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 General Richard B. Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Thank you, Dr. Davis, for that kind introduction. And thanks to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, the Fletcher School, the Navy, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for hosting this conference. I appreciate all the sponsors of this event, which I've been following from time to time since I've been in Washington. The program you've put together is very impressive, and you've had some great speakers and panels. The experts you had on just before lunch, the service chiefs and their representatives, are obviously very capable representatives of what we're all about in the Department of Defense today.

Baseball great Casey Stengel once said, "Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story." Well fortunately for me, and for the American public, the players you saw before lunch, we all play pretty well as a team.

The subject of this conference, Security Planning and Military Transformation After Iraqi Free-dom, I think, highlights one of our biggest challenges—the fact that we have to conduct current operations and transform simultaneously. Your title is probably not quite right. In my view, there's no "after." It hasn't happened right now. It's got to be continuous in terms of how we think about transformation. Because, of course, Iraqi Freedom isn't over. My view is we're making great progress, and I'm absolutely confident that we're going to be successful in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we're still at war. Our brave servicemen and women go into harm's way every day in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and other places around the globe, taking the terrorist fight to the enemy.

And like many others, I expect this will be a long war, this war on terrorism, fought not just by the military. Certainly it's unlike any we've ever fought before, because the enemy is unlike any we've ever fought before. This enemy knows no borders, sends no ambassadors to the United Nations, and has absolutely no regard for life, liberty, or anything else civilized nations value. All you need to do is look at the recent attacks against innocent men, women, and children in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq to remind ourselves what kind of enemy we're up against.

I would say transformation of our armed forces is not optional. We have to transform for lots of reasons. One of the reasons is to combat the threat I just described, and also to prepare for unknown future challenges. We have to focus on the near-, the mid-, and the long-term capa-bilities, all at the same time.

That task, I believe, is every bit as difficult as it sounds. I'd like to focus today on creating a cli-mate for transformation. How do we ensure transformation will take place, when we're so busy and so focused on fighting a global war?

I need to start by saying what I think transformation is really about. It's a term that's used by lots of people, and perhaps over the last year or two, we're a little more focused and know what we mean, but it still means something a little different to everyone.

First—and this is probably the most obvious aspect of transformation—is harnessing technol-ogy. But I'm less interested in new and improved airplanes, fighting vehicles or ships that do the same things that we've always done. The real point of technology is to provide new solu-tions and new ways of doing business.

Take, for example, the Army's Stryker Brigade. I had the opportunity a month or so ago to visit I Corps at Fort Lewis and take the Stryker vehicle for a test drive. And it is an incredible vehicle. It's fast, it's quiet, and it can deliver 11 troops to the fight. But the Stryker Brigade isn't primarily about new vehicles. It's about a new way of organizing a brigade. It's about networked com-mand, control, communications, computers, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance—the C4ISR piece. It's about links that allow commanders to see, and share, and understand infor-mation about the battlespace. They can acquire, instantaneously, a level of awareness that formerly would have been impossible at that level of warfighting. Stryker Brigade Combat Teams are organized to take advantage of the technology. So when the back of that vehicle opens up and the troops come out, their situational awareness would be better than any other group of troops that's delivered to a combat situation. So it really is a whole new way of doing business. As you know, the Stryker Brigade is on its way to Iraq and they're getting ready right now to go into Iraq. In my view, it's ideally suited for the type of environment and mission they're going to face.

The Stryker Brigade, like any transformational program, incorporates a whole spectrum of changes. In fact, we have an acronym we use to describe this—DOTMLPF, which is not just another military Web site, but as some of you in the audience know, stands for Doctrine, Or-ganization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel and Facilities. As I alluded to at the start of my remarks, we like to focus on the "M," the materiel solutions, when we're talking about transformation, especially at budget time. Boy, if you can tack the word "transformation" onto whatever you're trying to sell, it's a wonderful thing. I have a whole different view: I think there's more transformation that goes on in the other letters of DOTMLPF than in the "M," in the tech-nology.

Transformation is hard, mental work. It has to have an intellectual element. What happens be-tween the ears of the warfighter, and those who support the warfighter, is more important in my view than the technology. Innovative ideas don't have to involve revolutionary new things or new technology.

