Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 34th IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security Strategy and Policy:
Security Planning and Military Transformation

December 2-3, 2003
U.S. Chamber of
Commerce Building
Lafayette Square, 1615 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C.

Address by Mr. Tony Brenton, Deputy Head of Mission, British Embassy

Introduction by Dr. Charles M. Perry, Vice President and Director of Studies, IFPA

Dr. Charles M. Perry: Let me welcome you to our last panel of the day, on the topic “Coalition Operations and Alliance Transformation.” Now, as we have already had more than once in this conference, we continue to enjoy an embarrassment of riches this afternoon, with five, highly-prominent speakers from diverse regions, all deeply involved in shaping the defense policies of their respective countries, including their approaches to coalition planning and alliance adaptations for the 21st century.

Now, as you may have guess, I say five because we’re only slightly less rich than we had expected, since unfortunately, Secretary Richard Lawless had to be drawn off to another meeting that competed. He sends his apologies, and we also regret his not being here, but that’s said. We have, as I said, an ongoing embarrassment anyways, with the wonderful people we have here before you.

You have their individual bios in your program, so I won’t read them here. But just to be sure that everyone knows who’s who, I’ll just introduce the speakers in the order that I’ve asked them to speak, beginning with General Wagner, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Force Joint Command. There’ll be Tony Brenton next, number two of the British Embassy here in Washington. Third will be Ovidiu Dranga, who’s the Deputy Secretary of State for Euro-Atlantic affairs—NATO affairs—the Romanian Ministry of National Defense. Next will be Nobukatsu Kanehara, who is now the Political Counselor at the Japanese Embassy here in D.C., but was most recently also Director of the Japan-United States Treaty Division in the Foreign Ministry, so deeply involved in these issues. And last, but far from least, Brigadier Mark Kelly from the Royal Australian Army, who also is now detailed to CentCom and will be speaking from that perspective today, as well as from his national perspective.

With that introduction, it’s horribly— I’ve taken something of a modified regional approach, beginning first with our U.S. Command, that has responsibility for this entire issue of integrating U.S. forces, training them for transformation, but also integrating them with allies and coalition partners, and then moving to Europe, and in the Euro-Atlantic and NATO region, and then moving to Asia, with our most important ally in that region, Japan, and then finally, again, to Brigadier Kelly, who will speak a bit about his national experiences from the Australian point of view, but also speak about CentCom as the region which really begins to bring together all the new allies from Europe and from Asia, at least from an operational sense. And it may continue to do for some years more, as we’ve been speaking about this last day and a half.

Before turning the floor over to General Wagner, let me just make three very quick points about the basic theme and topic of this panel that we might all keep in mind as we listen to the presentations, and think about what we might want to ask each of the panelists.

I think the first point to make is just simply to underscore, as many have at this conference already, the importance of coalition and alliance planning to future military operations of the 21st century. For even though we’ve been bombarded in recent months by near-constant commentaries regarding the American impulse in unilateralism, and despite the fact that United States can, and sometimes must, take the lead and act alone, the simple truth of the matter is that, more often than not, we have acted as part of a coalition, rather than alone, both by choice and sometimes by necessity—maybe at all times by necessity. Certainly depending on the circumstances, the coalition might be smaller or larger, and it may be more active in one phase of the operation as than in another, but it is a coalition nonetheless and that’s what we need to be planning for.

The second point follows from this first one, and it relates to how we think about and define coalition and coalition operations. And again, simply put, when we think about coalition operations, I think we need to think about much more than just the contribution of combat troops to combat operations, as important as that is. Keep in mind that the allies and the coalition partners can, and do, bring to an operation a broad range of assets and capabilities, material, and otherwise, and they can, and do, do just that across the rather wide spectrum of time, ranging from pre-conflict to the actual conflict, and as we now are seeing, at least some(?) are post-conflict phase.

So, apart from military forces, they can bring, among other things, crucial diplomatic support, important intelligence, access to key on-route facilities, and, not to be forgotten, vital insights into the nature of an adversary or a combat environment based on their own experience that we don’t have and we need to have access to. So, all of this will be as crucial in the future as it is today. We need to keep that. Bottom line is, we need to think about coalition and alliance planning in a larger context, and we have to think about wider range of options and a number of different time frames and keep those in mind, I think.

