 Let me, I'm sorry to interrupt and if you don't have food before you and you have not eaten go back and get it but be quiet because we want to get going here. We've got, we've assembled probably one of the most interesting panels and speakers today that we've had in a long time. This is going to be really an interesting session. Thank you all for coming. My name is John Hamery. I'm the president here at CSS and I'm, it's our great fortune to be able to host this series. I would like to especially thank our friends at Rolls Royce that make this possible, you know, and so eat as much as you want. They're paying for it. All right, we'll do it that way. I'm not going to do the formal introduction. I'm going to, to, but I do want to just say a word of personal thanks and admiration to Jim Mattis. We first got to know each other when we, he suffered a lot longer hours than I did. I tried to keep up with him but couldn't. This was back when he was, when he was the, the executive secretary for the secretary of defense and he, in variable, he would come down and say, are you sure you really want this to go to the secretary? Do you really think this is ready for the secretary? And I pleaded with him, but he became my strongest and best ally in getting good things done. Remarkable man. And I've had the privilege and the pleasure of following his trajectory since that time. And we're just really very fortunate that he's with us. This is going to be an exceptionally interesting session. Because as you know, if there's probably no topic for which the department is more hotly debating its future than the question of how to organize for irregular warfare. It is the issue in many ways. It's understandable. We're, we're in the seventh year of some difficult combat. It's likely going to continue for a while. And are we organized the best way forward? I mean, this is in the front end of a very big, rich and meaningful debate. And we're very fortunate to have General Mattis to frame it. And then these remarkable panelists that are going to be with us to expand on this understanding we all have together. So thank you for coming. I'm delighted you're here. Good Colonel, come up here. Let's get this thing really rolling out. And Jim, thank you so much for being here. I'm very honored to share with us. Thank you, Dr. Hamry. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nate Fryer, senior fellow here at CSIS and also at the same time of visiting research professor at the Army War College's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute. I'd like to welcome you all to the sixth military strategy forum event this year. And I'd actually like to extend some kudos to Dr. Maran Lee for putting all of these together. It's been a remarkable job on her part. As Dr. Hamry said, the military strategy forum is sponsored by Rolls-Royce North America. And through the forum, we invite distinguished defense officials and military leaders to offer their vision for defense policy and strategy. This year's forum, as you know, is focused on the QDR. And as you know, today's issue at hand is a regular warfare and hybrid challenges and their specific impact on land forces. We're fortunate today to have General James Mattis with us. But before bringing General Mattis to the stage, let me just give you a couple of admin points. First, please silence cell phones and blackberries, if you haven't done so already. And second, just as a reminder, we do have a panel that immediately follows General Mattis's remarks to discuss the same topic. Now to our keynote. As both Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and Commander United States Joint Forces Command, General James Mattis has been a key leader in the debates about joint force futures in a more unconventional operating environment. General Mattis has served in his current NATO and US positions since November 2007. General Mattis is a superb warfighter and joint senior leader. Over a 37-year military career, he has commanded operational marine formations at all levels from platoon to marine expeditionary force. Prior to arriving at Joint Forces Command, General Mattis was commander of US Marine Forces Central Command. Notable also are General Mattis's most recent combat commands. First is commander of First Marine Expeditionary Brigade and Task Force 58 in Afghanistan. And second is commander of First Marine Division during the initial attack on and stabilization of Iraq. Well before assuming his current post, General Mattis was a thought leader on the complex demands of future warfighting. I was particularly struck by one observation he made in a peace co-authored with Frank Hoffman in 2005. Reflecting on the tension between maintaining conventional warfighting dominance and adjusting to an unconventional future, he and Mr. Hoffman observed relevance is more important than yesterday's dominance. We're fortunate to have General Mattis with us today. Please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you. Thank you, Nate. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for taking time out of your schedules to be here. It's a real honor to come here, CSIS, since its founding by David Abshire and 31 Knot Burke. I have obviously been an incubator of great ideas. And I think in today's age, we've never needed this sort of an outfit more as we try to come to grips with this complex situation we face today. Of course, in light of some of my public remarks, it's an honor to be invited anywhere in public polite company anymore and talk at all. But anyway, Dr. Hamry was wonderful in his remarks about it, but I'll tell you, it's amazing in this town, sir. I still remember you and I walking out one night when your name had been listed above the fold in the Washington Post, comparing you somewhere to the antichrist and the degree of forgiveness and grace with which he took it. And I still remember the next day we were sitting in the usual morning meeting and something had gone on. And completely unperturbed by everything that was being dragged through the mud inappropriately. In the newspaper, he just said, aim, little boys, the riding shetlands. And we went on. So keeping our balance, though, at a time and in jobs that at times don't lend themselves toward keeping one's balance. I'd like to put today's discussion into context and basically use a broadly deductive approach going from the general to the specific and then get into the implications for the ground force within a joint force construct. And I hope to share some nuggets with you, maybe give you something to challenge me about as we get to the Q&A period. And that's always the biggest benefit of these times anyway. But since I've been offered a free lunch in these financially difficult times, I feel I should at least sing a little bit for my supper here. So let me jump right in. The United States and our allies today are supreme in the air, on land, on the sea, in conventional operations. The enemy has one role, and one role only if they take us on at 15,000 feet or they take us on in the high seas in open desert conventional warfare. And that role is fugitive. You'd better move fast. We'll blow you out of the air. We'll burn your ship