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 Peter J. Schoomaker, USA, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

Slide Presentation (PowerPoint 502KB)

General Schoomaker: Thanks, Jackie. Thanks a lot for the opportunity, Bob, to be here. Ladies and gentlemen, a great pleasure to participate here as part of this panel, as part of this conference, and to represent to you what it is that we're doing. Jackie, I'm not going to go to the Stryker question right up front. Stryker is part of it all. But I think that I can put it into context as we look through a few things. I'm going to use some slides here, and I don't want to slide you to death. They're simple. They're not multicolored. They're black and white. But I want to make a couple points.

And the first one, I want you to see is the Soldier's creed. Give me the first slide. There's a reason to have an army, and the reason to have an army as part of our armed forces, part of the joint team, is to defend our nation. And fundamental to defending our nation is to fight and win on the battlefield. It's to kill and destroy our enemies, and their infrastructure, and the things that we have to do. And fundamental to that are warriors. And I think if you take a look at that warrior's creed…I used this before the Senate Armed Services Committee the other day… just to remind everybody what the Army is about, and what our Soldiers have to be about. Embedded in that Soldier's creed is the warrior ethos. The mission is first, and we will never quit. And we will never accept defeat. And we will never leave a fellow American behind. I mean…that is fundamental to what and who we are.

To support what Mike said, there are certain things about this whole transformational business that aren’t different, that are fundamental, and have to be sacrosanct and center to what it is. And in the Army, the center of the Army is the Soldier. It's not a platform. It's not a system, or anything else. It's those young men and women out there with their cargo pockets full, that are living in the mud, and doing the kind of things that you see them doing day to day. And they are fabulous people. And I'll tell you, it's just an absolute privilege to be able to associate in an active duty sense with them again, from a personal perspective.

Another thing that I want to show you, if you give me the next slide, is, since the first of August, when I came on board, these are the counterparts that I have met with…my counterparts…Chiefs of Staffs of armies, 71 of them. And it is fundamental, I think, understanding what the future of warfare is, and what the nature of this world is, to understand that we are going to operate with…and have to understand and be able to communicate with, in a broad sense…our counterparts. These people all communicated to me how fundamental they feel the army is to their societies, and how they look to us, the United States, and the United States Army, as a model in one sense or the other. Not that it's exactly the model that they need or want, but it is something that they respect, in terms of combat power. And I just want to make that point, because what's interesting here, if you take a look at a few of those small nations that are up there -- Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominican Republic, they're in Iraq with us right now. Granted, they're not there in huge numbers, but they're there. And they feel it's important to be there. El Salvador…think about what, in recent history, we've had going on in those kinds of places. This is important, and I think it's something we shouldn't overlook.

If you'd give me the next slide. And I'll go through these quickly. If you look at that chart right there on top, over time, you see that straight line? That represents the Cold War era. That represents the great certainty that we understood, and we organized, trained, and equipped our Army to be able to go against a certain enemy. And we understood that enemy very well, and therefore we were able to embed a great deal of certainty in how we organized, trained, equipped, and thought about how we were going to win on the battlefield. And then we ran into the current operating environment. You can call it the wall coming down, or the demise of the Soviet Union, or whatever you want. I think, quite frankly, that cloud started to appear much before then. We just didn't pay attention to it, and didn't want to admit it.

But inside that environment is what Mike Hagee just talked about. And that's the great uncertainties, the ambiguities, all of the kind of things that people don't like. And that is that you're not going to be able to categorize, characterize everything to a “T” and organize to go after it. And what's happened is we've applied a force into that cloud, and we found ourselves disjointed, as that dotted line shows there. And we're constantly having to adapt, and Band-Aid, and do all kinds of things to do it. The strategic question, and what that line shows there, that lazy eight, that infinity sign, shows that the Army actually, at different speeds and different times, has been transforming over its whole life. The strategic issues are, what is the relevance of the Army, and what is the readiness? That is what we have to deal with as we look at the Army's relationship to the nation.

