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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. Robert D. Kaplan, author and correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly

Introduction by Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., President, IFPA

I would like next to introduce Robert Kaplan. He's a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and he is, as most of you in this room know, a best-selling author on international affairs. He has written a large number of books, and I can only mention a few of them here. One of them is Balkan Ghosts. Another one is called Ends of the Earth. And the first one that I read by him was actually an article called "The Coming Anarchy" in The Atlantic Monthly, which then he published as a book, a much more extensive examination of the coming anarchy, as he put it. He foresaw much of the landscape that we're talking about here today. He has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe, among others. He is a frequent lecturer at universities, at business forums, at military colleges, and at conferences such as this, and has been a previous speaker in this conference series. So, Bob, it's with great pleasure that I welcome you back.

Robert Kaplan: Well, thank you so much, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here this morning with this really distinguished panel. I would just say that I agree with all the parameters of what the last speaker said. And I've spent the past, six of the 12 months, embedded with NCOs and middle level officers in Colombia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and other places. And what I'd like to do this morning is give you a kind of nitty-gritty of how it looked from the point of view of the NCO on all of these issues. And keep in mind, everything that I'm going to be saying is the product of conversations with warrant officers, sergeant majors, nothing above major or lieutenant colonel, particularly in Afghanistan and in the southern Philippines, where there's been a lot going on, though it hasn't been reported.

Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Jamas Lamia (?), Abu Saif, all of these groups are insurgencies. It's a worldwide insurgency. It's like El Salvador in the 1980s, writ large. And we are fighting a classic counterinsurgency, except on a worldwide basis, which means we have more to learn from our experiences in places like El Salvador, the Philippines of 100 years ago, Nicaragua of the 19th century, and places such as that than we have to learn from the two World Wars, the two Gulf Wars, and the Korean wars.

Now, what is an insurgency? First of all, it means a dispersed battlefield, relatively empty of troops. Operation Iraqi Freedom was not the war. It was the shaping operation. The real war is now. The real war is a small war, and the Marine Small War Manual of 1940 defines a small war as when you go in with big infantry, the enemy disperses and disappears, regroups after several weeks in smaller numbers, and hits you here and there, in pinprick attacks. All that's from the 1940 Marine Small War Manual. And we see it not just in Iraq today, but in many other places. A counterinsurgency means military operations never stop. There are no victory declared. There are no victory parades. But at the same time that military operations never stop, diplomacy never stops either.
Counterinsurgency means smaller and more far-reaching advanced operating bases and forward operating bases. When Washington speaks of combined arms, and jointness, often what I see in the field is it just means pile-on, if there's something going on in the Philippines that Army SF is doing, and Navy wants a piece of it, the Air Force wants a piece of it, while real combined operations is like one Air Force embed in an Army SF A-team. Or go out to the fire bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are now our battle labs. A typical fire base is a mud walled fort where three or four Army SF A-teams, 40 or 50 guys, and OGAs, other government agencies, CIA, defense intelligence agency, maybe a Navy Seal team, they'll all be together, with a civil affairs unit next door in the next fort. And it means right down to the unit level, different services operating. It doesn't mean vertical pile-on.

Counterinsurgency is also low tech. It means that 810s from the late 1970s can do a lot more for us than F-15s and F-22s. Every NCO I spoke to said, "Give us more 810s. The older and slower the plane, the better, the better it is for close air support. Because you're going to encounter the enemy in small numbers, in mountain valleys." Oh, and it also means rediscovering the Toyota Land Cruiser with mountain medium light— light machine guns, studying the techniques of the Chadian rebels and the Eritrean guerillas of the 1970s and the 1980s. It's not just SF and special ops that have bought into this. This was told to me by a 10th Mountain Division Colonel from the regular Army, and how he's been reeducated, being out in Afghanistan the past six months.

And ultimately, it means powering down to a flat hierarchy. And now I get into the substance of my talk. To me, from what I've seen in the field, transformation is bureaucratic. It means cutting away vertical layers of micromanagement. We achieved transformation beautifully and perfectly two years ago, in late October, November, early December 2001, with the fifth special forces group based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Counterinsurgency means producing a product and letting them loose. The fewer instructions, the better, and no instructions is even better than that.