to the water line or what the aviators leave for the ground forces in the open desert. We will annihilate it. And so no surprise here. History has always told us what an enemy would do confronted with that sort of a checkmate. They've moved into areas where we are not so dominant, where we're not superior. And they've moved against our perceived weakness. And that is absolutely to be expected. We should not be offended by it. We should not say that's not fair, anything like that. Things have changed. When I got the call initially, it was from Secretary General as the first I heard I was coming to the job, my NATO boss. When I got the call from him, I thought I'd better start reading about this transformation stuff. Be a good idea, since that's my title in NATO, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. And obviously, the Joint Force Command was up about changing the US military, the future. We kind of look at it, ladies and gentlemen, we're concerned with the combatant commander after next. We've got a lot of people worried about today. We've got people who are looking forward a little bit. We try to look at the combatant commander after next, determine what are his challenges going to be. As I studied those military forces, it was very clear that no military in history, and I went all the way back to antiquity and came all the way forward to the modern times, no military force in history has ever changed or transformed absent one thing. They had to have a clear definition of a specific military problem that they were going to solve. They didn't set up the Supreme Commander for transformation and wash their hands out, say there, now we've got it. They identified a specific problem. I can go through in the Q&A, many examples, starting with Alexander the Great, going right through the Germans in World War I, the US Navy in the interwar years, people who got it right and people who got it wrong. But as they set out to lay that problem out, the level of rigor would have satisfied a Jesuit priest, I noticed. They didn't go with a real easy statement of the problem. They drove down into the details. Late last year, I signed out for US Joint Forces Command the Joint Operational Environment, or what we call the JOE, the JOE. And this lays out the problem as we see it and no one is perfect about predicting the future. It's unpredictable, we all know that. But at the same time, we try to get it as right as possible, knowing that to get it 100% wrong is absolutely what we want to avoid, but knowing we have rather modest expectations, we know we're not gonna get it perfectly right either. So we just don't wanna get it completely wrong. And I think the problem is, we put the environment together, the JOE together, to capture the demand signals on the Joint Force, but I think the problem is how do we maintain nuclear and conventional superiority while building as a core competency irregular warfare capability and doing so so it can fight against a hybrid threat. In other words, we do not wanna rush from one side of the boat to the other because if you take that paradox of war I discussed earlier, if the enemy perceives that we've gotten weak and conventional, then guess what's gonna happen? We're gonna encourage our enemies to go conventional. And if you think it's expensive to maintain a conventional force, try fighting a conventional war if you want real expense. So part of what we're trying to do is adjust to the new realities and it's a matter of continuity and change. And I think that right now, the solution that followed is as close as we could get it. And the solution is in something called in our military way of titling things, the capstone concept for joint operations or CCJO. Now in the CCJO that was signed out by Admiral Mullen, I defined the problem, sent it up to the boss, my American boss and he looked at it and said, okay, here's what we're going to do about it. The chairman, Admiral Mullen, personally met with my writing team. He reviewed it in September, I think it was he called all of the combatant commanders all 10 of us in and the joint chiefs, we spent two days in the Pentagon and we pulled apart the Joe to see if we had the problem right. Then we pulled apart the CCJO, he personally directed changes. He was part of writing this, I think frankly for the first time since Colin Powell, after as the wall was coming down, we now have the chairman's personal thumbprint on how will the joint force operate in the future? Because some things had come into clarity, it had clarified themselves. We had clarity where we did not during the 90s as we were all trying to adjust to a very complex and changing world in a period of transition. It is now becoming more and more obvious what we face. So the problem and the proposed solution were both brought to bear without going through or brought, were birthed without going through the usual Pentagon staffing, staffing that, well, the reason we circumvented it, the usual staffing method is it usually turns out vanilla pap that's of no value to anyone anyway. So the Joe and the CCJO are the outcomes and in those two documents are found the framework for the future ground force. As you know, we don't do anything as a ground force or an air force or a navy force. Nowadays we do them as joint forces but inside each of those have got to be core competencies in certain domains. And we know that we've got to adapt. We know that it's very hard to decide on what do we adapt to, but we know that if we don't adapt, we're going to be dominant, Nate, but we're going to be irrelevant is the bottom line and that we must avoid. We must avoid being dominant and irrelevant. And I think we also want, when we go into the future challenges, when our civilian leaderships and these democracies look at the future, we want the fewest possible regrets as we put that force against the enemy. Are we going to have to improvise to a specific situation? Absolutely. If I was to sum up everything I've learned in 30 some years of wearing this uniform and about fighting, it's all summed up in three words, improvise, improvise, improvise. But what you want to do is improvise the least possible because you anticipated the future joint operating environment and you have the forces as well positioned fit for purpose as you can make them. The signposts have come into focus and you can look at them from Bosnia where we went in to save a Muslim population basically from genocide to Chechnya and the bloody fighting there, Iraq, Afghanistan, southern Lebanon, I'll get back to that in a minute. Obviously the South Caucasus, we've been looking at these signposts. It's not like the future is completely opaque to us. The future is now, we're seeing a lot of the future right now and there's also a reminder in all of those that no war is over until the enemy says they're over. Something for us to remember as we sometimes got into concepts of operations that implied that we could see all, know all, be all and determine all. Now America lacks a grand strategy today. There's no surprise there. It's a more complex time. It's very difficult. It's hard to concentrate on right in a grand strategy when your house is on fire. You