Down there below are two core competencies. We have lots of core competencies, but I think if you boil it all down to what's really important, we train and equip soldiers, and develop leaders. That's what we do in the Army. We develop leaders for the nation. The second core competency down there reflects the relevance and readiness that's required, and it indicates who it is that we are providing forces to. And that is the Combatant Commander, and the joint force. That's our purpose. The Army does not fight by itself. It cannot fight by itself. As Vern and I discussed at breakfast this morning, all of us at this level have got to understand all of the domains. It's not that we are going to optimize ourselves for the other guy's domain, but it is that we have to understand it. And we have to be able to understand how we can achieve synergy. And unless we can do that, we cannot fundamentally serve the Combatant Commander and the joint team the way we have to. Next slide, please.

We have 16 focus areas here. That is a result of a tremendous amount of survey and study, talking, collection, and everything during the transition time between Rick Shinseki and myself. These 16 focus areas are those things that we feel that we have to address in the near to mid term to be able to move ourselves in a way that transforms the Army the way it has to happen. And what you will see here is that transformation is not just an equipment issue. It is not just the physical. It has to do with a wide range of things across what we call the DOTMLPFs (doctrine, organization, training, leader development, people, and facilities). And if we can do that in the way that we want to, we're not going to be able to make that cloud of uncertainty go away in the current operating environment, but we can balance ourselves, in a way, with capability that gives us much more agility, much more balance, and allows us to stand on our two feet in a way, and address the kind of things that the nation is going to have to address.

And I think, if I was to pick a few things out of there, obviously the Soldier is the centerpiece. But there are three things there that I really think are take-aways, that are fundamental to our transformation. And one of them is the joint and expeditionary mindset. And that is the notion that we're tied to a strategy that says we're going to go there, and we're going to fight them at their place. And that means, we've got to be more agile. We've got to have the capability to get there earlier, and we've got to act sooner, to be able to do that. It does not mean that the Army is going to become the Marine Corps. It shouldn't. We have to maintain our campaign qualities. We've got to be able to go toe to toe, and slug it out, and stay, and do things in a rough sense. But we've got to be able to enter the fray earlier, and we've got to be able to move through and leverage the other domains that are resident there. And so that is what it's all about.

The second thing you see there…that I think is important…is the AC/RC balance. We are still structured, both on the active and the reserve side, too much towards that solid line that we had prior to the cloud arriving, kind of a Cold War construct. We're over-structured in the reserve components. We need to bring that structure down…not the end strength…but the structure, and get it balanced so that we have ready units. And they have to reinforce and reflect the kind of force that we must have. We have to do the same thing on the AC side. I'll show you another thing here in a minute that shows you why we have to do that.

The third thing that I think is very, very important there…is the modularity. And that is a sense of organization. We've got to break this notion that we pay ourselves with $100 dollar bills. And I call large corps and division structures $100 dollar bills. You know, if you go down, and you're going to buy a small item at the Quick Stop, you know…like a can of snuff…it’s three dollars and seventy-five cents. (I'm sorry. You know, I call Wyoming home, and that happened to be one of the things that we associate with there.) You're going to go down there to the Quick Stop and buy a can of snuff, and all you've got is a $100 dollar bill in your pocket, what you're going to end up with is a lot of change. And if you go down to the supermarket, you're going to buy your groceries, and you find out that you can't cover the groceries with your change, so you're going to break another $100 dollar bill. And you do this over and over and over. And pretty soon, what you've got is cargo pockets full of change that you can't aggregate into anything meaningful.

So, what we really have to take a look at is how to create an Army that pays itself in $20 dollar bills, something that is balanced and capable, that we can use in an expeditionary sense, that we can aggregate into a campaign quality force. And that's exactly what we're taking a look at doing here. So I think those three things are really fundamental to what our transformation is about: joint and expeditionary mindset; AC/RC balance; and a modular kind of structure yet to be determined. But, we're probably moving more toward brigade combat team kinds of structures, that centers around the Soldier. Okay, if you give me my next slide.