What happened was that several A-teams, maybe 80 or 90 troops, were sent into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan and other places. They were preceded by a smaller number of CIA and others. Each of these teams had Air Force embeds, and they were giving no real rules except, link up with the indigs, the indigenous troops, in this case, the Northern Alliance and friendly Pushtuns in the south, and make it happen. So they did everything. They grew beards. They broke all the rules of the regular Army. And within about six or eight weeks, 80 people essentially conquered Afghanistan. And it was done, and the way it worked was, you had master sergeants calling in B-52 strikes from Diego Garcia. Essentially, all the bureaucratic layers between the Secretary of Defense and that A-team team sergeant were cut away, so that they were operating in total autonomy. Some of the colonels and lieutenant colonels in Fort Bragg told me that these guys were moving so fast, they couldn't keep up with them, so there was no point of even giving them orders, or any kind of directions.

All of you probably know what a CONOP is, a concept of operations. It's a form that is filled out before an operation, blood type, social security number of everyone taking part, or a 5W form. Well, the Marine Small War Manual from the 1940s talks about how, in a small war, you do away with written orders. Orders should be quick. They should be verbal. Two years ago, CONOPs were practically done away with, or they were approved within a half an hour. And now I get into the sad part. We're back to 72/96 hours for CONOP. CONOP approval in Afghanistan, where it's diluted, it's become risk averse, and so many compound hits are happening, like, a week or half a week later than they should, and that results in dry holes rather than in weapons catches, and all of that.

Keep in mind, now I'm going to be talking about the bread and butter of the war on terrorism, which is not the sexy hunt for high value targets, HVTs. It's the hunt for middle value targets. And if the hunt for middle value targets is bureaucratically impeded, it hurts the hunt for high value targets. It's the old Rudy Guiliani subway turnstile phenomenon. If you want to catch murderers, start arresting kids that are jumping turnstiles, and you'll find that one out of 10 of them are wanted for a worse crime, or they at least will have vital information on somebody who's wanted on a worse crime.

So, after Afghanistan was conquered, we stood up the combined joint task force. Thousands of people flooded in. I think now we have 10,000 or so troops in Afghanistan— I'm guessing that about half of them are at Bagram or in Kandahar— and with very, very small numbers of troops in fire bases spread around Afghanistan, where it should be the opposite. Bagram should be small, much, much smaller, and these fire bases should be more numerous, smaller. And they should be the FOBs for even smaller AOBs further out, with just six or seven guys. Again, let me emphasize, this is what all the NCOs and others are saying.

Right now, what we've basically recreated is a vertical management of middle and high level officers at these major bases. And they even admit it. I watched a meeting with a colonel who came down from Bagram to a certain fire base, and people said, "Well, how's it going in Bagram, sir?" He said, "Too many people like me making life difficult for you. There's no decision that the major here can't make in terms of an operation. There's no reason that any permission should be asked higher up. But in fact, that's the way the system has been recreated.

I covered the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And in certain ways— and I don't want to exaggerate this point— we've become the Soviets. Don't get me wrong. The Afghans still love us. It's amazing. There's been no, in any way, no deterioration of good relations between the population and the American soldiery. But one of the reasons that's happening is because in Afghanistan US soldiers are getting out of the HUM-Vs, walking among crowds, handing out Power Bars. All the things they're not supposed to do, they're doing, and it's working. We've become the Soviets in this way. Remember, the Soviets came in, declared victory quickly, assumed they won a great battle. And then little by little, they were eaten up alive by insurgents who used the tribal agencies inside Pakistan as rear bases. What you hear throughout Pakistan is that we're not where we need to be. The fire bases should be doing unconventional war, everything from digging water wells, building schools, going out with the indigs inside the Pakistan border, and a diplomatic contrivance has to be created to get the government in Pakistan to look the other way. Just sending out teams for high value targets over the border will not be enough. The Soviets were not defeated in Afghanistan. And the Soviets learned. They brought in more and more Spetznaz as the war went along. They got better and better at it, but it took them too long, because they learned too late, and by that time, the home front had turned against them.

