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.

Military Requirements for a New National Security Environment

Keynote Address by General Peter Pace, USMC, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

[Related news article: Pace Says Planning Guidance Will Reshape Military
By Jim Garamone, American Forces Press Service]

Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.: This second day of our conference is devoted to a discussion of military issues and especially issues related to military transformation and, of course, resourcing the transformation of our military forces to cope with the issues of the 21st century.

We are greatly honored this morning to have as our opening speaker General Peter Pace. General Pace became Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just over a year ago. He is the first Marine Corps officer to hold this position. As Vice Chairman, he is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s second ranking military officer. His official responsibilities include serving as Chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, the JROC, Vice Chairman of the Defense Acquisition Board, and he also serves as a member of the National Security Council Deputies Committee and the Nuclear Weapons Council. So, these are very broad responsibilities.

His previous assignments include Commander, United States Marine Corps Forces, Atlantic, Europe, South, from 1997 to 2000, and later he served as Combatant Commander, United States Southern Command. And I might add, in that capacity was a speaker at one of our previous conferences two years ago. General Pace is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and, as he reminded me during the opening area here before we began, Class of 1967. He is also the recipient of a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from George Washington University.

So, it is a very great, special pleasure for me to welcome General Pace as our opening speaker in this session.

General Peter Pace: Bob, thanks very much. I very much appreciate that very kind introduction and especially all you’ve done to make this conference what it is. I had a chance to read the Early Bird this morning, and you all had some great discussions yesterday, apparently. It looks like you’re trying to eat a pretty good-sized elephant in two days. Thanks also to Tufts University and especially to my very, very good friend, lifelong friend, General Jim Jones, who is a fabulous Commandant of the Marine Corps, and I’m just delighted that he’s also going to be a great Supreme Allied Commander in Europe when he goes over to the NATO and the European Command. Jim, thanks for inviting me to do this. And also to my longtime friend, Ed Hanlon, who made a special effort to make sure that I had the invitation and could get here. Ed, thanks a lot.

A document came across my desk this morning that was actually released November 10, 1995, but if you understand the Pentagon, seven years isn’t too long. But, also if you understand the Pentagon, things have a habit of arriving just in time, and this one did this morning. I don’t normally read when I talk to folks, but this is supposed to be a true story that really illustrates the point of thinking differently, which is what we’re going to talk about a little bit this morning. This was released by the Chief of Naval Operations, 10 November 1995, and it’s an account of some Americans and Canadians at sea and their radio traffic with each other.

"The Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid collision.

Canadians: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert your course.

Canadians: No. I say again, you divert your course.

Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States Atlantic Fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers, and numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north, that’s 1-5 degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call."

Thinking a little bit differently. My world, like yours, changed 11 September last year and certainly the duties of the Vice Chairman changed drastically by the time I had gotten to the Pentagon on 1 October of last year. Normally, the duties that Bob mentioned early on in his introduction, the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee and those kinds of duties would take all of the Vice Chairman’s time. As it turns out and as you would expect, the global war on terrorism has really taken up the vast majority of my time. And the amount of time that I’ve been able to spend on Joint Requirements Oversight, meaning looking out to the future 15, 20 years, and transformation really has not been as much as I would like it to be. It’s just a fact. And I try to devote as much time as I can to it, but opportunities like this to come and talk about requirements is an opportunity for me to kind of think through what I’ve done and what I should be doing.

When it comes to requirements, I’m not even sure how to define that. I’m part of the process, but what is a requirement? It’s overused, in my opinion, and I am much more comfortable with joint capabilities and what kinds of capabilities this nation will need. Because a requirement can change based on a situation, and a requirement sometimes, the way the process has worked in the past, is merely a validation of somebody’s good idea.