And the third and final point I’d leave you with is just to remember that coalitions of the willing are really just that, voluntary associations that we can’t just assume will be there, ready and available when wanted and needed. Indeed, as recent U.S. consultations, even with old friends, regarding potential contributions to the effort in Iraq confirms there’s often a good deal of diplomatic work and in-country political wrangling that needs to be done before a decision to join a coalition will be taken. And even after that decision is made, there’s generally a good deal of additional training and organizational work that needs to be done, before deployment can actually take place.

So, in other words, we need to be working very closely, very intimately, every day with good friends and allies well ahead of any contingency for which their help might be needed, or that help might never come, or at least not in a very timely and effective way. Fundamental point, again, is that transformation, with transformation—and probably even because of it—the alliance and coalition dimension of military operations will remain vital, and it will require an enormous amount of advance coordination and joint preparation to get it right.

So, with those brief introductory comments, let me pass it to the real experts, who are doing just that work.

Mr. Brenton: I have to say, I feel a slight disadvantage, standing up here as a mere low-tech diplomat surrounded by all you high-tech military folk. A diplomat was once defined as a man who thinks twice before saying nothing. [laughter] I have hopes of evading that stereotype, but my approach to the issues which we were invited to address—I have to say—comes from a more political, than a military, standpoint.

The topic that I’ve been asked to address is the lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom that we derived as a consequence of my experience of working very closely with you in that operation . I dealt with Afghanistan as well, so I will throw a little bit of that in. And what I’m going to set out for you, in fairly bold form, are seven, rather local, lessons. And then I’ll try and draw three, more global, conclusions from our experience working in coalition with your forces.

The first lesson is a very obvious one and a very basic one, but shouldn’t be forgotten, which is how crucial, to the success of the military operation, was the very close political understanding we had in the months leading up to the beginning of the war. For us in the U.K. and for you here in the United States, this was a very difficult war to plan, because there was no certainty there was going to be a war. There was no certainty where we were going to come from—and I’m going to come back to that. There was no certainty precisely what allies we were going to have.

Therefore, the facts that we in the U.K. knew, and the U.S. knew, our very top political leadership were working in intimate—couldn’t have been more intimate—cooperation gave a certain amount of assurance—the sort of capabilities which were available on each side, capacity for immense amount of contingency planning—so that when we got down to the last few days before the operation—and it was literally less than a week from the moment when war became inevitable to when the operations actually started—they’d been able to do a lot of contingency planning in reasonably confident expectation of how we would be working together, come the moment.

The second local lesson that I would draw goes to the military side of that and refers to slightly further back in history—the importance of a very long, shared history of military cooperation—in enabling the act of cooperation in the operation at the very end. And we in the U.K. and you in the U.S. are probably as close as any two nations on Earth, in terms of the closeness of our militaries, the exchanges of doctrine, shared kit—all of that—and that proved very, very important in enabling us to operate very smoothly and coherently together in Iraq.

There were some extra factors which also proved very important as we got into military operations. Our air forces had of course already been cooperating very closely in the maintenance of the No-Fly Zones. We all knew each other; they’d already been flying together, working together closely. The transition from protecting the No-Fly Zones to a more aggressive posture in Iraq was relatively smooth and straightforward.

Similarly, our navies had been cooperating very closely over maintaining the Sanctions Regime in the Gulf. So again, the personnel knew each other, the ships knew each other. The shift from what they had been doing to another military posture was relatively straightforward. And of course, also, the fact that we had worked very closely together in Afghanistan—particularly in the sorts of areas which you don’t talk about very much, special forces and so on—again, meant there was a lot of shared approach, a lot of people who knew each other, systems that knew each other, which functioned extremely effectively in the Iraqi context.