You've heard much in the past about a legacy force, an interim force and an objective force. I think we've come to realize that those were useful words for a period of time, but we now find ourselves at war. And every day that I wake up, I realize that we're an Army at war, and a nation at war, and that my greatest responsibility is to make sure that we are not only supporting the Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen that we have at war, but that we're supporting those who were getting ready to go next. And that we are in this thing for the long term, which means we have got to be able to fight and win with the current force, which means that we must be able to enable that current force. It means we're going to have to put some things in it that make it better, and we're going to live with it for quite a while. And of course, we want to continue to move towards a future force. And so what we're doing is recognizing that it's important, as we move and learn through combat, the things that we're learning, that we want to spiral that knowledge and those capabilities, and the kind of things that we're developing, into the future force.

At the same time, as we develop the future force and evolve technologies and other kinds of capabilities, we want to spiral back into the current force. And so what we've got going is a way that we're informing ourselves for the future, and we're pulling capabilities sooner back into our current force structure, which flattens that line out. Instead of us jumping to new capabilities over great leaps, what we want to do is make ourselves better tomorrow than we are today, every day, and to ease ourselves into what we have.

And that's where I think Stryker comes in. I think right now, where Stryker was an interim capability, it is now part of the current force. We have now deployed, over the last 30 days, a Stryker Brigade into Iraq. As we speak, it is completing its Joint Reception Staging and Onward Integration, and it will be in the field here very, very shortly, up the road and into its operating area in Iraq. And we will find how that concept works, and how that construct works. And it's more than just the vehicles. It's the whole construct, in terms of what's resonant within that kind of an organization. So, I think Stryker is now part of the current force, and I think it's going to inform us as we move forward, to what the future combat system is going to look like and the kind of things that we're going to do with that future combat system. If you give me the next slide, real quickly.

This triangle right here, this pyramid, is important because it is a construct that shows the application of a structure against a strategy. And if you take a look at the top of that triangle, you see RC on the left and AC on the right. That is a reflection of the fact that we must have part of this Army ready to go every day. There is RC structure that must be responsive on very short notice to homeland security and homeland defense, under the control of the governors and the TAGs, and eventually…if necessary…under a federal structure. On the right side of the tip of the pyramid up there, you see AC force structure. And we are under instructions that we must be able to minimize the requirement to mobilize reserve component soldiers for expeditionary types of things. And the kind of forcing construct we have right now is to be able to go to war in the first 15 days and minimize mobilization. And so that is recognition that we've got to have that expeditionary capability.

If you look at the center of the pyramid there, you see AC/RC depth. And those are formations that reflect what is in the top piece of that triangle there. Those are formations, both active guard and reserve, that mirror the kinds of things that are in the top of that pyramid and give us the campaign quality force that's required. If you go down to the white band there that says AC/RC, that is the rest of the depth in the AC and RC, especially in the combat support, combat service support arena, and in the multidimensional kinds of formations that we've got that provide the staying power, the kinds of things that we have to have in major war. And we must never forget that this whole pyramid rests upon an institutional Army that is absolutely important to be able to generate all of the things that are required to sustain an army, to develop its leaders, to train, to access an army, to retain an army, and all of the kinds of things that are required in the institutional training base. So, as we're looking at structuring and balancing, we're looking at it within this context. And it's got to be applied against the strategy that we're being asked to support. Give me the next slide, please.

I'll wrap this up. I know I talked fast and perhaps you'll want to highlight some of this as we get into discussion. But I just want to throw the Soldier's creed back up there again. Because I'll tell you, I could not be more proud of the Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen right now that are serving this nation's needs. I mean, the Army itself is in over 120 countries right now. Three hundred thousand Soldiers are deployed right now, and doing things not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but all over the globe. It's incredible. And these people are operating on intent. I’m proud to be associated with them. And I'll tell you, I've been there, looked them in the eye. And what I recognize…is what I've seen many, many times over…is a degree of will, the ability to kill, and the kinds of things that we have got to be able to do on the battlefield to win. Our people have it. This generation's got it, and they're doing it very well, and I'm proud to be associated with them. So, I'll just wrap up there and hopefully you'll have some questions and we can discuss this further. Thanks a lot.