We're two years into the war on terrorism. Pushtu should no longer be considered an exotic language in Washington. Neither should Urdu or Persian. And yet, you go out on compound hits and missions, and even the counterintelligence officers from special forces haven't been given much language training, and they're forced to work through translators. We should be mass producing speakers of these languages. And if you believe that Pakistan has a difficult future ahead, and if you believe that ultimately we may have a big presence in the tribal agencies, we should be mass producing Urdu speakers as well. Again, this is what you hear from people in the field.

Let me talk for five minutes or so about the Philippines. People talk a lot about promoting democracy, and that's what the United States should be doing around the world. Well, an era of increased and more democratic governments means an era of more restrictive rules of engagement, more restrictive ROEs. Because the more democratic governments you're dealing with, the more you have new governments who are besieged by new and very aggressive media, who the last thing that new, fledgling democracy needs to see with its own media is American troops running around, killing people. The reason why the rules of engagement are so strict and so frustrating in the southern Philippines and Colombia and other places is because we're helping to support new or uncertain democracies. And one of the ways we support them is to operate quietly, in the shadows, in ways that don't generate bad local media publicity.

Enduring Freedom had another element besides Afghanistan. It had a Philippine element, which is very interesting, I think, for the future. We couldn't go in and kill the enemy, but what we could do is send in various special ops teams to build water wells, rebuild neighborhoods, hold med caps (?), dent caps (?), in order to do several things: to sever the link between the terrorists and the indigenous population; to destroy the bad stereotypes that the terrorists had created about American forces; to get good local publicity in the media. And simply by being there, even though American troops were not shooting, they forced Abu Saif and others to retreat to even smaller islands, and to marginalize them even further. You know that a parent seeing a kid treated for malaria or tuberculosis is going to be a very vital intelligence source for what's going on in that village. And if we can only do that in the northwest frontier and other places, I think the Philippines and the success has a lot to teach us. And also, we did something else which we're going to have to do worldwide. We shamed the government in Manila into paying more attention to its poor Muslim population in the south, which it hadn't done up until that point.

Just a few general points while I close out here. There's been a lot of talk of imperial over-stretch. Well, I guess you can have imperial over-stretch if we had another Iraq. But we could be involved in 100 and 170 countries, and it would be imperial under-stretch. It all depends on the numbers of people you have in these places. What I see in most of our deployments is force multiplication, not imperial over-stretch. I see 10 guys in one country, 20 in another, really accomplishing great things. And in fact, when we only have one or two major operations in a theater, it encourages Washington pile-on, because every service wants a piece of that operation. And if we had more operations, say, in the Pacific command, you'd have enough work for everyone to go around, and therefore we would be more efficient in the places. So the number of countries we are in has nothing to do with whether we're over-stretched or not. Neither does the gross number of troops in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

I've read that a number of senators said we should increase the number of troops in Afghanistan. Every officer and noncom I spoke to in Afghanistan said nothing could be more destructive. Because the way it's set up now would mean a larger support tail, a bigger presence at Bagram. What we need is a few hundred more people at smaller and smaller bases in the hinterlands, and maybe to move half of Bagram to K2 and Uzbekistan. These are the kinds of things people talk about at late-night rap sessions in the barracks.