One example is a program called Dragon Eye—many of you are probably familiar with it—a small, battery-powered UAV that weighs about four pounds and can be launched by hand or a bungee cord. It has some sensors on it, so it costs about $60,000. It's used for short-range re-connaissance by the Marines to see what's over the next hill or around the next building.

Another example, where I think there's more intellectual power than technology, is a system we've just fielded called the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, or JPEN. How many of the folks in this room know anything about JPEN? Well you should, so listen closely. It's too good to be true. It's cheap, off-the-shelf, and it works! As we focused on security at military installa-tions around the country, we found we really had no process for sharing discrete bits of informa-tion that might be related to security concerns. For example, if a suspicious-looking vehicle at-tempted to gain entry into Fort Belvoir, of course they have procedures for logging that. But could we say for sure that information would be sent over to Andrews Air Force Base or Fort Myer or the other military installations around this area? There was no way to guarantee that.

So we had some really smart people come up with a solution—JPEN—that allows real-time sharing of force-protection information. It took 90 days from developing the concept to fielding a prototype—90 days—and another 60 days to become operational. It uses commercial, off-the-shelf software that was modified slightly for this application. It's fielded mainly throughout mili-tary installations across the United States, for about $20 million. It's up and running at 30 sites right now, including the service command centers in the Pentagon, and currently, one city—(I think Jacksonville, Florida)—as well. The beauty of it is, you can link anybody, and everybody can put in data. You can set the thresholds for when you want to be alerted anywhere you want to set them—it's tailorable and scalable. Northern Command is now part of this network, and now some non-Department of Defense agencies are working on linking into JPEN.

This joint, interagency cooperation and collaboration highlights the third element of transforma-tion, and that is the cultural element. We've come a long way since the Goldwater-Nichols Act was passed in 1986, in the Department of Defense, in breaking down some of the barriers among our services.

You probably remember during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan Special Operations Forces troops, the only mode of transportation available was on horseback or donkey, working with the Afghan warlords and able to call in airstrikes. That kind of cooperation requires a whole new level of trust and cooperation among traditionally disparate organizations, and it worked very, very well.

I would argue that Iraqi Freedom, however, was the first time we've seen major combat opera-tions that were truly joint. You heard General Schoomaker talk about this. There really was in-terdependence on the Iraqi battlefield, among the services and what capabilities they brought to the fight. In Desert Storm, we really deconflicted the components by sector or by altitude. It was a joint effort, but I would say not at the level of Iraqi Freedom, where we were much more integrated, and I think the success speaks for itself.

Iraqi Freedom also highlights the importance of what we call "Enhanced Joint Warfighting." That means going beyond just the services to coalition operations that share information in a much more agile way, and the critically important task of integrating the efforts of other agencies of our government—the CIA, the FBI, State, Justice, Treasury; in fact you could name almost every department and agency of our government and in the War on Terrorism—they all have a role to play. And how you integrate those along with our coalition partners, and our coalition partners' agencies that are similar to our agencies—how all this comes together—really means thinking beyond some of the traditional cultural barriers that inhibited that kind of thought before.

So to me, transformation is a combination of technological, and certainly most importantly, the intellectual piece, and cultural change. But, understanding what transformation is and being committed to transformation aren't enough to make it happen. We have to create the right envi-ronment, an environment where people are encouraged to think innovatively, take risks—and yes, make mistakes and living to tell about it—and turn ideas into practical solutions.

Recently we had a guest lecturer at the Pentagon as part of the chairman's lecture series. Dr Hugh O'Neill, from the business school at the University of North Carolina, gave us a great talk. He talks about change, and innovation and transformation. He started out by describing some of the factors that make organizations resistant to change. For example, he said the larger an organization is, the more it resists change, which is not really too surprising. And then he said the older it is, the more it resists change. And the more successful it is, the more it resists change. About that time in the lecture, I was thinking, "We're in pretty big trouble here! We're old, we're big, and generally we're very successful."

But fortunately, he had some ideas, and validated some of the ideas that we're playing with, on how you can create a climate where true transformation can take place. In just a couple of weeks, we'll celebrate the 100th anniversary of flight—definitely a transformational event, espe-cially from a fighter pilot's perspective. December 17th marks the day Orville Wright flew the Wright flyer, covering 120 feet in 12 seconds.