And I will tell you that, in my opinion, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council has evolved over time, thanks to the very good, hard work of my predecessors. But it needs to continue to evolve. We are very good right now at grading other people’s homework and not real good at helping the services understand the kinds of capabilities that we will need for the future. So when a service comes in to the JROC and presents their program, right now, if it meets all of the criteria for the program as designed by the service and it is interoperable and it fits a need, it gets the JROC stamp of approval. And that is a value added, but it is not as much value added as would be a JROC that functioned in a way that looked out 15, 20 years along with the services, was able to promulgate capstone requirements and capabilities and operational concepts which would then assist us as a nation in seeing the types of things we may be required to do in the future, understanding the gaps in our capabilities to perform those missions in the future and then asking the services to design programs that would fill those known or presumed capability gaps in the future. We need to do a better job of doing that.

The other thing that we’re trying to work is transformation. And, like requirements, I have a really hard time defining transformation. I understand it when I see it, but trying to say to someone transformation is such and so is not something that I’ve been able to do yet, despite working on the problem for over a year.

Having said that, I think there are things that I can do in my various capacities that will assist in setting up a process that will facilitate transformation and that will facilitate capabilities definition and facilitate requirements in the long run.

Let me start with where we are today on the cycle of contingency planning guidance, defense planning guidance, and things like that, because this is how we’re thinking. I can perhaps help us think through how we can be more efficient and effective.

The Secretary has recently put out his contingency planning guidance to his Combatant Commanders. And rather than look for a two-year cycle on war plans, he has directed them to come in within six months with their first cut on changing the major battle plans for the nation. That is working, and it’s due later on this year from each of the Combatant Commanders. And inside of that process, we’ll be taking battle plans that have been on the shelf for the last five or 10 years, in some cases, and bringing them up to date and through an interview process, with the Combatant Commander sitting down face to face with the Secretary and also with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank, work through how many assets he really needs to get a particular job done. That’s a piece.

A new part of the puzzle is what we are calling an operational availability study. Put simply, the question is how much of the nation’s combat capability do we want to be able to deliver anywhere in the world and in what time? Examples, and these are not real examples, these are generic examples for the sake of having a into discussion without getting into classified numbers.

There are 10 U.S. Army divisions, and if you can get five of those divisions today anywhere in the world in five months, is that satisfactory? Now, we’ve done the homework, and I know the real answer to that question about as far as how many divisions and how fast. But we did, for the last two or three months, the analysis of today’s war plans, remembering that they’re being changed, but today’s war plans. What’s the requirement and are we meeting it? And the answers are, we are meeting the requirements as laid out by the Combatant Commanders, but it’s difficult to understand or to be able to point to, is it because we’re able to deliver X number of divisions in Y days and, therefore, the commander adjusts his plans to that? Or have we adjusted the delivery of our capabilities to the commander’s needs.

But let me get back to the divisions. If you can deliver five divisions in five months, would the nation be better off delivering three divisions in 30 days or five divisions in 30 days? And if we could do that, what would be the impact on the war fighters’ war plans?

Same thing with airplanes. X hundred airplanes focused on a particular region of the world for a war plan. How fast can they get there? Very fast. Is there a place for them to land? Is there enough cement, enough access already available to us to support the Combatant Commanders’ war plans? Or are we expecting to negotiate that when we finally figure out exactly which region we’re going to go to? Ships, 12 aircraft carriers. X number of those can get anywhere in the world within Y number of days. Is that acceptable to the war plans?

So, when you take today’s war plans and lay them out and get the answers to today’s force and you have your Combatant Commanders now going through a six-month analysis, free of current constraints, coming in to the Secretary, saying, if I had this many divisions in this many days, I would fight the war this way, and you add to that the analysis that we’re doing through the JROC, with all the service of vice chiefs, of identifying the kinds of changes we can make, then you get to some decision points.

Mr. Secretary, if you don’t like the fact that it takes five months to get five divisions someplace, there are things you can do about it. You can direct us to look at the way we are based overseas. Or you can direct us to look at the way we preposition things that we can fly over to. Or you can have us look at the speed of deployment from home station in the United States. If ships on average are going to travel 20 knots, 500 miles a day, would you like us, Mr. Secretary, to spend some of your resources today to design a ship that can go 40 knots or 60 knots, covering a thousand miles a day or 1500 miles a day? And if we were able to do that, Mr. Combatant Commander, what would that do to your war plan? If you had three divisions, if you need five today, if I can give you three divisions in 30 days, could you then put together a plan based on speed that could accomplish the same mission inside of 30 days that you need five divisions to do inside of five months, as an example.