Dr. Davis: Thank you very much, General Schoomaker.

Questions and Answers

Audience: James Kitfield [?] from National Journal magazine. I'd like the chiefs to address the issue of end strength in transformation. As we all know, this force was not sized recently. It was sized in the 1990s. And it was not sized for a global war on terrorism. Intuition would tell you that now that we're in Afghanistan, in Iraq, we need a bigger force, because these are new contingencies that we were not planning on. We're told that we probably don't need a bigger force, because this transformation has allowed us to do things with smaller forces, and so the joint staff is now reworking the war plans. If you're in Iraq, and you see how stressed the Army is, it seems to me that that's not a transformational mission. The stability operations are manpower intensive. Is this force big enough, basically, for the contingencies it's facing now? And is transformation really a way out of confronting the fact that this force is very, very stretched thin right now.

Dr. Davis: Who would like to begin? General Schoomaker?

General Schoomaker: If I understand the tenor of your question, you're speaking to the end strength issue, whether the force is large enough to do all of the kind of things that we're doing right now. And I can speak for the Army. I think Vern had it exactly right. I think that transformation is going to give us capabilities that are going to allow us to use our people smarter. But we have a more immediate problem right now. I'll call it kind of, in the Army here, the fundamental question. We have over a million people in the Army, active guard and reserve. We can't reach a million. And the big challenge that I've got, resource-wise, is paying for more people, exactly what Vern was talking about, and putting them into a bankrupt structure, and then end up having to pay for that with the top line pressures in the future that you heard from over here on the left, on my left.

So, one of the major things that we're doing right now is mining the structure that we have, and aligning it, and getting it balanced so that we can get access to the force structure we're paying for, and making sure it's ready and available to us. And we're doing pretty well. There is no commander in Iraq or Afghanistan that is asking for more people. That is, it's not a bumper sticker that this is true. And we constantly are in dialogue about what the requirements are over there, and there's nobody that's asking for a bigger force over there. They feel they have the force that's required. My problem is the persistence, and how do we generate this force over a long period of time? And quite frankly, we're working that very well. We may end up coming up having to ask for more force structure, or for increased end strength. But I am not prepared at this time to give up on the fact that we're making quite a bit of headway right now, in terms of the balance, and getting access to what we have. So, it's an open question. And it's a good question, but I think you're jumping to huge conclusions, that the answer is just supplying more soldiers to the battlefield. It's not the issue.

Admiral Clark: If I might, I addressed this briefly, but let me tell you the things that we're doing. We did a pilot, a pilot called sea swap, which would keep our ship on station, rotate our people. Buys more capability if we don't have to pay for the transit every time. We're going to end up leaving a ship over there two years, and see what we learn. That's going on now. We're on our third rotation.

I've got another pilot going on called optimum manning, figuring out how we can inject technology into the process, and reduce the size of the crew. We will apply those in the next submission, across the whole force, because it's been very successful. DDX, that we will build, instead of having a 500-person crew, will have a crew of between 100 and 125 people. Technology will allow us to do that. Those are changing the ways we do things some, but also the application of technology. But the biggest savings will come to us when we learn how to do things smarter, and we revolutionize our processes, and run the business end of this thing more effectively.

So, I'm going after less end strength, but I'm doing it with a very clear objective in the strategy. That's where I'm going to get the resources to recapitalize. Jackie said, "Is transformation modernization? Is it--" Well, you know, it might be modernization. But certainly, here's one of the things I've come to believe, that if you miss the opportunity, when you are modernizing, because you're getting rid of old stuff and getting new stuff, when you buy that new stuff, it's going to be set in the structure, for 30, to an aircraft carrier, for 50 years. And so it is vital that we think through the transformational process as we are going through the modernization process. And in my case, I am actively pursuing less end strength.