got a lot of people who are working on near and present problems. But clarity is forming for us and we, for example, we know that we will work in the future with other nations in this interdependent world. We're going to have to do that. Now does that mean we would never act on our own? Of course not. Any nation has to be able to act in its own interest. But I have never fought in all the years I've worn this uniform other than alongside allies, other nations, people who did not wear US military uniforms. Also, Secretary Gates has clearly enunciated that in defense matters that balance will be a guiding principle. Now balance means that we are not going to surrender some part of the spectrum of combat. Whether it be a regular war or nuclear or conventional we have got to be prepared for all of those including thinking the unthinkable. And I would tell you that from my perspective now as a military person when the civilian leadership says balance I have to take it to the next level down and say balance for what and what does it look like? How do we make a relevant force for what the secretary wants? We must not make wrong turns again as we have in the recent past. And I'm speaking very candidly with you but there was some wrong headed thinking when we dismissed the unchanging nature of war. The fundamental nature of war is not going to change to suit us. We embraced some wishful thinking, we espoused some untested concepts and we ignored history. And unfortunately not only did we do it to ourselves but some other nations actually thought we'd done our homework and they adopted some of those to their regret, some of those concepts. This week as a result of that sort of thing we are testing, experimenting, war gaming, the CCJO as we speak. I just drove down from out at Booz Hamilton Alan Hamilton out there at Tyson's corner and we're testing the CCJO, the capstone concept for joint ops, the thing that's gonna drive all the rest of our concepts. We're addressing it against a near appear competitor at distance, we're testing ourselves against a fragile or failing state, we're testing ourselves against the globally network terror enemy to see if this joint force, the concept we're putting together can keep this country and its values and its allies safe against those three kinds of threats. I do believe we have to stay away from a purely capability based approach. I don't know what it means but I can tell you one impact of it. When you decide you're no longer threat based you've forgotten Von Kloss, which is Trinity includes something called the people and in a democracy you forget the people and it's going to come back to haunt you. Why should they put out their treasury, their young people for some kind of capability? We're not a war like people, we do this out of a sense of obligation if there's no threat, why do you have it? So as we divorced ourselves from a threat based approach we also divorced ourselves from incurring the support perhaps certainly the emotional appeal to our people of why this military exists and how the American people stuck so closely with our troops through all this in the midst of perhaps a less than well articulated threat time of that kind of threat is really a testimonial to the fondness the American people have for their young soldiers, sailors, airmen, coast guard and Marines. We're gonna see if the CCJO holds and if not we are going to adjust it, we have no pride in authorship, I have some of the best historians and academicians and people like that working on it. We ran it against people from Capitol Hill, Republican and Democrat, we had people out of academia, we had the former sound mixer of the Frank Zappa band to make certain we weren't all getting the right kind of military people in there but we really tested this thing. What we're seeing is continuity and change. Where is the continuity? Continuity is in the unchanging nature of war. There are some things that are always going to be there. You can read about it in Thucydides, Sun Tzu, you can read about it in any number of history books that's not going to change but what is changing is with the adaptive character of war, how we actually fight, that is going to change and therein lies the real challenge. I think the dialectic process is gonna work, we think we've defined the problem, we've come up with a solution and that's the thesis, now we're going to run it against the war game, if we come up with an antithesis we'll simply synthesize it, that'll drive us to the next thesis and then we'll keep cranking the threat against it and we'll come up to the next one, we'll keep doing this, it's monotonous but it's also the way you keep from doing silly things like grabbing concepts that are defined in three letters or something like that, then wonder why the enemy dances nimbly around you. There are some sidelines too that we have to stay within and one of them is that we are going to have to moderate our natural American penchant, diminish perhaps our idea that technology is going to solve this human problem called war. Not going to happen, it's never happened in the history of war and we're gonna have to remember that war is primarily a human endeavor, a social problem that takes human solutions. Certainly we want, I'm no ludite, I want the best possible technology but be careful about what you think technology provides you and be a little moderate in thinking that it's going to really bring victory, especially as the enemy avoids our strengths like they have throughout history. Defense planners will not be allowed to adopt a single preclusive view of war. If we do so, as I mentioned earlier, we will encourage the enemy to say, ah, they decided they're only gonna fight this kind of war so watch this, I'm just gonna go to a different form of war and I'll take them on there and now you have a very probably well-resourced force now in the US and one that's incapable of defending the country. We are simply not permitted a preferred way of war that ignores the character that the enemy wants to take the threat. A third point is we must prepare now for future surprise so we have those fewest regrets from the crisis strike and this is why the war game is so important for us out there but we need an operational shock absorber in the force that can take those initial shocks of surprise in stride, turn into effective action and move against the enemy's strengths. And we're going to have to do this for our nation. It's going to largely depend on our ground forces because of the nature of the enemy threat today although we will do so using our naval and air aviation superiority and bring it to bear. Remembering that 89% of our casualties since 1945 have come out of infantry units. They're not all infantry men, they may be engineers in there or truck drivers, 89%. And when you have that sort of a casualty rate that drives some other things that I'll get to in a moment. Most importantly, we're going to have to recognize that war cannot be precisely orchestrated. By its nature, it is unpredictable. You cannot change the fundamental nature of war any more than you change the fundamental nature of water or of anything else. I think that by its nature it's