That’s my second lesson. The third lesson I would draw locally is simply the need for military agility, and this is a point which I think the general has already mentioned. Up until really very late, before it became clear that we were going to go to war in Iraq and how we were going to go to war in Iraq, we had expected that war to come from a completely different direction from the one that it finally came from. We had expected that Turkey would be involved in some way or another, and we would’ve been able to operate from the north rather than from the south. We needed at a very late stage in the planning to turn all of that around and shift the whole operation through—I’m not a geographer, but I would guess - about eight hundred miles and shift a lot of kit in response to that. Now, it is a happy fact that your armed forces and our armed forces are forces which are capable of making that switch—have the lift capacity, the mobility, the effectiveness of that sort, which enabled us to do that relatively seamlessly—and turned what had been intended to be a land and air operation into, in effect, an amphibious operation. But not many countries can manage that trick, and it’s an important lesson for the future.

My fourth local conclusion is a rather obvious one, which is the importance of how you handle the media. Sitting here in our embassy in Washington, sitting in Washington, sitting in America, sitting in the U.K., an awful lot of the —not the sheer military progress of the war, but the political backdrop against which it was conducted, and therefore the views, the politicians who were concerned about the outcome of the war—depended upon the media coverage. Whoever came up with the idea of imbedded journalists is a genius; it worked extremely well. But, particularly in the U.K., we were dealing with a media who, many of the elements of which, were pretty dubious about the whole exercise. And keeping them fed with facts, and keeping them fed with demonstrations that we were actually having successes where a lot of people were looking for failures, was a very major part in insuring that the background to the military campaign was supportive of the military foreground.

My fifth—am I up to? Yes, fifth—key conclusion, locally, from the war in Iraq, also from the war in Afghanistan, is the issue of casualties. Now, obviously, fighting a war, you in any case want to minimize the number of casualties. But again, referring back to the political background, we deeply care, obviously, about protecting the lives of our own servicemen. It’s been crucial in these two wars, and more widely, not to be seen to be inflicting arbitrary and unnecessary civilian casualties. This produces exactly the sort of political backlash which you want to avoid. In any case, when you’re fighting a war in effect to liberate a country, the worst possible preliminary to liberating that country is to kill too many of its civilians. So there’s that.

But in addition to that, certainly in the U.K. context—and I felt it here a bit as well—there would also have been a public reaction if we had been seen to be unnecessarily brutal in terms of enemy military casualties. Now in Iraq, this actually proved rather straightforward, since an awful lot of the Iraqi armed forces simply melted away. But this is a consideration for future such operations. The killing has to be kept to an absolute minimum.

The sixth local lesson that we drew is the problem of what the military call “Blue on Blue” incidents—friendly fire losses. There was quite a lot of this, early in the Iraqi campaign. It was particularly visible, I think, because the Iraqis were rather invisible. And it did cause a bit of a reaction, certainly in the U.K. Now—as I said, I’m not a military person—I’m advised this is not an easy issue to solve. These things happen, by accident, by misjudgment, and they’re unavoidable when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of heavily-armed troops moving in a relatively confined battle space. Nevertheless, there are systems—considerations of who’s in command and control, how you communicate between two allies, those sorts of things—which we’re looking at, again, in the context of the outcome of the Iraq with the view to improving the sorts of contacts and minimizing that sort of very damaging incident.

And the final lesson I would draw, which I guess is probably the most visible given where we are now in Iraq, is the importance of planning for the transition out of war and into the post-war situation. Now, quite a lot has been said —I think much of it unjustly—about our failure to plan for post-war Iraq. We did plan for post-war Iraq of course, but it is actually quite difficult to plan to take over a country of 25 million population which had been ruled by a dictator for twenty-six years and which has been subject to U.N. sanctions for ten of those years. So, in terms of expecting perfect planning and things going exactly as you would have anticipated them, that was always totally unrealistic.

But what is very clear, both in the Iraqi context and was also clear as a result of the Afghan experience, is that you do need the best possible links between, on the one hand, your ministries of defense and, on the other hand, your development ministries, the various humanitarian agencies—those sorts of bodies—who will expect you to take up a lot of the functions of a civilian government once you have won your war. And there are really quite sharp lessons to be learned from our performance in Iraq, about exactly the sorts of links you need and the sorts of preparations you need to make so that, as I say, once the war has been won, you then make the swiftest possible transition to rebuilding the society which you have taken over.