One of the reasons the Wright Brothers were successful is that they were willing to take risks and experience failure. They repeatedly modified the structure of the flyer's wings, and even in-vented the wind tunnel to test their prototypes. And of course they failed many, many times. Imagine if they'd been trying to invent powered flight as part of a big organization. It would have been much, much harder. In fact, the military, on learning of the Wright Brothers' success at Kitty Hawk, first didn't believe it, and then declared the flying machine had no military value!

In order to foster a transformational mindset, Dr O'Neill says, you have to break smaller groups away from the larger organization—the organizational equivalent of camping on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. We have federally funded think tanks in this role, and Joint Forces Command as well as the services' battle labs that all participate in this kind of effort. We have a tremendous group of experts, across all the services and the joint community conducting ground-breaking experiments to generate transformational concepts and turn them into operational solutions for the warfighters.

One successful recent experiment is the Standing Joint Force Headquarters. This headquarters idea was developed to provide the combatant commanders with a core command and control team, along with collaborative command and control networking capabilities for a joint task force headquarters. The goal was to eliminate the spin-up time required for an ad-hoc headquarters to respond to a contingency. The concept was successfully tested in Millennium Challenge 02, and now we're working on manning and developing it with the appropriate unified commanders. We're working on another important part of this, the deployable command and control systems that are a part of this headquarters and writing up the procedures and conducting training. In the end, it will be like another weapons system, like AWACS or Hawkeye, and it will have readi-ness standards, and we'll test it from time to time to make sure they're ready to go.

We've just recently institutionalized the process of experimentation. Last year, Joint Forces Command assumed the lead role in transforming our forces. That was one of the big changes in the last UCP. One part of this function is publishing the campaign plan for joint experimenta-tion, laying out the criteria and the priorities. Joint Forces Command coordinates experiments with all the Services, the Combatant Commands, other US agencies, and our allies. Their char-ter is to make sure experimentation efforts support joint warfighting.

This is just one of the organizational changes we've had to make to meet the changing national security environment. Another is the standup of Northern Command, which became fully opera-tional on 1 October of this year to lead the homeland defense mission. We also merged US Space Command and US Strategic Command into a new and expanded Strategic Command, with a new and expanded mission. In fact, we gave them five new missions. The point of these organizational changes is to pull together specific, functional expertise out in Omaha under a single commander. If you look at the new missions they've been given, they all need a global perspective.

We're also trying to transform the way we develop and educate our leaders. In the past, joint education was only available for a limited number of officers at about the major or lieutenant colonel level and above. But it's pretty obvious if you travel around, with the War on Terrorism today, almost anyplace you go, you're going to see senior NCOs and junior officers from all dif-ferent services working together in ways they never had to before. So we're developing courses that will help the folks at that level, to understand and be educated on the joint warfighting busi-ness. Having done all that, we were still leaving out the vast majority of our Guardsmen and Reservists. So we have a pilot program already in progress to expand the opportunities for Re-serve Component education as well.

And I would submit that we can't declare our senior officers a finished product either. We've changed our Capstone course quite dramatically in the last year, which as you know is for the new general and flag officers and senior executives from the Department of Defense and around the interagency. We're focused now on preparing them for joint task force command. We're also developing a joint education program for 3-stars, and this one is still very embryonic. We've got a name, temporary as far as I'm concerned, called Pinnacle, designed to focus on in-tegrating joint and coalition forces and interagency cooperation.

We've also developed some guiding principles we call Joint Operations Concepts to provide a framework for developing capabilities and concepts to meet the challenges of the next 15 to 20 years. So we have the operations concepts for how we're going to fight, and we can quickly, out of that, figure out what capabilities we need. This is really hard work, and we're taking input from all the Services and the combatant commanders. This is an important step in helping all the great players we have play better as a team, as Casey Stengel put it.