unpredictable and if I were to give you an example in negative terms of what we want to avoid, we want to avoid what happened to the Royal Navy between Trafalgar and Jutland. Over a period about 100 years, we see a Navy that had been hundreds of years in the making that was absolutely a tremendous war fighting machine. It can go into the battle of Trafalgar and change the course of history. And if I recall right, Admiral Nelson raised one signal as they cited the French fleet. They were already in their formation. He didn't have to put them in the line of battle. He raised one signal. England expects every man to do his duty. He did not then start giving part and parcel PowerPoint slides and a bunch of googling up information on the French Sun like that. And if you look at the co-founder with David Abshire here, if you look at 31 Knot Burke and the way he fought his 10 Kansas eager beavers in the Solomon's back in the early World War II where they would get together after each night of operations and they'd all come together on a ship. They'd sit around the ship, say what happened last night? What are we gonna do? And then he would let them go. In the future, I think what we're going to do is divorce ourselves from what technology has given us and I'll get into more of that in just a moment about orchestrating or dictating every action on the battlefield. There are enormous ramifications to our forces about this but the only kind of military that's done this in history, the only one that's done this in history is one that thinks it cannot be defeated and it thinks it can actually dictate to subordinates by removing their initiative create a very efficient organization and in every case it eventually falls apart and for the Royal Navy, they go into Jutland and the German high seas fleet basically comes out of it in very good shape, it is not cut off, it's not annihilated, it should have been and under Nelson it undoubtedly would have been. Their recovery caused them to go in and when Beatty takes over the fleet, he changes everything and restores initiative to subordinate commanders too late for that big battle to have helped stop World War I's carnage earlier. The implications, what are the implications here? Hybrid threats are going to characterize the future. Of that, I'll tell you, if anybody sees this not happen in the future, come see me and I'll buy you a beer. I'm not confident that it's going to happen. Irregular warfare may well be the primary focus. Irregular warfare may well be the primary focus of future ground forces and that's going to require cultural savvy by our troops that's going to be essential. Knowing when to shift gears from one form of war to another because you understand here, hybrid means you're going to see a mix of conventional and unconventional and everything out there. It's not going to be in four quadrants of a DOD chart with disruptive, catastrophic, traditional and non-traditional war. The enemy's not going to say, well, I'll only do this one. No, the enemy's going to circle all the way through there and come after us. In this era, one that I would like to characterize as one of persistent engagement, advice and assist capability will be key. In other words, our ability to advise and assist primarily by our ground forces but by our air and naval forces as well. This is, I'm here to talk about the ground force today. I don't mean to make this sound exclusive but the advice and assist capability is going to be key. These wars are going to be fought among the people and we're going to have to be able to achieve influence over many audiences. You cannot do that unless you interact with those audiences and certainly the people who are in the contested zone. What we call the battlefield with the NGOs call the humanitarian field. We're going to have to deal on human levels with human beings and not think technology or tactics by targetry is going to settle the whole war. It's going to demand a whole of government approach and we have some problems there, you all know that. Secretary Clinton, Ambassador Herbst, they are making progress, the Congress starting to fund us. As one British gentleman put it once, once the Americans have exhausted all the alternatives, they will do the right thing. We're starting to make progress on this. And if you want to know why we have a cultural problem with it and why we need coalitions, simply go back to the Federalist Papers and you can read right there why we have trouble putting together an interagency effort. So it was set up to be combative between the various parts of government and there's not something that comes easily. Where it's going to require this future kind of war that we're fighting is going to require a seamless integration with the special operations forces. And we have achieved that in active operations over the last eight years. You will see constantly those of you who've been in the combat zone see this integration all the time over there. And of course it's going to have to be a coalition friendly force. We have no room for it's my way or the highway. Only good ideas or all the good ideas come only from nations with the most aircraft carriers in its fleet. That sort of thinking is antiquated. We need coalitions today for the best ideas. We need them for political reasons. We need them to help suffocate the hopes of our enemies. As they, my headquarters was guarded in Iraq a few years ago by 50 Tongan troops. Now you think what good is 50 Tongan troops? Actually they were very good. And I breathe the sire relief every time I drove back inside those lines. But also it meant that there was a sense of commitment in the United Nations. There was a sense of totality about what the threat was all about and what we were going to do with it. And we were not going to help them through their midlife crisis easily. They were there and they were carrying guns for a reason. There's nothing like having your young men fight alongside each other to really send a message. The battle of the narrative is going to be critical. Well, why would I bring that up about our ground forces? Tactical actions in the future will need to support the operational effort to gain the support of the people. Tactical actions are going to have to be designed to help gain the support of the people. And those tactical actions will have strategic impact in this information age and it's gonna demand articulate leaders and articulate troops. And I might add it's gonna demand articulate spokesmen in Washington DC who can address in clear terms the nobility of what we are defending. We are gonna have to deal with an often mendacious press that hold our forces to an immaculate standard while giving a medieval enemy the benefit of the moral equality or even media objectivity. And that's simply the way the ball's being pitched so we're gonna have to play on that field. But the global audience must see that war's grim realities can be reconciled with human aspirations. Otherwise, military success, ladies and gentlemen, will never equate to strategic success. And related to this is lawfare. Lawfare where the enemy actually uses our laws against us. And this is going to become more operant. For