a way that we make as much education available to a broad number of people. I’m somewhat frustrated by the fact that we have a system where we have a physical number of seats and many, many more officers who need the education than the physical limitation of the classroom permits.

And, so, the question for the future is how do you solve that problem? And within the Marine Corps, I think we’re doing some things that are going to address that. But it’s going to be a network of educational systems that reach out to our bases and stations. Instead of requiring everybody to go to Quantico, for example, for nine months, why can’t we, under the auspices of the Marine Corps University, take the education to the people who need it? Whether they be in Camp Pendleton, Hawaii, and so on. We have not harnessed the power of the retirees, for example, around all of our major bases and stations, who would be fantastic instructors to conduct a quality professional military education that can be delivered locally. In other words, we don’t always have to come to the classroom to get the quality education that you need.

A second point is that I’m increasingly of the opinion that starting with our command and staff colleges, there would be great benefit in considering whether to make all of those schools truly joint PME schools. And instead of a Marine Corps command and staff college, for example, that has, let’s say, out of 200 students, 140 Marines, why couldn’t we have command and staff colleges that teach maybe some emphasis of what the Marines teach but certainly a broader mixture of the student population, being soldier, sailor, Coast Guardsman, airman, starting at that level. Because that’s really where you want to make that cultural shift into the joint world.

The dichotomy for the services, as I said earlier, is to preserve the service cultures and make sure that our Marine warriors and our airmen and our soldiers, sailors, Coast Guard know what they’re supposed to do. And you can do that through the company grade levels, but somewhere at the field grade levels you need to start making that transition. And, so, instead of continuing to teach individual service cultures in individual service schools with a little bit of attention on jointness, you might be able to do some pretty dynamic stuff in terms of getting people on the same page at an earlier age.

With regard to preemption, I’m not sure from a Marine perspective, being forward deployed, hopefully, being near a point of engagement where you might be asked to implement that strategy, whatever the case may be. We are working very hard in partnership with all the services, but, obviously, with the Navy perhaps a little bit more, to make the sea-basing concepts of the 21st century be so powerful they can offset somewhat the sovereignty access questions that are going to be presented. So, it’s a question of being there and being useable immediately on a particular focus. But I don’t think there’s a particular weapons system, other than the ones we’re searching for right now, in terms of transformation that we’re lacking to integrate this particular strategy.

With regard to intelligence integration, the Marine Corps has, within the last two years, promoted its first general officer who has an intelligence background. We really should have done this about 10 or 15 years ago. We’re a little late in coming to the ballgame on this one, but that has had a major transformation. And, as I alluded in my opening remarks, being able to support the task force in Kandahar in Camp Rhino with a lot of the intelligence products and real time for the Marine Corps intelligence activity in Quantico, Virginia, was really eye-opening for us. And, so, we need to continue to make a great contribution in the joint arena.

From the acquisitions standpoint, I think there is great progress that can be made and should be made with regard to taking into account the various interests of all of the players. The Combatant Commanders’ conferences that we have, for example, I think are very good opportunities for us to not only read what the Combatant Commanders want, but we also spend a lot of time talking to them throughout the year.

I think transformation is really fundamentally on the shoulders of the services. The Combatant Commanders don’t have time to worry. They may be able to transform some new operational concepts and things like that, but if you’re going to transform and you’re going to do the things we’ve all talked about, it’s going to be done by the services, the ones who organize, who train, and equip, who deliver the force for employment. We want the feedback from the Combatant Commanders as to what it is they want, what capabilities they want. It’s our job to go out and get that.

And with the JROC and the service chiefs-- Nobody should think that the JROC functions independently of the service chiefs. The vice chiefs might want to think that, but they don’t. At least they shouldn’t. And I don’t think they try to. But there is great connectivity there. And I really believe that the JROC process under the current construct has the capability to do great things. But I also believe that we have to change some of our laws. And we have to change some of our rules so that there can be more players in the process, because it’s fairly exclusionary right now.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Jim. Now we go to General Jumper.

General Jumper: Well, I’ll try to be brief. Let me start with the preemption notion. The con ops that we’re writing for things like preemption are what we call the global strike task force con ops, and it’s advantage is still standoff and precision.

Now, with regard to hard and deeply buried and specific targets, it’s true that we’re still working hard on the hard and deeply buried issue. But I don’t consider that the only answer to that is something that comes out of the air. At a certain point in time, you put people on the ground and they go and deal with those things very well. They’re trained to do that, and we take advantage of that. And we do what we can in this con ops orientation to enable that ground force to go in and deal with those situations.

We are looking toward developments in the future like the Mach 10 weapon that comes from very high in the sky. And, as you all know, Mach 10 you could hit something with a piece of Quaker Puffed Wheat and it will make it go away. You don’t have to worry about the cave entrance, you just make the mountain go away. If you want that kind of power, it will be available in the future.