We're pretty much on course, and that's all good news. But I don't want to leave you with the impression that we should be satisfied with the progress we're making. We still have lots and lots of challenges to work through. We need to get much better at gathering and sharing intelli-gence. We need to get much, much better at our mobilization and deployment processes. And we need to get much better at integrating our interagency and coalition partners into our opera-tions and plans. Those are the challenges that are out there, and they've been around for a long time, but they've never been more important than they are today. So we're going to need a transformational mindset, and the climate that nurtures that mindset, certainly for the foresee-able future.

That reminds me of a story from when I was commander of US forces in Japan, and General Pete Pace was my deputy, and we were having one of our joint exercises. I can remember one individual walking into the briefing that morning with an enormous backpack, and he opened it and took out a stack of books about that high. And I asked "What's all that?" And he said, "Well, that's our doctrine, to tell us how we're going to fight." I said, "That's all very interesting, but you're not going to be very helpful. We're going to need more flexibility than that." He didn't show the kind of agility we need in our thinking today on how we're going to fight.

Let me share one more great Casey Stengel aphorism with you: He said, "If we pitched as hard when we're not in trouble, we wouldn't get in trouble in the first place." That's a rather light-hearted way of describing the situation. But we're concerned—all of us in this room—with some very serious issues. Terrorists want to do us more harm. I'm absolutely sure of that. If we wait for trouble, many more lives will be lost, and our very way of life will be at risk. So now, in my view, is the time to pitch as hard as we can, so we can look ourselves in the mirror each day and say we've done all we can to prepare America to face, and defeat, future threats.

Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions.

Questions and Answers

Audience: Lieutenant Colonel Jim Downey (?), Air Force Reserves, currently a national security fellow at Harvard University. And General, I saw that you were up there at one point in the past. My question is on an issue of transformation that I haven't heard very much about during the last day and a half, and perhaps you could just give a few thoughts on that. And that is, anything with regard to transformation in space, or space operations.

General Myers: Well, you bet. And there's a lot of thought being given to that, that needs to be given to that. I think on the one hand, these joint operations concepts are going to help tremendously. Because one of the biggest challenges we have, I think, in the space business is to figure out where having the high ground in space is a real advantage, and where we can afford it, and where it can bring the right kind of capabilities to the fight. There's also the piece that is working, is the future systems that support not only the military but the intelligence agencies and so forth, which also has lots of transformational aspects to it, a lot of it related to technology. I would emphasize the operational concept piece of this, so we know, when we spend the kind of money we have to spend for space systems, we know how they're going to fit into the architecture.

I mean, space is ripe for transformation. Example, stove pipes. If you want to see stove pipes, go to the space world, and look at all the systems up there, and look who runs the different systems, and imagine that they talk together pretty well, about a C- or a D+, okay? They talk, but they could be much better. And what an area that's ripe for the kind of-- All you've got to do is think about it, and you could make it better today. I mean, if the folks that were responsible for some of these systems just thought about it a little bit, intellectually, and then could break down the cultural barriers, then-- and I've got great stories in this regard, having lived at space command for a little bit-- you can make great transformational strides without spending a nickel. You might have to get some folks access to different-- I'm thinking you might have to get them a new ID card so they can get into different buildings. But I mean, basically, very cheap.

So, no, I would not exclude space from this at all. In fact, I had a long talk yesterday with Admiral Ellis, who is now, as you know, out in Omaha, the strategic command commander. And we talked about a lot of those things. And he's exactly the right person to have out there, because he's thinking right along some of these lines that are going to transform some of the operational concepts that we've got to develop, and some of the systems that will obviously support that. And so, I know a lot of people aren't talking about it, but it's certainly ripe for transformation. It has to if we're going to adapt space capabilities to the 21st century, clearly.

Audience: My name is Joseph Schneider (?). The heritage of our ground forces is primarily to fight and win wars. Currently in Iraq, the task of stability operation requires probably a very different skill set that we have historically not trained our warriors. If we face more situations like Iraq into the future, we may need either to retrain our forces so they have even broader skill sets than they have today, from fighting wars to doing stability operations, or perhaps creating new forces that are primarily oriented for stability operations, which may give us more of an imperial sort of profile, or maybe working with our allies, where they would provide stability operation forces. What is the current thinking of where we are going with stability operations?