So those are my seven local lessons. I draw three, much bigger conclusions about helpful steps to enable coalitions like ours to work in the future.

The first—and I think you must have heard this to death over the last couple of days—is simply the importance of military transformation. The war we fought in Iraq, following the war we fought in Afghanistan, was visibly in many ways the type for the sort of conflict we’re most likely to be involved in, in the future. It is not the sort of conflict which in general you can bring massed tank armies, shipped over weeks from thousands of miles away, to win. This is a sort of war where you need very fast mobility, troops equipped to be able to be brought in very quickly, and the lift to get them to wherever you want to go, plus the intelligence support so they know, when they’re there, how best to operate. This is a very different sort of armed force from that which many of our allies currently possess. I would guess the United States, the United Kingdom, are probably the two best equipped countries in the world in those terms. But it will be important, as we look towards future conflicts of the Iraq type, what we will want are the allies— that those allies have made the sorts of transformations that we have already begun to make, so that they can contribute as we have done.

My second big lesson is about the design of the military, and I can best put it this way—Hitherto, we’ve all gone off in our own national way, designed our military, bought them kit, given them a doctrine, and sent them out. And then they found themselves cooperating, sooner or later, in the field. And they’ve had to build in, reverse engineer, into their design the business of cooperation. Now that, given the world we’re in now, no longer seems to me to be adequate. We need to incorporate the concept of operating together right from the moment that you begin the design, so it’s built in from the beginning, the sort of doctrine you choose, the sort of kit you choose—to some extent, the sort of forces you have. This sort of concept is emerging, but instead of retrospectively thinking, “Oh gosh, I’m going to be working with someone else,” maybe we should think a little bit about how we do that. You build it in from the beginning.

And one current project, which I point to, which does that is the Joint Strike Fighter that we are being built here in the United States, who, with the United Kingdom, is a major contributor—be a shared piece of kit, which brings a lot of inter-operability between our two forces, which we’ve not hitherto had.

The third, final, global lesson that I would draw will be an unsurprising one to you, which is how crucial NATO still is to us all. Now, this is a surprising lesson, as NATO was of course explicitly designed to keep the Soviet Union out. . So why do we still need NATO? And I think what Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us is that NATO is now the key test-bed for the sort of inter-operability, the sort of training together, the sort of planning for cooperation—which is what we’re going to depend on in future joint operations around the world. As you’ve heard from the General, NATO has been equipped with its own command, specifically designed to push forward the sorts of transformation which I’ve said our future allied armed forces will need. And NATO is also developing in its Response Force exactly the sort of highly-mobile, highly-effective, distance-reaching force, which is a sort of force which modern wars will require.

That’s it; thank you very much.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Perry: We have some time for questions now, and I’m sure we’ve got some questions out there to these presentations, all very interesting and compelling. Right here, first question?

Audience: Peter Sharpen, Mider(?) Corporation. General Wagner, one of your slides indicated that, in the retrospective on Operation Iraqi Freedom, one of the areas where we need to do better is coalition information sharing. Could you discuss a little bit the directions in which you think we might move to do that better?

General Wagner: Well, certainly, it is a frustration, not only to the United States forces, but also to our allies and partners who we attempt to operate with. In the past eleven months, I’ve had the opportunity to host twenty-two MoDs—Ministers of Defense, or Chiefs of Defense—from other nations, and, endurably, we get to that topic. In fact, in talking to Australia, their comment was, “We want to be by your side when the war fights start, but we can’t be there unless we’re part of a planning upfront—enabled to see the planning, see the information, and share in the development of it.” That is just one country, who would say the same thing. And in fact, many of our operating forces have had to figure out ways on their own, where they can figure out how to share the information because our systems don’t allow us to do that.

Really, we do think that there are technologies solutions to this. A large part of our information— Of course, we do a lot of our work and a lot of our planning on secure nets—a secure net which has more information on it than you want to share. And so, the question is how do you allow partial access. And there are technologies now that will enable us to do this. Plus, as you know, perhaps, that DEP STEP DEF(?) is just recently authorized, and written provided guidance set(?) enables us to do more information sharing. So, it’s a question of policy, and it’s a question of technology.