example, the enemy in false religious garb is opening the aperture of who's a legitimate target. Look at Mumbai, look at Bali, look at 7-7 in London, look at 9-11 in the United States, look at Madrid, look at the Russian school children in Beslan, Russia, the hundreds who are slaughtered. We are seeing the enemy opening the aperture over who they want to go after. At the same time, we are narrowing the aperture that we're operating under, thanks to precision and thanks to this omnipresent TV camera on our side, the enemy has effectively denied our media from their side of what's going on, other than in their own statements, this sort of thing. So this is gonna be challenging for our land forces. Again, I don't write policy, I just execute the last 600 meters of it. We are going to have to be able to deal with this reality. And part of it has to do with people who are comfortable enough with defending our own values that they can articulate our values. And right now, I think our education system, at least in the States, is doing a horrible job of creating that sense of destiny and what it is that the Enlightenment brought down to us and what we owe to turn over to our children. So for our ground forces, we're also gonna have to create new triads. Now, many of us in this room remember the old strategic triad, it was nuclear submarine launched ballistic missiles and we had land-based missiles and nuclear bombers. You have two new triads. One is army, soft and marine, because the nature of the enemy, they've decided that's where we are not superior, we are not dominant, so that's where they've gravitated to. So we're gonna have to create a triad out of those forces supported by our aviation and our naval forces that can move against this enemy. Another triad inside those forces is gonna be the leader and the team and the individual. It's gonna be more important what the individuals bring to the battlefield than their numbers. High-performing small units are now a national imperative. And that's not just for our soft forces. We work very closely with Special Operations Command between Joint Force Command and Admiral Olson's team there, but how do we harvest the lessons they've learned not to create special forces? You can't do that with the general forces, but what you can do is harvest many of their lessons learned and many of those skill sets and bring them online. Our forces must be capable of operating independently at increasingly lower echelons. The general purpose force must be able to disaggregate, to adapt to this form of war, yet aggregate when needed. For example, in a more conventionally characterized war. Now, if you look at everyone who's been thinking we're going too far into your regular warfare, take a look at what came out of South Caucasus a year ago. And here we saw a largely conventional Russian force that used unconventional, whether it be cyber or the Vostok battalion, a bunch of thugs and murderers, and sent them in to completely disrupt the population so when the Russian army came in it looked like it was actually calming things down. But my point is you're going to see these hybrid wars where they don't fit neatly into one category or another even though they may be largely characterized by irregular or insurgent or conventional, this sort of thing. But if you don't have a general purpose force you can break down into smaller teams and still come back together and aggregate then you're going to have a problem in a world that throws wars of varying characters at us. Israel, against Hezbollah, we are studying this conflict very closely. We have a very close working relationship with the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. We saw conventional and unconventional fights there. We saw high tech, very high tech, an Israeli ship taken out by an anti-ship cruise missile and then we saw IEDs being set off back in the rear. We saw all of this in the same geographic area. So while there is no template for hybrid threats, the Israeli-Lebanon, South Lebanon conflict is a textbook example of a hybrid fight and our troops are simply going to have to be able to swing both ways. We're building a small unit center of excellence at JF-COM where we're orchestrating many of these changes. Human factors will be key. In the information age, the idea of American technological superiority is probably overrated. Everybody can get at the technology now. In many cases, they can use our own GPS to get first round effect on target by mortar rounds that they are firing against our own fobs in Iraq. They didn't spend one penny on R&D, they didn't put one satellite in the air and they're getting that result from it. So the idea that we are somehow going to be superior in technology, I doubt in niche areas, the enemy may have superiority, but in the human factors areas, therein lies perhaps much of the advantage that our ground forces will be able to bring. Technology in the future is going to be playing for the ground forces supporting and a subordinate and an enabling role, but I don't think it will any longer be seen as the catch-all and the be-all and we could simply reduce the army to 2,500 men or something at the Fort Mayer Guard as some people have thought in the past. It is going to take a ground force that can affect its will on the ground where people live. A word of caution here, I mentioned it when I talked earlier about Nelson and then what happened by the time of Jutland. High tech allows us to centralize or decentralize much of our approach to war and the Americans tend to centralize forms of warfare because they want to achieve efficiency on the battlefield or whatever the reason. I think that will no longer work. It's simply not the way to go and I would use command and control as an example. The US military is the single most vulnerable military in the world if, and I say again, if we overly rely on technical C2 systems. Centralized decision-making would equal a single point of failure. General Petraeus, our good shipmate who's running a heck of a fight, has come out and said, we must, based on his years of experience fighting this enemy and observing combat, we must decentralize to the point of discomfort. Decentralizing authority, decision-making authority and assets to the point of discomfort because operations in the future will occur at the speed of trust and technical systems will be under attack and will go down. Units large and small and individual soldiers in the battlefield of the future will operate off commanders intent. This is generalized instructions, not detailed orders. And how is that for a change when you think of the way the military operates and especially when you look at what these robust systems today uninterrupted by the enemy's activities are allowing us to tell right down to a lieutenant what his uniform will be determined by general officers 100 miles away when he goes outside the fob. Those days are going to have to be over. We are going to have to restore initiative. For those of us who wear this gray hair around here, you remember in the old days you could not at times during exercises use your radio because to press that handset meant what? You are gonna get 36 rounds