Dr. Davis: Next question? Right here. Oh, come on. This is your chance. There's one back there.

Audience: Ed Rowney (?), retired lieutenant general. I want to follow up on that last question. I did not get an adequate answer, and I want to pursue it a bit. This is mostly to General Schoomaker. Given that you're transforming, and having lighter and more mobile forces, and can possibly do this with a few fewer people, given that the reserves need to change, and more regular Army people need to have those missions of medics and engineers and whatnot for reconstruction problems, given that the National Guard has to reorient its mission from overseas to more home security, I wonder, and I want to ask the question, can you possibly do this with not only the possibility, but the probability, that you're going to have to not only stay in Iraq, but have more Iraqs, can you possibly do this with anything less than 50 to 100,000 more troops on the ground?

Certainly, we should save money. Certainly, I applaud all the things that Admiral Clark said. But, you know, we've spent 6, 7, 10% of our gross national product before. We're now spending 2.9%. We're in the fight of our lives for this war on terrorism. Certainly we can afford more than 2.9%. So, I'm going to just pursue this question, just to be a pain in the neck. Can you possibly do this without fewer than 50 to 100,000 Marines and Army troops on the ground?

General Schoomaker: General Rowney, you're talking about on the ground in Iraq?

Audience: No, I'm not talking about on the ground in Iraq. I'm not going to contest the question of the soldiers saying they don't need more forces. Sometimes I wonder about that. I thought, you know, that we should have had a little more forces going in, because you had to have some contingencies. And the force, the division couldn't get in. So, I happen to believe that we didn't have enough.

Let's wipe all that out. Let's agree with the commanders in the field that they don't need more. But I'm saying, we're going to have to stay there. And right now, the reserves are hurting. The Army is hurting, on moving back and forth. The National Guard has to have a homeland mission. I see a need to persist in Iraq. I see a need for planning against future Iraqs. I don't know whether it's going to be Syria, or Iran, or North Korea. There's certainly going to be more before we finish this war on terrorism. Therefore, I say, let's do all these other things, but let's not believe that we're going to be able to do this without more Marines and Army boots on the ground for the future.

Dr. Davis: Generals Hagee, Schoomaker, do you have a follow-up comment?

General Hagee: I would actually follow up from what Pete said. He made very good points there. But the way I look at the battlefield is, what we're doing right now, is this what we're going to be doing five or 10 years from now? In other words, have we arrived at a point where we're going to have forces, as General Schoomaker talked about, spread throughout the world, the Sinai, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan? If we are, then I think the answer might be that we do in fact need an end strength increase, just as General Schoomaker mentioned. But if we're not, if this is a spike, even though that spike might be a year or so, my professional opinion is that right now we do not need an end strength increase, if in fact it is a spike. And that is-- I think this is what the Chief of Staff of the Army talked about-- that is what we are looking at right now, and that's what we're trying to look at into the future, and make a good call on that.

Sir, as you know, you cannot stand up a division overnight. It takes a couple of years to stand up that division. We stand up that division, and we find out that, in fact, two, three, four years from now, we don't need that division, because it was in fact a spike. Have we, in fact, used the resources of this nation correctly?

General Schoomaker: I think I also owe you a little bit on this. You know, if we were unconstrained, and had no issue in that regard, obviously, we could build a force where there was no risk. Then we ask ourselves, can you recruit and retain the force that we're talking about, at that level? If you take a look at what we have right now, you know, we are operating-- Right now, the reserve component's under a thing called partial mobilization. It's not PSRC. This is not the typical thing that we've operated under in the past. This is partial mobilization. This gives the President and the Secretary of Defense access to one million people in a reserve component for two years. One million people for two years. And we are not anywhere near that level of commitment.