This certainly isn’t a question of a lack of desire on the part of either(?) the United States forces or our allies, who we’re working with to share the information. But it is a question of setting the rules, and the business rules, that allow us to share that information. And I think we are making progress, and I think we have reason to be optimistic. This is an issue that is—the importance of which we share it(?) at all levels. And we do have some technologies that we’re working on, that allow us to have somebody have access to the computer and limit the access to where they can go within the information that’s available. So, I think there’s reason to be optimistic, and I think that the DEP STEP DEF(?) has made a first, good step along that line, and I think we’ve got some technologies solutions.

Dr. Perry: There are two questions, back there on that table.

Audidence: Wendy Jaffe, General Accounting Office. With the U.S. Army investing in future combat system and network-centric operations, provide through network-centric operations, how is this going to affect U.K. forces and Australian forces, in terms of inoperability?

Dr. Perry: ...[inaudible] who the question is directed to?

Would you care to address it from your standpoint?

Mr. Brenton: The issue goes slightly wider than network-centric operations. The U.S. is spending— It’s a fascinating fact about U.S. military spending. The U.S. are now spending more on Defence R&D than any other country spending on its entire defense budget. And this is obviously a challenge for those countries that expect to be working closely with the United States in future campaigns, to ensure that we can. And the trick has to be, as these systems evolve, to be involved ourselves, to evolve parallel systems or to have a share in the systems, and to ensure that our doctrines and practices, and equipment, develop in parallel with those in the United States. I quoted the example of joint strike fighter—it’s exactly an application, that sort of approach.

Dr. Perry: Anyone else like to add to that, or—?

We had another question at that same table—one more?

Audience: Ray Stuchohl, a student at Catholic University. In the last three year, there have been several occasions when the U.S. worked hard to involve ally partners throughout the world in operations or goals. One that I can think of is missile defense, then, of course, operations Enduring Freedom and Iraq. General Wagner just mentioned information operations as a possible lesson learned. Can you tell us some other lessons learned for the future, that we might want to look into?

General Wagner: Other areas to look into—and I’m sorry, into which area? Can you—

Dr. Perry: Other lessons learned from the combined operations of the—

General Wagner: Would combine?

Mr. Stuchohl: ...[inaudible] Sorry. More in getting the allies on board to support us, particularly some of the errors that might have been made with First Missile Defense, and then with convincing other countries to work with us on Iraq.

General Wagner: I think that the first thing I would say, for OIF, would be the phenomenal amount of cooperation and support that was provided by other nations in many different ways. There was information sharing; there was logistical support. There was basing. There were nations who were riding the one aircraft that they had or the one courier(?) that they had. There was a tremendous amount of support that did come from other nations, so the first thing to do would be to acknowledge the tremendous amount of cooperation and support that we did get from many other nations, not least of which was seen at CenCom in the planning and the support there.

I think there’s also a lot of operational sharing of how to do things, how to operate in an urban area. There are other forces that have been operating with terrorist forces for a long time. Their forces have been operating in the build-up areas against an organized crime. So, there’s all sorts of information that’s been shared, and tactics and procedures that have allowed us to operate more effectively and to, in fact, save the lives of the soldiers of all countries, as they are operating on the battlefields. So, I think that there are many, many successes, far more so than become a current from what we would normally read in the newspapers. A very strong partnership has been mentioned by General Kelly, not just in CentCom, but on the battlefield, and the support from the nations that we have operated from.

Now, specific other aspects besides the information sharing—Clearly, we were able to engage targets with our aircraft. With the information that we share, we can use precision munitions together. There are many aspects of the battle fight that have been fought, and are very much of a coalition aspect, with absolute sharing of the same training techniques.

And one of the aspects that we’re trying to do is through our joint national training capability, that soleverage(?) the same experience that we found in Iraq, in our training. If you were to take the map of the world and you put on it, Iraq, where do forces come from to fight? They never got together at a given stage, and based and planned. They came from all around the world, and they came to fight on the battlefield. That’s where they first joined for the operational forces. They launched from bases all around the world, and they came to fight. That’s the way we fight. We don’t get together—all gather together at Fort Benning and have a big conference to decide how we’re going to fight. We come from all the bases around the world, whether the naval, ground, or air assets(?), and we join on the battlefield to fight. And that’s what we’re trying to replicate with a global-national training capability, where we replicate that on our training fields, around the world.