And you can go on and on and on with that kind of logic, and it boils down to basics: access, deployment speed. And when you look at speed, you get to the point that speed is expensive. It’s also a tremendous force multiplier.
Examples of speed in today’s force. If you want to get a division there faster, you can have more airplanes, you can have faster ships, but you also want to take a look at the size of the lift requirement. Can we design divisions that will be 10, 15 years from today as lethal as today’s divisions are but perhaps two-thirds the size? And how does precision munitions get melded into that? And of today’s 10 divisions in the Army, there are six heavy and four light. So, when you do your mix and match around the world, you are constrained by the ability to have X number of heavy divisions and Y number of light divisions that that particular Combatant Commander needs.

I’m not saying this is possible, but it is certainly worth looking at whether or not when you design the objective force in the U.S. Army each of those 10 divisions is interchangeable. If you are able to do that, have a smaller division, equal to or more lethal than today, that can be transported much more quickly by faster ships or on the same airplanes but just fewer of them, and if they were interchangeable so that you could rotate your force as the Chief of Staff of the Army and have your first five divisions leaning forward, ready to go out the door and your next five divisions in some kind of training cycle or dedicated to experimentation. I’m not talking about tiered readiness, I’m talking about availability for combat in a way that you can then rotate your divisions in a way that takes care of some of your operational tempo - personnel tempo problems, and in a way that allows you to be ready to go to Korea, be ready to go to Iraq, and end up going to Afghanistan. And instead of having to shift out the division that’s leaning forward to go because that division just isn’t quite right for that particular mission, be able to take your first division that knows it’s the first one out the door for the next five months or six months, whatever the timeline is that you rotate these folks through.
We are at the very beginning of being able to take a first chainsaw cut at understanding -- I’ll say that differently. We do understand, we have done the homework on today’s capabilities versus today’s war plans. We are about to make the first chainsaw cut based on the first information available from the Combatant Commanders on how they are changing their war plans based on being told by the Secretary in his contingency planning guidance to go out and rework those plans. And this will be an iterative process. The commanders will come in with their ideas about the kinds of capabilities they would need to do the job differently, and we will work with them in a way to figure out how do we deliver that capability over the long term. And if we are able to deliver that capability, then that will also impact the commander’s future plan.

So, this is not a one-time shot. Every year, we will do an operational availability study and this first year, it will be a very rough cut, chainsaw cut, that will give to the Secretary recommendations on the kinds of things that if he does not like where we are today, he can give us guidance on things to go study or things to go invest in or things to go experiment or things to go buy. Then we’ll go through that cycle again next year.

We will have that done by March or April of next year, so that when the Secretary crafts his defense planning guidance, which is put out in April or May next year, he will be able to use those recommendations the way he sees fit to give guidance to his service secretaries and service chiefs on how he wants them to allocate resources. They will then spend the time between April or May of next year, and about this time next year, as they are doing this year with last year’s guidance, crafting their budgets. And then, as we are doing now, we will take the service budgets, and look at them. How have they satisfied or not satisfied the defense planning guidance and what adjustments need to be made? And again the Combatant Commanders will be doing their war planning, which will be informed by the budgets that the services are talking about and informed by the operation analysis.
So, each of these pieces blends in and becomes part of a whole that, if we stay focused on it and do it year in and year out and institutionalize the process, has the potential to bring forward to the service chiefs, to bring forward to the service secretaries, and to bring forward to the Secretary of Defense decisions, weigh points, go left, go right-type opportunities that will allow us to be more effective in battle and allocate and spend our resources more efficiently.

I need to talk just a second, and then I’ll stop because I want to get to your questions, about the active component, Reserve component, National Guard mix. Having had the great pleasure of working side by side with Marine Reserves, I know personally how critical they are to all that we do in the armed forces. There is nothing that we do operationally that is not supported in part or in whole or in large measure by our Reserve and National Guard community. That’s a great thing. And the other great thing is, when you’re walking around the building or you’re walking around your command, if somebody doesn’t tell you that that person’s a reservist, you don’t know, because they are so interchangeable and so competent at what they do.