With regard to PME, I’m in 100% agreement with Jim Jones. I think that we should all transition ourselves to the point where our PME is all joint in nature, and we certainly don’t mind doing it from a soldier’s or a marine or a sailor’s standpoint at their school or an ...(inaudible) standpoint at the appropriate school with the right slant on it but with the goal that it does, indeed, fill a joint square. I think that’s well worthwhile.

The question from Sandia on integrating intelligence with war fighting is right on. It’s part of my stovepipe theory. You are in a habit in the intelligence community that says you collect, then you analyze, then you report. If you’re in that mindset, it’s very hard for that same group of people to shift seamlessly and effortlessly to a find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess kill cycle. But, in fact, that’s exactly what we have to do. And that’s one of the paradigms we’re watching being broken right now with the Predator UAV, as we have traditional target tiers actually sensor operators on the UAV and being able to put those skills to work in real time. The trick is to be able to work that into the joint context so that you can shift seamlessly back and forth between a collection requirement and a time-sensitive or time-critical target and kill requirement and then back to your collection responsibilities in a seamless fashion and to be able to manage that in real time and be able to train the people to do that.

And, Jackie, on acquisition reform, one of the things that we’ve done in our development of command control at ...(inaudible) at Langley Air Force Base is a bold experiment on putting testers, developers, the companies, and the operators all under the same roof and forcing them to get along. And as they do this, what we have found is the testers when they’re in on each phase of the evolution of a program, suddenly the test requirement comes down, orders the magnitude. When the operators are involved, you’re being able to do technology trades with requirements on the fly in a reasonable way and through the appropriate process in a way that does not violate acquisition laws or rules, maybe habits. But the end product is coming out many times quicker than we’ve ever been able to do it before. This is a small step, admitted, but I think it’s a template that is worth exploring in the long view.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, John. And now General Keane.

General Keane: I’ll also try to be brief. In the education, I accept your caution, but the reality is that distant learning is here. And we can reach a larger audience more frequently and stylize it so that it can penetrate an audience and be complementary to their duties. For example, we have new soldiers who do not have college education, so a very aggressive business learning program that we’re providing to them, we’re giving them a computer and access to colleges of their choice. And they’re taking college courses around their schedules, which, in the Army, has always been very troubling to us because we have more youngsters who have dropped out of our courses, even when we try to do it on the weekend or during non-duty hours. And for our officers and non-commissioned officers, it’s here to stay, and I think it’s going to enhance our capability, as I said, to reach a larger audience and to do it more frequently.

I also want to associate myself with the comments made about JPME. We are pushing down into our staff colleges considerably more joint education than what we have historically done in the past, because we recognize that our officers and non-commissioned officers have to be equipped much earlier with the skill sets and education requirements to meet the needs of an ever-changing joint environment. And it’s just essential that we do that. And we’ve already got that in place.

On preemption, it’s clear that we have forces that are stylized to do that. Our special operations forces, our capacity to do forced entry today, and our transformation strategy is all about being able to provide forces to the joint team to be able to do those kinds of tasks.

And integrated intelligence, you know, General Schwarzkopf, after Desert Storm said, and it was his number-one criticism, that the national intelligence community was not able to effectively, in a timely and responsive fashion provide intelligence to the tactical field commander. And I know for a fact that in the 18th Airborne Corps, which I have associated most of my life with, in the five divisions that were there, despite the fact that operational objectives-- We were there for five months, and when operational objectives were assigned, we did not know the composition or disposition of the enemy in any of those objectives, despite we had been there for that period of time. We have changed that. There has been dramatic change in getting national intelligence sources in the hand of war fighters in the ensuing 11 years. It is truly remarkable. But we still have a very large national intelligence apparatus, it is still stovepipe post-9/11 to some degree, despite all of our efforts to change it. We won’t get there, I don’t believe, until we have truly shared databases, where an intel analyst who is pursuing something, say, with Osama bid Laden, and asks that question and all of the databases respond to his question, because he’s authorized to ask the question and he has access to the information. We still do not have that today. We’ve got to get to it.

And the acquisition process, to me, the number-one issue is the cycle system itself and all the ensuing underpinnings for it that you have to change to get to that. And the JROC, General Jones, we take our guidance from our service chiefs, as we always have. In the JROC process, I think we are on the cusp of some fairly profound change in this requirements process. Because we are looking at an operational concept and developing that concept, a joint operational concept, from which will flow the capabilities that you need to meet the requirements of that concept. And then you turn to the service, and you ask the service to provide these capabilities. We have never, ever done that in the past. It has always been bottom up.

END OF TAPE

--decision makers at the highest level. My view is that we provide the capabilities and tools to carry out any decision, should one be made to preempt. We think we have the capabilities and we keep them forward deployed in our Naval forces. We work in concert with the other services to execute whatever the desired outcome is.