Right now we have mobilized, counting the next mobilization, about 40% of the reserve component. So, I can tell you that it's not only possible and feasible to continue this level of operation with the force we have, but that if we can get access to a lot of the force right now, because of the way it's structured, and bring it into the thing, that we'll get much better use out of the force that we're paying for, which we are not getting right now, we haven't gotten for years, and we need to fix. It's time to quit thinking the old way on this. And if we can't do that, then we are going to have to go, and we're going to have to spend a premium on the most expensive element, and then worry about whether or not we can recruit and retain that large a force. So, I think I owe it to the people, the Army, and to my boss to do the very best we can to figure out what we can do with what we have before we get into this other question. Because the other question is not going to solve our problem for us right now.

Dr. Davis: Next question, in the back first.

Audience: ...[inaudible] the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center. My question really is for General Schoomaker, although I expect it pertains to the other panel members as well. There is a perception that our reserve component is fairly heavily committed at this point. Because of the nature of the business, many of those men and women are also our firefighters, policemen, EMS techs, Hazmat folks. And so their deployments not only have a personal impact, but also a very real impact on local jurisdictions' preparedness. So my question is, in the transformation, are we looking at ways in which we can minimize the impacts and the commitment of our reserve component?

General Schoomaker: Well, again, that's probably a question that's more germane to the Army. We realize that. I mean, I was just with the 30th Brigade, and a high school principal was one of the sergeant majors that was there. There were about seven state troopers in one company that I was with. There are county sheriffs, and firefighters, just like you talk about. But, you know, we mobilize who signed up, and who we have in that structure. And the reality is, when we do mobilize them, they come out of the communities. And you're exactly right. These are exactly the same kinds of people. So, I guess the bigger question is, is the construct that we have for the United States Army, which was designed to fight and win the Cold War, and to mobilize and expand, still a viable construct?

Because when we call up units, we don't ask how many principals are here, and how many state troopers, and how many prison wardens, and all that. We call up soldiers, and that's what shows up. And I don't know another way around that right now. So if we're going to escape that issue, it's a whole new question, in my view. You're exactly right. That's exactly what occurs right now, and they serve very well, and they're very proud of what they're doing.

Dr. Davis: There's a question right here.

Audience: Jason Sherman (?) from Defense News. My question is for General McNabb and General Schoomaker. Admiral Clark and General Hagee outlined a broad vision for where they'd like to take their services, with this notion of a sea base. Would the two of you be willing to endorse their vision, particularly the joint aspect of it, and say what role you see for your respective services in this sea base?

Lt. General McNabb: Well, if you ask us if we endorse, we obviously do. I think it's a great concept, and they are going to be betting on the Air Force support as needed. And I think that there's no question that this is the kind of thing that is, they come forward with that vision. We will look at how we need to support that vision for the employment of their forces.

One of the things that I think, and it kind of gets to maybe this end strength issue that you all talked a little bit-- One of the things that you can see is, if we have to surge, and spend the dollars for a surge force, it becomes cost prohibitive. But one of the things that we can do by working together with capability type packages, instead of talking about platforms, we talk about, what capabilities do we bring? What you can end up doing is often the combatant commander's packages of capabilities that will allow us to take care of each other's surges, and perhaps mitigate it. Where the Air Force might be surging and needs help, the naval and Marine forces come to fruition. Sometimes it would be a combination of air and Army forces coming together to say, "Hey, combatant commander, you need this."

So, I look at the vision of the Navy, the sea basing, when they brief that, to the programmers and the op steps (?), one of the things that became very clear is that our role in that is absolutely essential as well. And now the part is, how do we fold into that? That's the part that we were talking about the future of joint ops. I mean, it's great to see where they're going, and then we can say, "Hey, what else can we do for you? How could we make it even better?" And I think those relationships are really there. It's really going to make a big difference.