of Russian artillery on top of your head just for pressing it. We operated at time with a great deal of an issue. We have not as best I can determine turned off a radio once in the last eight years of active operations. We have raised a generation of combat experience troops who may very well have learned all the wrong lessons. We're going to have to change that. I think in the future, Admiral Nelson and Admiral 31 Knot Burke's idea of how you get integrated action is going to have more to do with our performance than how many dozens of bandwidth machines you have laying around your headquarters. Taken together, this is all going to require a change in personnel policies and especially in the training and education of junior officers and junior NCOs because we must prepare them for the level of authority that they are going to be given. And I think that commanders are gonna shift from command and control to the concept of command and feedback because you cannot control in the kind of world we're going to without slowing everything to the lowest common denominator. Large mass formation in the future will become targets for destruction or be slow moving and slow acting behemoths irrelevant to the fight. Yet aggregated capabilities must be achievable on this decentralized battlefield. In an increasingly anti-access world on one hand and then wanting to gain a decisive impact on the course of events on the other, we are going to, it's going to demand a ground presence. Ideas that we're going to be able to fight future wars without having soldiers on the ground or just having a few special forces, I think that's a pipe dream. Maintaining our command of air and sea, we're gonna need ground forces that can conduct forcible entry or we will not be able to reassure our friends and challenge our enemies. And it's likely that we are going to be landing then, putting folks into urban and forested and jungle areas where our technology at least so far will be somewhat muted in its impact. I wanna make an important point here, tying all this together for the ground forces is going to be state of the art simulators. We're gonna replicate aviation's decades long use of simulators and we are going to be presenting hundreds of tactical and ethical dilemmas to our lads before they go into their first fight because it's absolutely to me the worst possible thing to think where we take all these casualties, we have not copied what we have going on in the aviation for years and use simulators that we know the technology exists, we know the resources can be put to it, we have both a moral and we have a mission reason for using these because there's no reason not to, the technology exists today and casualty reduction in terms of our own lads and in terms of the innocent on the battlefield dictate this in a three block war for a corporal and for a nation where you can be on one block handing out blankets on the next block the same corporal can have a squad in the midst of a heavy firefight and on the next block he's trying to separate warring factions, you don't need these people to learn this by going through the experience, we need to put them through some kind of replication, some kind of simulation and we need to do it for those of you who've read the book Ender's Game, basically a science fiction book, the young lads fighting, he'd been put through his pace with some protégés they're going through this training to defend the world they know the enemy's coming again and a bunch of young folks and they burn out and they have all their whatever going on and at the end he notices a few more people up on the observation thing while he's down on the deck playing his war game and of course what happens when it's over he just fought the war he didn't even know it wasn't his training now we'll never get to that point but there's certainly a reason why we can do a lot better than we've done today using the gaming technology available to us. A last point, I would just tell you that like several of us in here like my shipmate General Kearney and all we fought this enemy for a few years here. I'm one form or another I've been deployed against this enemy since 1979. Frankly General Haleston had I realized the Cominot would leave me in the Middle East for most of my life, I probably would have found a different line of work since I'm a bachelor and I appreciate the liberty opportunities in some other places but I'll just tell you the enemy means what they say I've always taken that if you read what the enemy says believe it, if they say girls don't go to school they really believe that. If they say that nobody gets to pray other than one way that's exactly what they believe and certainly we can peel away with a good message what we stand for and the toleration we stand for and what came out of the enlightenment but between two completely irreconcilable views of the world we're going to have to fight and this entire fight I will tell you is based on our strategy such as it is our military strategy, our battlefield concepts, our battlefield operation all based on one thing a high quality all volunteer force and right now there is too much riding on an army sergeant who just got back from two tours in Iraq who's trying to sell the US Army in Peoria there's too much riding on his shoulders. We need a sense of responsibility about this by our civilian and military leadership mostly civilian since it's the nation's decision to go with an all volunteer force but we need Dr. Hamry and one of his notes that he puts out occasionally wrote about despite the hot political rhetoric very interesting words the young people have continued to sign up and despite tens of thousands of casualties despite families on military bases holding their breath as they see an official car coming down the street there we have the highest retention rate in the army and the Marine Corps history the two forces that have taken most of these casualties but we need everyone to feel a sense of responsibility to act locally and individually and nationally if we want to keep this going this experiment we call America and what it stands for doesn't just happen to exist if we don't have young folks who are willing to give up the comfort and the safety of home to take discomfort and challenges on then frankly you can have general stand up here and we can talk in Washington DC and make very eloquent statements and it all means nothing without the young folks who are willing to close those last 600 meters ladies and gentlemen I'll stop there I purposely didn't go into the which programs are going to be good for this military you figured out let me let's get into the question and answer here go ahead please Sir Jeff O'Cosman from Penn State University thanks for giving me your service and for your marks I want to take you to your role though as supreme ally commander for transformation for a moment and I ask you a question at two levels as you look at that hat that job look at our European allies how they doing because in terms of the economy one would say that their economic situations is as bad as ours there's a lot of talk about their ability to transform build the kind of forces that can go out and