General Myers: That's a lot packed into that question. But there is an initiative that's, I don't think, particularly new, but it's gotten new emphasis inside the Department of Defense, to do exactly what you said in the last piece of that, and that is perhaps to train some of our coalition partners to do stability operations, and provide the training, perhaps some mentorship as they go do things, help them with those aspects of it. But you are right. We had a perfect slide that described the situation in Iraq as we went from the end of major combat operations to Iraqi sovereignty over here at some point, and probably even beyond, which showed that even though you're at the end of major combat operations, combat operations are going to continue at the same time you're going into stability operations. And you have to do one, and the other.

The good news is that our forces swing back and forth between those two things with some alacrity, and great skill, matter of fact. It probably does point-- And this would be something we'd probably capture in some after-action lessons learned, is, how should this impact the training? Now, I know the training for the folks that are getting ready to go to Iraq, in what we call Operation Iraqi Freedom 2, that rotation that will start in January and will go through March and April, that those forces are specifically configured for the situation that they face now, as opposed to the forces that are in there, that had to be configured on the run, because they were the combat forces, in many cases, the combat forces that pushed their way to Baghdad, not in all cases. And we have replaced some, of course. But we've had time to train and to modify some of these organizations so they are better able to handle these stability operations. And we've got to address that training piece.

One anecdote that I like, so you're going to hear it. Visiting a wounded soldier the other day, who had his leg pretty badly mangled by an RPG. He was 21 years old. And we were just chatting for a while, and he says, "You know, I felt like a rock star in Iraq." And he was in the Kirkuk area. And he said, "That's because all the Iraqi children and the Iraqi adults, anytime I'm around, they come running up. They want to get pictures. They want to do this. They want to do that." And he said, "And I'm an artillery man, but what I was doing was helping organize this town council. That was my job." And he said, "Where else can a 21-year-old have that kind of impact on a people, on a place, and a nation?" And he said, "I didn't want to leave when I got hurt. I was hoping they could just fix me up there, and let me stay, and let me finish my work."

So, folks with that kind of spirit need the right training, so they can do both. I think it's been said, and I think it's absolutely true, that when our troops go into combat, whatever service, they take America's values with them. And some of the stuff, they do very well, just because of their values and what they've learned. We need to probably do a better job of training them for some of these situations. Despite that, they're performing very, very well, I mean, exceeding all expectations. And that's from the general officer level down to 21-year-olds like I just talked about. Yes, sir? Is that a reporter? That's a reporter?

Audience: Hi, General. Yeah, it's Bud Bear (?) with Fox News Channel. I know this conference is about transformation after Iraqi Freedom. I'm hoping you'll permit a question about the operation, ongoing. There's been a lot of talk in recent days about Izad Ibrahim Aldooray (?). What is your assessment of his role in the recent attacks there, and can you give us the latest on the operations to try to track him down?

General Myers: Well, I can't get into operational detail. But as, Bud, I think you know, we have a team of folks over there, that their role in life is to find folks that are in the deck of cards, and any other high value targets that they come across in their duties. And they work that very hard, and there are many operations that go on throughout a week, matter of fact, where they track down intelligence that they've developed, and so forth. In the case of Aldooray, of course, he is thought to be thoroughly important in whatever former regime elements are left, in terms of perhaps organizing them. Now, we don't know exactly. But we think that he could be playing a leadership role. So, he's an important individual. And I think there are some reports in the press that he's been picked up. We do not have that information, so I can't say that that's the case.

Audience: General, Jeremy Harrington (?). I'm a student at the Fletcher School. One of the most powerful themes of this two-day conference, echoed strongly by the previous panel, was the importance of the individual war fighter, and the tremendous impact that individual war fighters have in one-on-one situations, whether a fire base in Afghanistan, or a checkpoint in Iraq, or the incident you just mentioned in Kirkuk. What can be done to improve the cross-cultural communication abilities, and the cultural awareness of our regular forces? How are special operations forces are exceptional in that area. There is a perception, however, that compared to our most robust allies and coalitions of the willing, the UK and Australia, that our regular forces at the lower enlisted ranks are a little behind in their ability to work with other cultures. And aside from language training, which is a year at Monterey, what can be done to improve a specialist's or a private's ability to work in situations in places like Iraq?