Finally, last point, that everyone has their own idea of why the US military is so great. My idea is because we have the best NCO corps in the world. And that's something that nobody could steal, because it's a product of our middle class society. Your average team sergeant NCO is someone of incredible capabilities. And I think the job of the Secretary of Defense and others, among other things, is ultimately, ultimately, find all kinds of ways to power down responsibility to these people in the most far-flung regions, and to cut out layers in between. Whenever that can happen, you're going to start to see that we're going to bring more and more good luck upon ourselves in the war on terrorism, because that's the essence of counterinsurgency, which is, flatten that hierarchy. Get rid of those vertical, industrial age layers. Thank you very much.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much, Bob. Bob Kaplan has, for many, many years, been embedded, I might say, at the grassroots, or at the NCO level, whether it be in the military or in the civilian sector, the counterparts. And therefore, his work has been so valuable in giving us insights into so many of these regions of the world.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We're still missing Mansoor Ijaz, but I think we should begin the discussion. Let me just give you the basic ground rules. Please keep your question brief. We're looking for questions. If there's a statement you need to make, make the statement, but make it brief. Secondly, please identify yourself. And thirdly, please wait for the microphone after you're recognized for the question. So, who would like to be the first questioner? Who would like to go first? Yes, right here.

Audience: I'm Ed Rowney (?), your former friendly arms controller. My question, I guess, is mostly to Bob Kaplan, but maybe to some others. And that has to do with this mindset— Maybe the other speakers can chime in on this. Why is it that the leaders of the Islamic faith, the mullahs, don't recognize that this extremist group could possibly bring about their downfall? Why don't they speak out against them, and excommunicate them? Why the timidity of the mullahs?

Robert Kaplan: The Middle East is a laboratory of pure power politics. Soft power is not very well understood. Remember that we operate in a world of legality, of laws, and regulations, where if you have a fight with someone else, you have courts to resume to. But in the Middle East, though there are laws on the books, in all these societies, it's driven by pure power and intimidation of one sort or another. And if some of these others, more moderate groups, thought that they had the power to overcome the others, they might in fact operate that way.

But there is another thing. As Mansoor said, al-Qaeda and its spin-off viruses is the most dynamic element today in Middle East society. You know, it doesn't require country clearances, travel orders. It doesn't have to write CONOPs. It's not totally snarled in bureaucratic paperwork the way the postindustrial age West has become, or with big organizations, the way we have become. You know, it's the ultimate postindustrial kind of centerless corporation. It's run on an informal basis, and we think of informal, medieval institutions as backward. In fact, they're far forward than us, because the most effective power is informal power and influence. And these people have really developed a very dynamic, centerless cluster of organizations that conveys itself, that conveys its power.

And there's something else. Islam is the best of the three religions for poor people. If you're poor, and downtrodden, Islam is an austere voice. It's a religion that's willing to fight. It's a simple message. It's kind of like early Christianity was in the second and third centuries of Rome. If you read about the various Christian cults who rose up against Roman rule in Tunisia and what is today western Algeria, you'll see a great similarity between them and some of the radical Islamic cults.

And then there's something else, and then I'll push it on to the other panelists. If you look at a map, and you look at these towns, and these tribal agencies of Pakistan, like Parachinar, Miramshan (?), Wizeristan (?), they look like small towns, and they were, 10 or 15 years ago. But when you get there, they're slums. They're inner city slums, with narrow warrens, five, six stories, many families packed in tight. The regime in Pakistan has done nothing for them. As one of them said to me, "We don't care if it's Noar Sharif (?), Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf, whether it's democrat, it's an army coup. It makes no difference. The people in Islamabad hate us. We're not really part of the country." And the radical mullahs are the ones who say, "Stand up and fight."

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I think that Mansoor Ijaz would like to comment on this question as well, and any other member of the panel is welcome to do so. But Mansoor, you in particular

Mansoor Ijaz: I think the way I would put it to you, very simply, is that the rulers are afraid of the monsters that they created. They created the monsters by suppressing the natural capacity. Who is bin Laden, at the end of the day? What is the phenomenon of this man? He basically wanted to combat and rise up against his fascist father, and he couldn't do that. Then he wanted to rise up against the state, and the state was in such a state of affairs that he wasn't able to do that. And so he said, "Let me go and strike out at those who support my state." And when the state stripped him of his citizenship, they stripped him of his dignity, and that caused even more— It's what I call the trampling of the ego. In the infamous memo that many of you know about, that I wrote to Sandy Berger (?) in 1996, I said to him, "Sandy, we cannot achieve anything in the Islamic world by trampling the egos of their downtrodden. If we do not do more to raise them up, their disaffected up, they will surely come to our shores to tear us down."