Professional military education, one of my priorities. A graduate of the War College in Newport and proudly stated, we’ve got a challenge, particularly in the Naval service, and that is getting the time to get our people to do these things. We ask a lot of them. We want them to be professionally trained to do their warfare missions. We want them to be educated and well understanding and capable of operating in the acquisition environment, the business side of the house. We want them to have graduate education in special areas that they can lend their expertise. But we clearly recognize the need for JPME, again, endorse stronger the idea that we figure out a way to get joint credit for these courses at the staff colleges. That’s a no-brainer to me.

To the question from my colleague at ODU, we’re not quite at the single aircraft mode on the aircraft carriers yet. I think you’re probably referring to the fact that we have just introduced the F-18E and soon the F-Hornet to go with our other forces. It’s going to be quite awhile before those appear in great numbers throughout the fleet. And, so, we are in an evolutionary process here where we are exchanging some tired iron and some of it very, very capable. I have a son who flies an F-14D and he badgers me every day to no end, what is wrong with you, Dad? You’re throwing away a beautiful, wonderful airplane, the F-14D is the best thing you’ve ever seen. And I said, I agree, but there are some things out there with tremendous capability, in some areas much better, and, by the way, it’s going to be maintainable a lot easier than the kind of things you’re struggling with. So, we’re in transition. We will have F-14s probably another five, six, seven years. They are going to give way to F-18Fs, they’ll be complemented by Cs, and as we do the Naval integration piece, we envision a Marine squadron in every one of these airwings. You’re going to see a Marine Airwing Commander before very long. And we are going to jointly be able to cover the missions of both services. And this is just the strike fighter business. E-2s are going to be a mainstay of our air capability of our force for a long time. We firmly believe that electronic attack is a necessity and, so, we’re going to have prowlers, and the helicopter is going to play an increasing role in all of our con ops as the air capabilities have just been dramatically expanded. So, I think there’s a pretty good mix, and we really believe that we can answer the mail when we’re asked to do it.

Intel integration, ditto what’s been said. You know, we put the two and the three, the intel and the operations people together for a reason, because they are constantly in communication, need to be, so they’re almost always placed in close proximity, even if there are only two of them, so that they can get the right information to the decision maker. We’ve got a way to go to this. No doubt about it. We spend a gazillion dollars here in this nation on product that often is in stovepipes, and we’re just going to have to work on it. In the Naval services, we are looking very hard at how we might integrate our intelligence, Navy and Marine Corps intelligence, to come up with a better product for ourselves and for other services.

Jackie, the acquisition thing. Jack’s touched on this business of the joint con ops. This will truly, truly shake the place and turn it upside down. Just how we’re going to do this, and we’ve got a Title 10 reality here that all the money comes through the services and how we change this piece of the culture, not to mention the other aspects of it, it will be truly a challenge. But we’re taking that on in the JROC, trying to figure out how to do this. But I think when that day dawns, we’ll be in a new era and we’ll be the better for it.

Thanks. Tom?

Admiral Collins: Just a brief comment on three of the questions that were posed.

Education and training, it’ll cost us more money out of training and education costs, but I would submit there are a couple of things. You’ve got to make the business case, you’ve got to look at the return on investment. And there are multiple delivery vehicles that you can use. Use the one that makes sense and gives you the performance you need at the lowest cost. I think performance is the magic word here, that you’ve got to start at the higher level, education and training and what is the performance of the work force. And there are human technology folks that look at this from a systems perspective and look at a whole host of interventions, education, and training as one, but there are others. I think you start at that higher level systems approach to performance of the work force, then you make the right business case, and then you make the right investment.

On preemption, my only comment on preemption is that we’ve got to ensure that we think of preemption in the broadest strategic concept. It goes beyond the traditional military approach to preemption. It means from a national perspective, use all the tools in the toolkit, economic, diplomatic, and on and on interventions to give you preemption. There are many ways to get preemption. Working through international bodies in a proactive way is a preemptive type of approach, and we’ve just got to not get into the trap of thinking of preemption too narrowly, but how does our piece of it fit into broader approach to preemption.

On acquisition reform, I’m not totally objective here, but I think our integrated ...(inaudible) system is a very imaginative, very forward-looking, very flexible, focused on requirements performance approach. Take a test drive on that one. Take a look at that. I think it’s an incredibly flexible approach, and there are a lot of people looking at that as a model, and the jury’s still out whether it will be totally successful. We just awarded it on the 25th of June, but it’s a system, performance-focused, life cycle cost-focused procurement over a number of years with incredible flexibility, but accountability built in. You might want to take a test drive on that one.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Well, thank you very much to this outstanding panel. We’ve run about 10 minutes overtime, but I believe it’s been worth it. We thank you for being with us this morning, for adding so much to this conference.