General Myers: Well, I think one of the things that's being done, for those units that are deploying, I think they have all brought in cultural experts. I say all. I don't know if all of them have. But I know that the intent was for folks like the First Cav and so forth to bring Iraqi experts in, and to have those discussions down at-- for every troop, to understand culture they're going into, and the sort of environment they're going to be walking about in. And clearly, that's what you're going to do in the short term. You're not going to give them language skills in the short term. But that's being looked at as well. We're looking at the services in general, and what needs to be done in terms of language capabilities and those sorts of things.

I think all the services do-- Army probably leads with the FAO (?) program. It's a terrific program. The other services were told to do it like the Army does it. That was some time ago. I wasn't in the building at the time. I remember the decision. The services, they'd have to speak for themselves. My understanding is, and from what I've seen, it's not been quite as robust as the Army has done that. But I think all the services understand the importance of that, and will try to develop officers, and then NCOs and others that have the cultural awareness and some language capability, because that's what's going to be needed, obviously, in the future, in the battle space of the future, as we get into what we think we're going to get into.

But in the meantime, I think the individual commanders have done a great job in preparing the units that are going to be part of this next rotation, and going out there and trying to get people that are familiar with the culture, cultural experts, in to talk about that piece of it. And I would say that everything I've heard on our sensitivities, that the troops, even the folks that might not have had a lot of this training up front, have performed very well. And again, it goes back to taking your country's values into combat. You do, and you treat people properly. And I think there's just story after story of that. So, I think we need to do what we're doing in preparing those folks to go, but I also think the folks over there-- My perception is that they're acquitting themselves quite well in that regard, and that is not-- In my view, and from what I've heard, it's not a major issue. I mean, it's just not a major issue. You read the occasional report, but we've got 130,000 troops in Iraq. Every once in a while, something is going to not be just exactly perfect. And so we'll have to put up with that.

Audience: Sir, Alex Hellerman (?) from Systems Planning and Analysis over in Alexandria. There's a subculture in this town that's essentially waiting for transformation to go away. How are you going to make sure that transformation doesn't turn into yesterday's buzzword?

General Myers: Well, you know, transformation wasn't just invented. It's a continuum that's been going on since forever. I mean, any organization that wants to stay alive for any length of time has to change. And certainly that applies to the military, and certainly the military has been involved in the transformation business for a long, long time. It will not go away by the simple fact that it's absolutely essential to maintain our capability to address the securities challenges we face. And so it is a popular word now, and we have budgets now that allow us to do some things that we couldn't do before. And I think also now what we have is a sense of urgency. I think what kicked us into high gear was September 11, 2001. That's what kicked us into high gear. We said, "Wait a minute. We can't just keep waiting for this. We've got to organize ourselves to be more agile, faster, more flexible, in the kind of capabilities that we offer the commander in chief. And so I don't think it's going to go away. I think it will always be part of it. And it is popular right now.

Back to the budget issue. You know, if you've got your favorite thing, if you can attach "transformational" to it, you're probably going to get money. In my view, that's not what transformational is about. It's more about what we just talked about. It's more about the dot-mil-PF piece, which is how you get folks more culturally sensitive, because you work on the training piece of dot-mil-PF. Or, it's the Striker Brigade, because you work on the organizational piece of it, with a little bit of technology, but mainly the organizational piece. There's not much new technology in the Striker Brigade. It's just the way you harness it and put it together. There may be a subculture waiting for it to get away, and maybe they're the troglodytes. Maybe they're the same person that came up to that desk in Japan with that big set of documents and said, "Here's how we do it. Thank you very much," or the kind of person that comes to me and says, "Well, gee, we can't do it that way, because we've never done it that way before." Those people are not very useful, and I don't think they'll be very useful in the future. Beware of them.

Is that a question back here? Oh, you're just the mike holder. Think of a question. No, no. It looked like he was ready for a question.

Audience: Hi, sir. Jim Garamone (?). I'm with American Forces Press Service. Sir, many of the speakers talked about the importance of information operations, and I was just wondering what your impression of the information operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and what's the role for IO in Iraq today?