Having said that, I think that a challenge to the Reserve and the National Guard community is, if we determine that speed is a force multiplier, if we were able to craft transportation or basing or staging that allows us to get to the fight sooner and that allows us to end that fight sooner, then we need to take a very, very hard look at the timelines that we have our Reserve forces in right now. If your Reserve division isn’t going to get to a fight until a particular time in the future and our projections are that the war is going to be over by then, it doesn’t mean necessarily that it will be over by then but it does mean that we will be looking at ourselves to see if we could do something different about the guidance we’re giving to our Reserve forces. So, we need to have the active Reserve mix very much in our mind.

And if speed is important, might there be a part of the force that is deployable without having to have Reserve call-up? That’s a policy decision. And the policy decisions in the past have made it so that to go to war, we must call up our Reserves. There were good reasons for those decisions. Are those decisions still valid today as we look forward to a different, perhaps different, not perhaps, a different war fighting environment? So, I think that Reserve mix, National Guard mix, really deserves a lot of thought by all of us who have the privilege of wearing the uniform.

With that, I’ll stop. And, Bob, you’ll direct the questions? Thanks very much.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, General Pace, for this outstanding overview. Speed as a force multiplier, very important for us to consider this morning. We now have an opportunity for questions to the Vice Chairman. Who would like to? And please identify yourself and wait for the microphone, which is right behind you.

Dr. Jon Czarnacki, Naval War College: General, concerning your review on the op plans, you mentioned that you’re asking for review on the war plans within six months. Is that going to affect the deliberate planning cycle, reducing it from 18 months to something less than that on an iterative basis?

General Pace: Thanks, a great question. I hope I didn’t say it the way you said it, because I haven’t asked for anything. The Secretary of Defense has directed that his commanders come in to him and talk to him about their war plans. I’ll have the opportunity, because he always invites General Myers and General Pace to meet with him, I will have the opportunity to be with him when he gets that presentation, and I will also have an opportunity as one of the members of the Joint Chiefs to sit with my fellow Joint Chiefs and review the war plans. But I just wanted to make sure I got that part straight.

The system that I grew up with, that we all grew up with, the deliberate planning process does not serve this Secretary well. The system that I grew up with took a mission, sent it down to the Combatant Commander, who went out and did his analysis, looked at three or four courses of action, brought those three or four courses of action up to the Joint Chiefs in the Tank, presented them to them, got a little bit of left rudder, right rudder, went back to wherever he came from, reworked his plan a little bit and then came up to the Secretary at an appropriate time, and the Secretary came to the Tank or stayed in his office and we all went to him, whichever way, and presented to him, here’s the problem and here’s the solution.

That’s a way of accomplishing it. That does not fulfill Secretary Rumsfeld’s way of leading the Department. He wants to make sure that he’s not having a lot of really good people working really hard, going in a direction that is not the direction he wants to go. He likes to see and talk to his commanders. When they think they’ve got it about 30% right in their head, you know, you read the newspaper, it says the 30% plan, the 60% plan. What the papers are really trying to say is, when the commander has thought it through a little bit and has enough on his plate to start talking about it, the Secretary just wants to sit down with him around the table and say, okay, Pete, what are you thinking? To make sure the assumptions I’m working on if I’m one of his commanders and the objectives that I’m working toward and the outcome that I’m looking to produce for him are, in fact, the ones that he wants. And that will go back and forth a couple of times, two, three, four times, 50 times, whatever the number is that it takes to get to the point where the plan and the expectations are the same. And that is truly value added.