General Schoomaker: I think-- In fact, Vern and I talked about this ...[inaudible] Not only do I subscribe to it now, and support it. I have for years. And I'll just go back. I was on the mission to go into Iran and rescue the hostages, 1980, one of the ground force commanders there. We used sea basing as part of that construct. When we went to Grenada, I was on that mission 1983. We used sea basing as part of that construct. When we did Haiti, we used sea basing. I had my JSOTF headquarters on the aircraft carrier America, with 64 Army and Air Force and Marine helicopters aboard that ship as a central element of what we did. We had a maritime construct involved in Just Cause, when we did that.

You know, I am a joint officer, and have been since 1987, that happens to be in the Army. And this is not a big stretch, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's a hugely important domain, and if we're going to move an Army to war with campaign qualities, and even in an expeditionary sense, the way you're going to move it fastest is by sea, and augment it with airlift for the kinds of things that you need early in the deal. But I mean, this is a domain and a dimension that is absolutely essential.

And I'd just like to go a step further here. You know, a lot of people think that Desert Storm was a joint operation on the thing, going back to one of Vern's points here. You know what it really was? It was joint de-confliction. That's what Desert Storm was, joint de-confliction. The war we just fought in Iraq was joint interoperability. Where we need to go in the joint world is to joint interdependence, where we trade some of our capability for other people's ability to deliver. That's where we need to be going.

Dr. Davis: Yes, sir. Right here.

Audience: Rick Middle (?) with the "Dallas Morning News." General Schoomaker, I wasn't going to ask this question, but your enthusiasm for sea basing tempts me. What role might the V-22 play in the Army's future? Are you considering that aircraft, particularly since you participated in the mission that inspired the Marine Corps to develop it?

General Schoomaker: Well, the Army right now does not have any role with the V-22. As you know, I commanded US special operations command, and as you know, special operations command is committed to 50 CB-22s for its thing. The reality is, that kind of capability allows you to move at C-130 speeds and C-130 distances. It's huge, in terms of what it means for battlefield mobility and agility. And I think the Marine Corps, when it gets the V-22, is going to find itself able to operate, as we discussed this morning, you know, in the old sea echelon concept.

When I went to the amphibious warfare school for a year with the Marine Corps to get educated on amphibious warfare, we learned the sea echelon concept. Well, you can't survive that concept anymore. You've got to be further out over the horizon. You've got to be able to close that distance. You've got to go deeper, beyond the old force beachhead line, to do the kind of things you've got to do. V-22 will do that. I think we'll be informed in the Army by that technology. I think we'll see some opportunity there. And, you know, just go back to Afghanistan. You know, when SOF was inserted in Afghanistan, those were 900 mile legs by helicopter. That is four air refuelings each direction, to put teams in. V-22 will do it with less refuelings, and at twice the speed on the deal.

And so I think it's a huge dimension, and I think it's something the Army is going to get informed about. And quite frankly, I think part of what we're looking at is transformation of Army aviation, and we're going to have to look at those kinds of speeds and distances. That is not to say that we have active interest, or doing anything right now with the V-22, but I think we're going to be quite informed in terms of what that means. And if we are joint interoperable, and we've got a partner here that's got a hell of a lot of them, we just might end up finding ourselves riding them some time, you know? By the way, you know, he also owns 51% of the C-130 tankers.

Audience: ...[inaudible]

General Schoomaker: Well, there's nothing to pin down.

Audience: But it sounds like you're saying that you do see a V-22 in the Army's future.

General Schoomaker: I did not say that. We're talking about capability here. And I think we'll be informed by that kind of speed and range. And if it makes sense, we may go that in direction. But there is nobody right now that's thinking about buying a V-22 for the Army. I want to see what they do with it, and I want to see what SOF does with it, and I want to see what's beyond it. There's a dimension beyond that. It's like V-22 capability with a CH-47 size box, or a C-130 size box on it, tilt rotor. You've seen that, the advanced tactical transport.

Dr. Davis: Unfortunately, I see many hands now rising to ask questions, but the chiefs have to get back to the building. And it remains for us to thank them for taking their precious time to be with us today.