So, we feel that we’ve learned a lot and are willing(?) to work together. We have done extraordinarily good job of doing that, but we want to build—
Audicence:—and how—what, perhaps—is going on between your forces and U.S. forces or other coalition forces, or might go on, that would improve the chances for coalition combined operations?

Brigadier Kelly: We shouldn’t underestimate the benefits of the ongoing exchange programs that many of us share, in a bilateral sense and also multilateral sense, and the joint combined exercises that our forces participate in, at a variety of time.

If I look back at our experience before going into East Timor in September of 1999, we had done a series of activities with U.S. forces from the Pacific —by naval, marine, and air force—as well as from USARPAC in Hawaii. And in a series of command post exercises and other planning activities that were totally unrelated to the events of September 1999, we actually then had similar personalities come and join our team in that combined force headquarters for the Internet operations. So, the fact that we understood, knew these people, we shared common procedures—these are things that allow you to meet in the dark night before going into an operation and actually work through things in a very balanced way.

But that means that we need that time to continue that sort of remediation training, when we are fully committed to ongoing operations, which global war on terrorism actually presents at the moment. So if we’re dealing with nations that have small defense forces, they need time to remediate themselves; they can’t sustain a level of operation. So, we have to be able to pace ourselves, as I said, and, indeed, Admiral Olson mentioned it yesterday. We’re involved in a marathon, not a sprint. So, our planning has to actually be able to articulate to our coalition partners potentially how long this effort is required, and they may be able to identify certain events in the timeline where they can contribute another niche capability which will actually relieve the pressure from another senior partner.

So, all of that is within the same sphere of the planning required, but also, the relationships that develop during those combined exercises that we’re fortunate to participate in, as well as the exchange programs and the exchange of officers at our respective command and staff colleges.

Dr. Perry: Anyone else? Question, here, in the front.

Audience: Jason Sherman, from Defense News. My question is directed to Kanahara-san. Near the end of your talk, you outlined a seven point initiative that you said reflected your personal views for a set of modernization and policy initiatives that the Japanese self-defense forces might do well to adopt. I’m wondering if you might be able to offer us any insights into the ongoing National Defense Program Outline, the NDPO, that the Japan Defense Agency is undertaking, that is expected to inform new thinking and new decisions in terms of how the Japan military is organized and any new modernization initiatives they may undertake.

Mr. Kanehara: To be clear for everybody here, the Defense Program, ours, is based upon five years programs ...[inaudible] continuous. We are now in the fourth year of that chairman and we have to make a new one next 2005. For several mid five years program, we set big policy guideline that is defense outline, and that will be changed for we are facing new threats and new missions. And debate is going on, in December, I think a decision could be made, but I don’t know, really. This is really hot issue, and my government is working on this very hard. I’m not allowed to discuss anything here; I’m sorry. [laughter]

Audience: ...[inaudible] to discuss enhanced cooperation with the U.S. missile defense capability and a small ...[inaudible] strategic air ...[inaudible]. Are any of those things being discussed and debated? Can you tell us some of the things that are being debated?

Mr. Kanehara: I can give you some basic line of thinking. As I said, our forces are based upon the exclusively homeland defense posture, and this defense posture will not change, because we are still in alliance with the United States. U.S. is a spear, and Japan is a shield. That is our basic concept of our defense.

But, because of that, we have no long legs(?), cargo planes for example. When we started our peacekeeping operation in 1993, we sent our air forces to Rwanda, in Kenya, to have strategic transportation there. But we had only C-130s—still have C-130s only—and our Chief of Air Staff went to Rwanda, made six stopovers. And we think it’s too obsolete; we have to have new cargo planes to have new missions. That does not mean that we’re going to have huge, power-position capabilities like U.S. It’s not our intention. But we have more international missions that were not conceived in 1960s, 1970s, and to cope with these new missions, we have to have suitable instruments to deliver these missions.