The problem then becomes for those who worked in the old system, how do they stay up? How do they do what they’re supposed to do fast enough? And that’s where some of the angst comes from for the folks who are trying to do the right thing but don’t have as much information as they used to have because they’re not sitting in the room with the Joint Chiefs, they’re not sitting in the room with the service secretaries, they’re not sitting in the room with the Secretary of Defense. Yet, they’ve got some responsibility and certainly a desire to do their job in support of the war plans. And we have done a good job of modifying the way we plan in a way that allows the Secretary to be value added. And we haven’t yet quite figured out how best to keep Major Pace informed in a way that allows him to do his job effectively and efficiently, inside a much shorter timeline between iterations of the war plan. We’ve got to think that through and we haven’t had a chance to do that as well as we’d like to.

So, I’m happy with the products. I’m happy with the dialogue. I’m not happy with keeping those who are working real hard informed — how do we give them the information they need?

Does that answer your question?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Who would like to pose the next question? Yes, over here. Wait for the microphone.

Bert Tussing, United States Army War College: Sir, it sounds like the IPL [Integrated Priority List] is going to be the main driver for the POM [Program Objectvie Memorandum] now, with the way you’ve described the new capability study, the operational availability study. My question, sir, is are the Combatant Commanders’ staff capable of taking that on, particularly given what you just described as the deliberate planning process and the changes there?

General Pace: I need to ask you a question before I can answer yours. You said, IPO?

Bert Tussing: I’m sorry, the Integrated Priority List from the Combatant Commanders.

General Pace: IPL, excuse me.

Bert Tussing: I’m sorry, sir.

General Pace: Let me try to answer the question. If I don’t, come on back at me, okay? The IPL itself is a list that the Combatant Commanders send forward to the Joint Chiefs and to the Secretary that says, this capability is missing in my theater and I need it. And if you can only give me one thing, give me this one first. If you can give me two, give me number one and number two. And, oh, by the way, if I can have 10 things, here is my list of 10. Realizing that there’s dollars involved in that. We take those lists-- I mean right now, as we sit here, there are guys in the Pentagon who have the lists from the Combatant Commanders. And we go out next week with the JROC on the road trip to see all the Combatant Commanders, and I’m going to look them in the eye and tell them, here’s your list, here’s what is being satisfied inside the service POM right now as they are in draft form going to the Secretary. Here are the things that you have asked for that we cannot satisfy and this is why. Of the things that are not now being satisfied, this is the language that we’re going to recommend to the Chairman that he write in a letter to the Secretary of Defense, wherein the Chairman gets a chance to say, I believe that Pete Pace’s number-one priority is really the number-three priority for the military, etc. That’s a private communication from the Chairman to the Secretary.

But the process, and now I’m getting back to what I’m going to do next week with the Combatant Commanders, is to talk them through what they’ve asked for, talk them through what is going to be funded, talk them through the things that are not funded, what we’re going to support and recommend to the Chairman that he supports to the Secretary, so when the Secretary looks at the budgets, he can redirect assets. And those things that we say, look, it’s important but we’re out of Schiltz. That, then, to me, although the Combatant Commander’s IPL is certainly informed by his war plan, is a separate process from it. And the fact that he has to do his war planning inside of a six-month cycle simply means that he’ll know sooner what he doesn’t have. And he may have to wait a month or two to be able to put it on his new IPL. But that discussion can be going on, not the IPL process, but the discussion can be going on, right now as it is. The Combatant Commanders are working on their war plans. They’re saying to us, if I could have this number of divisions this quickly instead of that number of divisions in a longer time, if I could have this number of aircraft carriers by this certain time, this many Marines, this many soldiers, we’re working with them day to day on that. And, oh, by the way, here’s an item that I’m going to put in my IPL that you guys need to know about. We can start working on that right now inside of the operational availability process to bring forward to the Secretary by next March our recommendations about the things he should tell his services to look at for their budget build next year.

Does that answer it or not? Come on back if I didn’t. If I missed it completely, come on back.

Bert Tussing: My concern, sir, on the question is traditionally, of course, the services have all developed what they foresee to be the requirements for the future, in fulfilling the requirements for the future. Maybe I’m taking this wrong from the presentation of the new direction that the Joint Staff and the Secretary are trying to take in expediting this process, basically going back to the Combatant Commanders and saying, okay, what do you foresee the immediate requirements for your war plans and beyond that. And it seems, sir, and I may be wrong, but it seems that you are going to be depending more upon the Combatant Commanders’ staff to develop those capabilities, not requirements, but those capabilities with the same number of folks as they’ve had in the past taking on more of what the service chiefs have traditionally done with their staffs.