In the end, it comes down to a war of not intellects, not minds. It's a war of what's going on in your heart. Because every human being's heart beats the same way. And these leaders have not provided for their people. And then on top of that, they've taken orders from us. That's the perception, at least over there. We've got to stop making them give orders, and they've got to start providing for their people. Otherwise, that large, silent majority that exists in the Muslim world will never rise up against these fanatics and contain them from within, and that is the only ultimate long-term solution that we ought to be trying to get at, because nothing else will work.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Anyone else on that question? In that case, let's go to our next questioner, the gentleman right back here. And then this next one will be back there. So, let's start right here.

Audience: Wooston Lee (?) from the Department of Defense. My question is mainly to Mr. Hoehn and Mr. Kaplan. I was wondering if you felt the last presentation, regarding the creation of a two-division structure, was a viable option, given what you have observed thus far, and the work you're doing on transformation.

Andrew Hoehn: I think it would be a mistake to think that transformation is only about the major combat elements of our defense establishment and war fighting structure. In fact, what I hear from this panel, and frankly, what we have been thinking increasingly, is that the type of challenges that we're going to see in the years and decades to come are going to be more in terms of the low end asymmetries that you heard the panelists talk about, and the high end asymmetries that you heard Professor Bracken speak of, and frankly, somewhat less of the traditional kinds of warfare that we are both skilled at, but frankly have dominated. And hence, that's why we see war fighting moving more to the ends of the spectrum, and away from the middle.

So, in light of that, the work that Hans Binnendijk has been doing, and others, in terms of thinking through what kinds of organizations, what kind of structure, what kind of training, what kind of doctrine do we need to deal with the challenges are exactly the right ones. And so, I applaud the initiative that he has put forth. And I think he would be the first to admit that it isn't so much whether that specific option is the one that gets adopted. I think the real issue here is, do we have within our armed forces the capacity to deal with the problems of stabilization and reconstruction? And I think what I take from his proposal is that there is a deficiency in this realm, and that we need to be looking to build some viable alternatives. And he is offering one. Whether it's that one or something similar, or even something quite different that addresses that set of problems, that's the real issue here, is, do we have the capacity, the capability, if you will, to deal with that problem set, and to do so in the most effective ways that we can.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I wanted to give Bob Kaplan the next opportunity on that question, but I think, Hans, you ought to have the last word on this question as well, since it's your proposal that is being discussed. So, let's go with Bob next.

Robert Kaplan: Let me answer that with an example that I was speaking to Secretary Hoehn about. We have this issue about tribal militias in Afghanistan. You know, our policy is to build up a national army there, and the tribal militias are an impediment in that. They're more warlord-focused. But when you actually get to Afghanistan, and you speak to the majors, and the lower ranking officers, and you go out, you find that in some parts of the country, supporting the ANA (?) is right, but in other parts, if you withheld support and weapons for the tribal militias, the Army special forces fire bases might even be overrun. It varies from one locale within a province to another. Therefore, these are not issues, I wouldn't even want Washington discussing, let alone deciding upon. These are issues that I wouldn't want decisions made at anything higher than the lieutenant colonel or the battalion level in the area.

And the problem is that Washington tends to identify the problems correctly, but it often deals with it by creating a new organization. And I think future is just cutting away vast amounts of organization here, and having much more people at the NCO level spending more time in Monterey at the language institute, and spending their whole lives in places like western Nepal, and the Horn of Africa, and places like that. It's like Secretary Hoehn said. Get more people out to the edges, and give them increasing autonomy. Because if not, if we don't watch out, we'll be like Gulliver, tied up by the Lilliputians.

Hans Binnenidjk: If this proposal focuses primarily on organization, and one tends to think of it that way, two divisions, then probably that's the wrong way to present it. I think this is much more about training. It's much more about the synergies that are created by bringing together various kinds of units. It's not intended to create a lot of layers. It's certainly not intended to put this problem back into Washington's lap. It is trying to do, on the ground, what we ought to be doing, but better, because we pull together these capabilities, and create these synergies.