Our threats too—the ballistic missiles were luxurious weapons for ships of powers. But, these days, they’re proliferating and the concept of deterrence has changing. It’s no longer the way to defend itself by pointing guns and— but through(?) here. But we see now many people having guns; why not putting bulletproof here? So the concept is changing. We have to prepare new threats and new defense concepts. But, what would be the final decision of the governments is top secret; sorry, can’t tell you.

Dr. Perry: We’ll be waiting for December.

Question, here ...[inaudible]

Audience: Ed Bruner, from the Congressional Research Service—direct a question to General Kelly. I was very much unaware of your coalition planning group, but I applaud the apparent promise that this approach would hold, and wonder if you might share with us a coalition perspective that the group perhaps developed and presented to the commander?

Brigadier Kelly: Just a ...[inaudible]

Audeince: A coalition— You said, one of your missions was to incorporate the coalition perspective under the overall planning. I’m just curious if you could offer us a type of coalition perspective that might have come out of that process.

Brigadier Kelly: One of the products that we produced on behalf of command of Central Command is a quarterly area of responsibility-wide estimate, which is a bit of a rugged check. It was formerly done by an element within the J-3 Operations Directorate of the headquarters. It’s now solely done by the Combined Planning Group. So, it’s a refreshing perspective for the commander. It looks at his full area of responsibility, not just specific sub-theaters that are active at present, and it provides him with a view drawn from a variety of sources—but quite often, open sources—and gives him just a view as to where we are. It may inform or influence other planning efforts, but it’s presented to his senior staff and himself; it’s an internal document. And he’s certainly been challenged by the view, which is now done by a twenty plus team of coalition officers versus a uniquely U.S.-only product, as it had been done prior to December, last year.

So, that’s one example. The other is within some of the courses of action being developed within the review of the campaign plan. Again, we are drawing on a wide variety of experience, a wide variety of national, cultural, religious, and regional perspectives, and so, different militaries have different ways of dealing with the problem. And so, some of the solutions will be different from a U.S.-only planner’s perspective to the way to conduct the operation. And that’s what this group is being acknowledged as providing other ways of doing business.

Dr. Perry: Question, here.

Audience: Colonel Jim Holzerith. I’m the Canadian Military Attaché here in the Canadian Embassy. My question actually goes back to Admiral Cebrowski’s notions this morning, that he introduced on interdependence versus interoperability. And, I think he introduced to them the joint context, but I would extend it to the multination(?) and coalition arena as well. And I guess, it really does tie back into the notion of design —joint—or design with interoperability in mind, in the first set. My question really is, is to what degree are we able to do that? Perhaps beyond concept development and experimentation, collaborative planning upfront, to truly get to an interdependent or at least a stage of coalitions where you can burden-share and plan on specific capabilities or leverage specific capabilities within a coalition.

Dr. Perry: General Wagner, do you want to—

General Wagner: ...[inaudible] from the standpoint of ally command transformation, NATO, and the operations that are going on there, and say that— I think that that is exactly what you will see happen. That is exactly what should happen. We’ve heard Japan talk about the fact that they don’t have the long legs, but they need the long legs. They have the willingness to participate, but they don’t necessarily need to buy everything they need to do that. We need to share, in doing that. And so, that is an interdependence, just as within our own military. The Army does not need to buy their own transports. We are dependent upon the Air Force for the transport.

That same sort of a concept is what you will see come out of the work that’s being done with ally command transformation and NATO, as they look to the capabilities that they need to collectively and figure out who’s going to buy which piece of the part that is required for the whole. And so, I think you’re 100% right in your direction as to where things will go —is that they will go to a direction of interdependence, not just interoperable. And they should be; it’s an efficiency, and it’s an effectiveness. It’s a partnership and it’s a trust. And I think that we are there to the point where we can do that, and will do that.

Dr. Perry: Tom, perhaps time for one more question? Another one, anyone?

Okay, I think that will do it for this afternoon, and I want to thank all the panelists for wonderful contributions. And, I would ask that—
[Applause]

I would ask everybody, please, to just stay where you are for a few minutes, so Dr. Pfaltzgraff and Admiral Green can come up and make a few closing remarks.