General Pace: Got it, thanks. No. What we want the Combatant Commanders to do is what they’re responsible to do, which is to tell us what they need, and tell us if they could have this thing, they could do their job better. That’s what they’ve been doing in the past, in the more laborious process, and that’s what they’ll do in the future in what we hope is a more efficient process.

The real concern for the services is that somehow we in the joint community would usurp command, train, and equip responsibilities of the service chiefs. That is a natural point of friction. And if I do my job right, collectively with the vice chiefs of each service in the JROC, we can help reduce that friction. Where you sit is what you see, I guess, and it’s kind of like asking a judge if he runs a fair court. But, I do believe that the JROC right now, with the members who are on it, is a very, very good forum.

It is not without differing opinions, but it is done very professionally and amongst individuals who are personal friends while they carry the sword and shield for their service. If there is not some friction, you could argue we’re not doing our job. I mean if you’re not getting somebody a little bit concerned about their piece of the cheese, then maybe we’re not working hard enough at the size, or the boundaries of this thing, trying to find out what’s possible.

So, it doesn’t bother me that there are differing opinions. It doesn’t bother me if folks start getting a little nervous about things that they believe are rightfully their turf. What would bother me is if we did not solve those concerns in a way that is best for the nation and in a way that whoever has to give up a little understands that he does so for the common cause. And I can tell you categorically, as long as I’ve been Chairman of the JROC, the service vice chiefs really do come to that forum, first, with a thorough knowledge of what their services can and can’t do and what they want to do, but also have been, and I presume, therefore, will continue to be very willing to listen to logic. Not easily, but they can be persuaded to give up a little bit to get the country where it needs to go.
That answer it? Thanks.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We have time for one or two more questions. Let’s go right down here.

Dick Diamond from Raytheon: General, I don’t wear the Navy uniform anymore, but I’m still somewhat of a junky for rubber chicken lunches, conferences like this, and various war fighter associations, changes of command, and so on. Invariably, what I see is the junior officers are there and the hotshot majors with their pens poised. And almost invariably, the flag officer or general officer who is visiting says, before we start, don’t ask me any questions about transformation, because I don’t have the definition for it. Invariably, they have an anecdote, and most commonly it’s some variation of the Supreme Court Justice who said, I don’t know what pornography is but I recognize it when I see it.

My question is, how can we expect the iron majors and the private snuffies to take a hand in transformation when a year into it, the leadership can’t settle on a definition yet?

General Pace: Fair question. Doesn’t bother me one bit that I can’t define transformation for you. Again, this is the judge grading his own little courtroom. I am real happy that we have gone a long way in designing a process through the contingency planning guidance faster, through the defense planning guidance, through operational availability, and through the JROC. We have begun to do the homework that will allow us to identify the forks in the road that we can take toward transformation. If you tell me that you’ve got a guy who can tell me what we’re going to be doing 20 years from now, I’m going to tell you you’re full of it. I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon. But I do know that there are certain capabilities we’re going to need for whatever happens this afternoon and for whatever we might be able to surmise for all the afternoons in the future.

If we can design a process that allows us to see where the forks are in the road, and they may just be four, five, six years down the road, which is what we’re doing this year in the budget process. Then in that budget process we allocate the resources that will take us to that fork but don’t overcommit, causing us to have to go left or have to go right. Buy the number of X kind of airplanes that will get us to this point in time where we will then have developed this other thing well enough to know whether or not we ought to buy more of this or stop buying this and buy more of the new thing that’s being developed. And there is iteration after iteration of that going on right now in the budget. The conversations about how many Comanches, how many F-22s, how many Ospreys, how many of this, how many of that, all are of the flavor how far down the road can we see, what else is being worked on, what else do we need to work on, and how much money needs to be allocated to the experimentation and development process and how much money should be spent on the things we can actually buy today? That, then, to me, allows Captain Pace to participate fully in crafting today and crafting tomorrow, even though none of us really knows what tomorrow looks like 20 years from now. So, the fact I can’t define transformation doesn’t mean I can’t facilitate it. Smart captains and majors have the opportunity to say, hey, three or four years from now, which is a pretty good vision, five years from now, we would like to be able to make this kind of decision. And to be able to make that decision, today we need to spend dollars on these things, experimentation, or whatever it is. When we can do that, as senior leaders, I think we help the transformation process along significantly. One more thing about transformation, because I truly believe it in my heart. If the only thing we changed was our mindset and we bought no new toys, we would be a long way down the transformation road. How to use the things we own today differently, and that includes all the kinds of things we’ve talked about before. You’ve got 12 airplanes, where do you park them? Etc., etc, etc.