Now, what is the viability of this? I think much will depend on the Army. The Army is going to resist this. Why? Because they think it's going to cut into one or two of their 10 fighting divisions. And if it does, it would be a mistake. I don't envision this as replacing an Army division. The analysis that we did indicates that most of these capabilities are around, and it's again a question of reorganization. You can do that in a way that you don't cut into the existing 10-division structure of the Army.

Now, I think, finally, what is likely to happen is that rather than the large structure that we suggested, where we'll be going, at least in the next several years, is that smaller groups will be created along this pattern, but not the division size groups. And they will be more deployable, more modular. That's not a bad starting place.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Unless there's anyone else on the panel who would like to comment, let's move on to the next question. There was a hand back here that I had said we would recognize. Yes, please, right there.

Audience: Jeremy Harrington (?). I'm a first-year student at the Fletcher School. I'd like to ask a question about the role and the performance of the intelligence community in illuminating the context of security planning, particularly the issues raised by the panel of the threat of non-state-armed groups. I'd be interested in Mr. Kaplan's observations, from his experiences being embedded at the grassroots level, what observations he has on what the intelligence community needs to do differently. And I'd also be interested in the views of Mr. Ijaz, in particular. Thank you.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: That's a question for a conference in itself, actually. But it's very important, and we'd like to get your reactions to it. Bob?

Robert Kaplan: One of the challenges I face as a journalist is, I often know where our intelligence people are by where I'm not permitted to go, or what fire bases I'm not permitted to visit. So I actually don't know as much about that as I would like to. There was one fire base I wanted to visit— I won't say where— where I was told, "No, you can't go there, because the OGAs, the other government agencies, i.e. the intelligence, owns that fire base, not the Green Berets." So, there's a lot going on that, frankly, I don't know about. But I think I would emphasize— And this is what people in the intelligence community will always tell you, I think. We Americans are very good at signals intelligence, on the technological aspects of it. But where it falls down, where we really have to depend on friendly foreign intelligence agencies, is on human beings who can ferret out intentions, who have embedded into groups for long periods of time, overseas. And that, I think, is the great challenge. It's a big challenge in Iraq. It's a big challenge in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in many different places.

And I'll give you an example. Mansoor spoke earlier about the danger of international shipping. Well, one of the best opportunities for terrorists— and this was written about in my magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, in a cover story, was about piracy of big tankers, and how much piracy there is, and how a number of tankers are actually run by ghost crews, because the real crew was killed at the high seas, and it's now being run by a ghost crew. And this is like a perfect petri dish for groups like al-Qaeda to take advantage of. And this is really where the rubber meets the road, where so much technological intelligence will be less helpful than two or three human beings who know exotic languages, who are in place, and who are with the right people.

Mansoor Ijaz: I think all that I'll add to that is that we have to ask ourselves in this country, why is it that we are not willing to resurrect what the CIA's great capacity was during the Cold War? Why is it that we're not willing to do that? What has happened to the ethos of this society that we're not willing to take the risk to go out and protect ourselves by engaging our own citizens? I mean, I do this out of a sense of moral obligation to my fellow countrymen, because this country gave me more than anyone in the world could ever imagine you could get as an opportunity. I was born and raised in this country, educated in the best institutions, worked on a farm, worked as a busboy in a delicatessen, and have the opportunity to give back something to society. But there's not that many of us around that speak different languages, and understand the cultural identities that you have to understand to be able to get inside these organizations.

Until we as a nation are willing to ask that hard question, and ask our political leaders to answer it, and then give the directive to our intelligence apparatus to go out and do it, I think there's very little chance that we're going to be able to infiltrate to the extent we need to to be able to diffuse the threats from inside.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I would ask any other member of the panel to comment on this question as well, if you would like to do so. I would simply say that, given the diversity of this country, it seems to me puzzling that we haven't been able to do what Mansoor is talking about. I shouldn't depart from my role as moderator here, but it seems to me, with a country with the diversity that we have in it, we ought to be able to tap into people who have loyalties to this country, as you pointed out here, who would help us to improve that human part of the intelligence picture. But that's just my own personal opinion.