defend values while so many years they built forces to defend territory we've seen the president go to NATO and get a pretty modest response in terms of additional forces going to Afghanistan so that's an equipping forcing part of it then the second half and I was taken by your extended comments about responsibilities how are they doing that one as well because many believe that in Europe people believe we're in Afghanistan because we're there to support the Americans we're not there because this is a threat to us we're there to support the Americans and that won't wash for very long great question we we now defend not just a realm that is geographic we defend a realm of ideas and defenders of that realm have got to get better at our ticket when we lost the British prime minister uh... the last uh... mister Blair I thought we lost one of the most articulate uh... defenders of the realm that we had but I'll tell you that in my work over there it was very clear that no one had a common view of the threat as a result we don't call it the joe there but we start a thing called the multiple futures project plural so we didn't have to get consensus which would have still born it uh... and what I we we put together what we think the implicated military implications are of of globalization and climate change and all the other things that we know demographics uh... ideological spread of ideological hatred in this sort of thing so hopefully if we can get to a some point where we all agree on what is the threat then we can start moving forward because after four months there i realized as I sat in that room that uh... there was no agreement on that if you don't start from one common point if you don't uh... for those of you are artillery officers you don't shift from a known point you know just fire around hope that land somewhere that's not going to work another thing is uh... decisions been made by the u.s. president and the secretary general and the french president chairman of the military committee to shift my nato job to a french officer four-star and i think in many ways the level of resentment about america in europe meant when we brought good ideas there they were not willing to really listen to him unstated they're very they're very polite to me up front i have good friends there but there was a sense of resentment uh... against america at one point i was frustrated enough uh... as they're beating me up about it i said you know i just got to tell you that there are all people i say sir to see many of us talking to i just got to tell you that i'll do a lot of u.s. naval officer i'll give a hundred and ten percent every day and and i believe in nato lock stock and barrel we need it but i said please don't ask me to care about your children more than you care i mean this enemy means what they're saying i was in cobble when i got that phone call from the secretary general and i looked at the few time zones between me and brussels from where i was right then it changed the view of this california base marine about the prevalence of this threat their parliaments because of the parliamentary system uh... do not give them a lot of of uh... ground to move on uh... if they they don't really have strong enough parties in some of the countries i think to demand sacrifice from their people if they demand sacrifice one little party's gonna pull and the government's going to fall so it's going to continue to take american leadership but in a more persuasive way that perhaps we've practiced it in the past and understand what it is we the children of the enlightenment what we really value and are you willing to fight for your values and i there's the rub we'll have to see where people fall up richard whites that's an institute uh... you mentioned correctly i believe that uh... the military needs to encourage cultural awareness foreign language skills etc among its troops but historically that's been difficult because many people at least uh... some of the officers i talk to you think that it though it would be better for their career if they person combat units uh... and do or do other things then develop those skills how would you change the senate structure to encourage more people to develop that it took that route but bottom line is institutions get the behavior they reward so if that's what reward them we're going to have to uh... if that's what we need we have to reward it uh... we've looked at a number of ways to do it we've looked at giving everybody a rosetta stone uh... the marine corps looked at every nco who who goes on to the career force first re-enlistment every officer being assigned to one of seventeen regions in the world identified by the cia uh... potential for conflict and have them study that region for their entire career linguistics culture anthropology that whole bit sociology that sort of thing i've even gone down and studied how the lds church teaches its young missionaries about the same age group of many of our our folks how do they get those language skills to convey complex thoughts this sort of thing uh... we're going to simply have to set up a reward system so we institutionally say this is what we prize and uh... that i i defer to general casey and general conway and uh... and the other chiefs of services for how they can best do that i i like the different service cultures each one of the different way of doing it and we'll do it will make it happen it's tough though it is very tough darpa creating this translating machine and i think you're going to solve your problems by having someone with a machine tell them something and then what i understood was i'm going to say it in english it'll get translated into arabic and then they translate it back to english it didn't make a hell of a lot of sense why don't we get back to investing money in our young people in the schools this is looking into the future so they can't graduate from high school unless they've been studying some of these foreign languages or they can't get into college you can't start it when they're that old well yeah you're probably right uh... that has to do with decisions beyond my obviously beyond my scope but uh... technology that enables a human interface i'm still all four but this one's not going to work because there's a reason why soldiers and Marines are taught to take their sunglasses off even if they don't speak a word of the language people communicate through their eyes too uh... there there are ways you've got to do that this is one of those areas where you cannot replace the human element here so uh... we keep trying because if you're just a guard on on an outpost and you just need to know what is it you're coming up to complain about or your concern you can use it for something like that maybe but so there's uses for it i wouldn't get enamored by it i share your skepticism i don't know about the military times how do you build that hybrid soldier can you do it with today's force you think in terms of quality and if not how do you get to that in terms of the recruiting base not stating the economy's fluctuations the question for those in back how do you create this hybrid soldier for hybrid warfare first of all i'd say war