That answer it? Thanks.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Our next question is from the back here.

Gordon Stump, the Adjutant General from Michigan: I’d like to discuss the Reserve component comments, especially on the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve side. I don’t feel there’s any problem with being there on day one. In the Kosovo campaign, there was an A-10 unit at Jojdkola(?) that needed help. We called up the Guard. It was the rainbow units from Barnes, [Massachusetts], Battle Creek, [Michigan], and a third unit [Boise, Idaho.] From call-up to bombs on target, deploying to southern Sicily was 15 days. I seriously doubt that the Air Force could have done much better than that. And I think it comes back to full-time manning. The Marines, the Navy Reserve, the Air Force Reserve, the Air National Guard are all manned at somewhere between 90% and 100% of their requirements. When you get down to the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, our full-time manning validated requirements, we’re only manned at somewhere around 50% of requirements. After five or six years of lobbying Congress, we finally have the Army put in the POM to bring our full-time requirements in the Army National Guard up to 70% in another 10 years. I really feel that if we’re really interested in using the Reserve component, and I think we must have the Reserve component to go to war. First, it brings the will of the people. Second of all, we don’t have enough money to afford all the soldiers we need to carry out our wartime plans. We need to get serious about meeting the full-time requirements of the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard in order to meet the requirements that you would like to have to get us to the war fight earlier.

General Pace: I didn’t hear a question. And I don’t mean to be glib about it.

General Stump: Will you support raising our full-time requirements up to 100% of requirements in the Army Reserve and Army National Guard?

General Pace: First of all, it is not my intention to hug or mug any particular service. And the fact that you said that the airplanes got in the air, same Air Force, I think, as the one that wears that uniform, and that they got there in 15 days is absolutely wonderful. And I’ll stand on my initial comments that we cannot go to war today without our Reserves, without our National Guard. And we’ve got, what, 58,000, give or take, on active duty today. So, clearly, the Guard and Reserve provide an enormous capability to this country.

I absolutely agree that the senior leaders in our military service and the senior civilians at the heads of the service departments and the Department of Defense must have the opportunity to take a look at the choices that are involved. And all I’m saying is I would not want to be PFC Pace, rifleman, inside of an organization that is designed, trained, and equipped to arrive on the battlefield after the war is over. We owe that person, that PFC, a better plan than that, and we owe our nation a better plan than that.

So, as we went through as we did these last two or three months of telling ourselves exactly what the results of today’s war plans and today’s TPFDDs [time-phase force and deployment data] are, when you craft that out and you look at it, there are some things that jump out at you that you say, we should do something about this. And there are lots of things on the active side and lots of things on the reserve side, all of which at this level right now are classified and I won’t be specific, but certainly for the Guard and the Reserve, there are questions of timing and readiness and ability to get from where they are to where the nation will need them in time to have an impact for the nation in that particular combat situation.

Whether or not, then, that translates into 100%, you’ll have to tell me what I’m giving up for that 100%. We’re in the middle of a budget drill right now. Nobody’s getting 100% that I know of. I mean everybody’s getting a piece of what their blue sky is. But that’s exactly what the Secretary does with his service secretaries. Certainly, someone should understand and be able to say to do this with the National Guard, it will cost this amount of money and this number of people. That should certainly be on the table. How much of that gets spent will be in relationship with the other demands on the budget and the people. And that’s just part of the process.