Anyone else on this panel who would like to talk about that? Then, let's go on to one or two more questions. And what I'd like you to do is to ask your question very briefly, because we're going to have to end the panel at 11:45 promptly. So, one quick question over here. Dick, I can see you back there. You have that.

Audience: ...[inaudible] semantics point of order with Robert Kaplan. I think you're giving the term CONOPs a bad rap. CONOPs, in its simplest form, tells what the relationships are between, who the players are, and what the mission is. And it's not doctrine, and it's not prescriptive, and it doesn't tell you what range, and what weapon, and what circuitry to use. We've never done it as well as the Brits, who have boiled it down to "Stop the Bismarck," or "Sink the armada." But I think if you get the CONOPs right— and we're making tremendous efforts to get the joint CONOPs done first— you will cover all those points that you made, that the NCOs can make decisions from advance bases, and the colonels can stay in Leavenworth, and be available for reach-back. But I think you're talking about doctrine, not about CONOPs.

Robert Kaplan: Can I respond?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Yes, please, a brief response, Bob.

Robert Kaplan: That briefs well, but the reality is that the document is used for people at the higher levels to dilute, to play around with, to change the mission. And the ultimate result, every day, on the ground in Afghanistan, is that permission is given to hit compounds, to search various mud-walled forts, 72 or 96 hours later than they should, and the result is dry holes, rather than bull's-eyes. It's another method that gives control higher up, which goes completely against the trend I think we have to go in.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We have time for one or two more. Right back here. Yes, please. If you could stand up so they can see you when they bring you the mike.

Audience: Yes. Vivek Dubay (?) from Los Alamos National Lab. This is mainly a question for Professor Bracken. There's been a lot of talk about organizational transformation, but implicit and inherent to that is cultural transformation within the defense business and the national security business. Can you offer additional insights from the business world as to how successful companies have time and time reinvented themselves? How can we accelerate the rate of cultural change to get to the transformation we need to get to?

Paul Bracken: I think it's a mistake to look at technological transformation, and then people will say, "But we have to change the organization. There's too much focus on technology." Just for example, in this last go-round, I think the whole distinction between technical intelligence and human intelligence is 20, 30 years out of date. So to get to your point, the question, I think we have to think of strategies in terms of congruences, alignment, so that when you change your personnel system, and your culture and your people, you have to see if it matches your technology, if it matches your strategy.

And if you look at the great, really pioneering works in organization theory done years ago, like Joan Woodward's (?) Industrial Organizations, her whole point is that managers need to think in terms of these alignments. I changed my technology. Did I change the culture? Because if you only change one, you're not going to get the payoff. But if you look at it in a holistic way, which I think we know a lot better how to do from the late 1990s— I mean, there's this view that bureaucracies don't change. Well, look at AT&T. Look at Enron. They were big bureaucracies, and they went under dramatic change. Oh, you said you wanted successful change? That's a different thing. That's a harder thing. But we have examples of that too. We have a wider range of experiences we can absorb.

And one of the things I believe, is that the DOD and the services need to do kind of an executive program, pooling the experiences of Hewlett Packard, and JetBlue, and IBM, and Enron and AT&T, for these alignments and congruences. When they changed the technology, did they change the people?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Well, unfortunately, time has run out. I wish this panel could go on for another hour, frankly. There's so much to talk about here. I think we have looked at these issues in holistic fashion, to use a point that was just made by Paul Bracken. I think that we have covered an immense amount of the security landscape. We have certainly seen at least various parts of the anatomy, or at least touched various parts of the anatomy of the elephant, using the proverbial blind person/elephant metaphor here. I think as a result of this, we have learned a great deal about the context of national security within which we must plan, and within which we must think about and carry out the complex tasks of transformation. So, on our collective behalf, I would like to express our thanks to this panel for an outstanding opening session, and for helping us to think through many of the issues that we will be dealing with as we proceed to this afternoon and to tomorrow.