is war is war hybrid threats may incorp which is the same point you're making though uh... hybrid threats will come at us with a combination of uh... conventional unconventional that sort of thing unconventional dust might be very conventional the enemy how do we build the soldier went back and stayed the romans they use the same troops in their day to protect the borders of the empire as they did to police the inside went back to the british twenty two thousand red coats i believe is all they had on the subcontinent that india and pakistan twenty two thousand red coats with a whole lot of nco's and officers advised and assisted in mentored the british indian army uh... there are examples of forces that could do this in the past and our high quality force can do it the problem is it's not big enough right now general casey does not have the time right now to take soldiers and train them for anything other than their next deployment to iraq afghanistan we're going to have to get an army big enough at a time when we've got to reconsider what size military we can afford considering that some of our enemies today could bring more financial power against it today not enemies uh... com competitors could bring more financial power against us can we really afford the size military we're going for what do we really need this why i think we need a grand strategy and once we have that we determine force do we need in the army to do this the army doing most of the fighting and most of the bleeding for this country uh... that uh... cuts across the entire joint force and it's going to take people where we invest much more in training and education so that we can train them for what we know they'll have to do set up a machine gun fly an airplane educate them for when we take that navy ship commander and put him in the pangier valley of afghanistan commanding a provincial reconstruction team he can apply good judgment to carry out commanders intent it's mostly going to be solved with training and education to get that broad-based force that can do both uh... i uh... uh... right now i'll tell you that the all-volunteer force would be very hard pressed absent a significant civilian leadership sense of responsibility to uh... help that sergeant out in peoria we're you know quality skills that brings the battlefield more important mass right now i'd rather stay away from the idea of growing it more right now we just need to get our appetite in our capability and balance and give the uh... the current force some time to get its act together okay yes sir general carl osgood with executive intelligence review clouds it's also famously said that uh... war is the extension of politics by other means one thing i have not heard a lot of discussion about in this context is the political uh... component of conflicts and i think a lot of it some of the conflicts that we're looking at will need a political solution rather than just military you know what you've laid out uh... could you talk a little bit about how the political aspect fits into all this yes yes i can i came here to talk about the operational level more than the strategic and the the civilian policy level i want to talk about how we fit the military into this what has been well asked here about this combination of types of war that we were going to have to be able to fight what we're going to do is emphasize in the future something the armies dunyomans work on it's called they call it campaign design actually it's tactical or campaign or strategic design this is where you first of all uh... if i had to show you the difference between design and planning design is you set the problem you establish the problem planning is where you solve the problem if you do your design piece right you may find that the best thing to send is not a armor company from the u.s. army but a sewage contractor from somewhere in other words we identify what the problem is we're trying to solve it has to do with setting the problem designing the campaign and the military may very well not be the main effort uh... i share your point i already i i guess i could have started even more broadly deductive on a on a much broader scale and narrowed it down but uh... i i concur with your point and we're doing this through the design phase and by the way ambassador herps and the folks over at state are inside can't when we do this sort of thing so we actually have the civilians there that we try to start building this whole of government approach uh... i'll take one last one from my shipmate okay what i'd like to ask you based on what we've learned so far what's your intuition about how we will ultimately that ground force our former fifth fleet commander and sent common great shipmate thanks for your service in a difficult time with iran out there kevin the program addicts i think you're going to see a significant shift where now instead of just things we buy radios trucks ships airplanes uh... we're going to see a shift in resourcing and priority how can we better train people uh... what it what what is the what are the psychological and social and coaching instincts we need to bring the bear i see a lot of this going into training enters technologies that actually can help this uh... whether be uh... the ways that we organize that force uh... and what it's organized to do uh... we obviously are going to have to be able to move strategically and tactically what does that mean whatever we develop on the ground tactically in an anti-access world we've got to get it there and perhaps without the uh... luxury of bases we've had in the past so your force the navy is going to have to be able to do c-basing over a sustained period of time for a significant expeditionary force those vehicles that we take are one of their key performance parameters is going to have to be survival because we know how the enemy's going to go after us now uh... there's going to have to be a degree of mobility and yet ultimately it will probably come down to people getting out of those vehicles and working with people on the ground hence i go right back to my training education piece so strategic agility with tactical units that do not completely box up for uh... sustainment or for movement our strategic assets and the ability to move quickly into areas but most importantly to sustain those efforts over a significant period of time and for the navy the ability to operate against the literals will become critical uh... we can't have a navy out there that can only fight a blue water fight and then wonder why again it keeps getting cut down in size because people are trying to fight a war where our naval forces are not being brought in in fact our naval forces have a lot to bring to the fight simply think differently thanks very much ladies and gentlemen appreciate it you have a great panel coming up ladies and gentlemen uh... on behalf of uh... dr hamry and uh... the rest of the csi's team and uh... the audience here and and and our sponsors roles rois north america we'd like to once again thank you know matters for his remarks and his insights and we'll be setting up for the panel immediately following uh... general madis's departure thank you very much