General Myers: IO, as we define it, of course-- And this is information operations. Jim, you mean information operations, not information activities? Okay. Because you'll get a different answer. But IO is the information assurance piece, computer network defense, computer network attack, electronic warfare, and there's one other piece there I'm missing. But anyway, that's what it is. Syops (?), sorry. That's what it is. And obviously, there's a big role for that. The IO piece of what we're doing inside Iraq right now, Afghanistan, for that matter, is vitally important. I mean, we're still in combat. And we're still trying to influence people that we're having this conflict with. And so IO plays a very big role.

As you know, it's one of the new mission areas that we gave the new strategic command. So that now falls under-- The responsibility for harnessing IO for the war fighter, other than the tactical syops piece, which is still a special operations command, now resides in a combatant commander, and that is strategic command. Before, it didn't reside anywhere. It was just left up to the war fighters to do the best you can. You know, work with the services, find out what's out there, and figure out how to do this the best you can. And they have already been very much value added to General Sanchez and his folks in Iraq, in Afghanistan as well. And so those are very important pieces of the total fight, and we're trying to do the same thing we tried to do with space a while back, and that is to operationalize that, to make IO capabilities available to operational commanders that they can trust, they know they've been tested, and that they can use, and it will help shape the battle space for them, and help achieve the right effects.

Now, that's IO as opposed to information activities, and I'm not going to get into that unless somebody asks about that.

Audience: ...[inaudible]

General Myers: They got it with the last UCP update. I believe so. It was an update. It wasn't a big change we made, but it was an update, when we gave them the ISR piece. We gave them C4. We gave missile defense, the integration of that, and global strike. They got five new missions, and all came from that. Okay, over here. If I could see better, I wouldn't have called on Jim, but I can't see with these lights in my face. So, Jim, you're lucky.

Audience: Linda Jaffee (?), General Accounting Office. I have a question about the allocation of defense resources according to the framework, for instance, operations, future challenges. And I'm just wondering how useful that is to you, and where you see DOD going with that concept?

General Myers: The concept is alive and well, and it's been-- If I understand it right, your question specifically, we've been using the risk management framework now for-- certainly ever since Secretary Rumsfeld came to the building. And it's kind of how we evaluate and balance benefit and risk, and we have risk analysis in several categories, operational being one of them. There are other categories as well. And we try to make those assessments so we can inform decision makers when they make the big decisions. And it's a concept that's, in fact, alive and well.

Audience: General, my name is Bryce Harris (?). I'm with OSDC Tubalsi (?). My question, sir, is generally about the future of warfare. When I think about transformation in the force structure, clearly what's talked about is a smaller, leaner, swifter force, intended to fight smaller wars of limited duration, etc. But I'm concerned about future wars with near peer competitors, such as China, perhaps India, Russia, etc., 15, 20 years from now. Can you alleviate some of those concerns that I have?

General Myers: Well, I think the panel you had before lunch talked a little bit about that. But nowhere have I seen, in anybody's concept or vision or idea, that the future is about necessarily smaller. That's just not one of the concepts. What you have to do is work through your national security strategy, down to your defense strategy, to your military strategy, figure out what your force sizing construct has to be for what you postulate out, for as far as you can see, and then look at the capabilities you need, and see if you're short, or you're over in certain areas. But I've never heard anybody talk about not having to have a total spectrum of capability. And it's just not-- I see it in print sometimes. They say, "Transformation means, well, we're going to be smaller." Now, certainly, today, an F-16 with two JDAMs is much better than an F-16 with unguided bombs that we had most of in Desert Storm. I mean, it's much more effective. And you can go through almost any weapons system in the inventory, and you'll find out today they're much more effective than they were a decade ago.

But that's not the whole issue. And so you've got to look through the whole spectrum, what kind of capabilities you might want to have against potential adversary capabilities, and measure that. I've never seen small, or any vision to drive us to smaller being a criteria for anything, actually. If it turns out that you need less of one thing because you're more capable, that may be the way it works out. But that's not one of the going-in premises on any of this business. So, I know there are people that worry about that, but that's not what the transformation push is all about. And certainly, you won't hear that out of the mouth of our Secretary of Defense. He's been very clear about that.

Dr. Davis: I want to thank General Myers for both your presentation and responses. You have been very generous with your time.