I’m okay if we compete and lose, so to speak. I’m not okay if we don’t compete the ideas for the leadership to make a decision. And all I’m trying to do for you here now is to kind of highlight, among other things that we learned in this operational study so far, that the leaders of certain organizations really need to pay attention, as they have been, but then do the homework to be able to present the details and the data for the decision makers to say I want to go left or I want to go right.

That answer it? Thanks.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I think there are two over here. Maybe we could take both of them and let General Pace answer them after the questions are asked.

David Bak, War Contact(?) [IFPA database lists him as International Analyst] for the OSD: Yesterday, we talked about the importance of alliances and allies, and today we’re talking about transformation and capabilities. And I’m wondering, from your perspective, what we can do better about integrating or thinking about how allies may be integrated into future operations, how they can be figured into our plan.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Could we have the other question, then, and then General Pace will have the last word.

Commander Steve Kenney(?) from the British Embassy: What do you think would be the effects on transformation of the United States armed forces if you replaced the JROC with an independently elected civilian body?
General Pace: Let me take the second question first. I don’t think we need to do that. And I think that the process itself would be the loser in that. There already is the civilian body, several civilian bodies. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council looks at and validates requirements, and in the future will help craft joint concepts of operations and help identify the kinds of capabilities that we would ask our services to build to. That’s a part. Another part is the Defense Acquisition Board that then makes recommendations about how many of a various thing ought to be bought. And the Chairman of the JROC sits as the Vice Chairman of the Defense Acquisition Board, and that Board is headed up by the civilian who heads up our AT&L, [Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics], our Acquisition Department, an Under Secretary for acquisition, directly under the Secretary [of Defense.] And then those decisions in the budget process, when the Defense Acquisition Board says yes because the JROC has validated it and they have made their own independent decision about whether or not we should buy it, when they say yes, we should buy up to 600 of something, then that’s given to the service secretaries and they then work inside their budgets. And the service secretaries, who are civilians, are working with the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the service chiefs, a combination of civilian and military, work together to determine whether or not some money ought to be shifted from one program to another.

So, number one, civilian control of the military is sound and on good footing and without doubt. Number two, the military body that is the JROC is part of a process where some is pure military in uniform talking to each other, some is pure civilians talking to each other, and some is a combination of the two in a collective way, giving our best recommendations to the Secretary so he can decide what he’s going to do, or so he can decide what recommendations he wants to take to the President. So, I’m very comfortable that the organizations that exist are very capable today and for the future of dealing with what they need to do.

When you then talk about transformation then, the first question, about how we can best stay plugged into our friends around the world, this is something we really have to be careful with. We do not want to design an armed force that by virtue of the way it talks to itself or the way it operates, is not capable of working with a coalition and, therefore, has to operate on its own because we’ve gone to this piece of ground and everybody else is still standing over here. We absolutely, on command and control, communications, all the connectivity pieces, must be able to talk not only amongst ourselves, but with our potential coalition partners.

That does not mean that you cannot run as fast as you can in the direction that you want to go. It does mean that when you’re doing that, you need to be conscious of the fact that everyone is not going to be able to spend the same amount of resources, that their capabilities in many cases are absolutely essential and you want to plug into them.

The new battlefield of counterterrorism, I believe, gives other countries a brand new opportunity to have significant impact on the battlefield. And the battlefield is the world for the global war on terrorism. A country that has 100 soldiers to be added to X thousand soldiers in an assault may feel like their contribution isn’t very big. But that same country, with the same 100 soldiers trained as special operations forces that can break down into ten, 10-man teams and go do some very special things in the war on terrorism can have a huge impact on the positive outcome of the war.

So, I believe that no country is so big that they can go it alone, and no country is so small that they cannot contribute. And that today, especially in the war on terrorism, small, flexible, adaptive, rapidly employable forces will have a huge impact. And other countries who look at that and have those kinds of forces will, in fact, be great partners with us in the war on terrorism.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Pete. This is a fitting note on which to end this opening session and to thank General Pace for this outstanding contribution to our discussions in this conference.