 I think my presentation is called something like Reflections on Military Professionalism and I speak to you highly conscious of the fact that I am no longer a member of the military profession having been out of the army now just about as long as I was a serving officer. So I qualify at best as a sympathetic observer of your profession, at least I hope by the time I get to the end of the talk you'll think I'm a sympathetic observer. In that regard, I'd like to suggest that a core issue confronting your profession today is to honestly assess the collective performance of the armed services and of the national security establishment more broadly over the past three plus decades and especially since 9-11. Now such an assessment is not a comfortable thing to undertake, it's never easy to honestly evaluate an enterprise in which you are deeply invested. I happen to be a Catholic and I'm quite conscious of the fact that if you really want somebody to take a close look at the crisis enveloping the Catholic Church, probably the last people you want to turn to are the Archbishops who run the institution. They've screwed things up too much and don't want to admit it. So here's one sympathetic outsider's perspective on what such an assessment on your part might entail and let me begin by offering some context for that assessment. For well over 30 years now, dating from the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine back in 1980, the United States military has been engaged, has been intensively engaged in various quarters of the Islamic world and an end to that involvement is obviously nowhere in sight. Many of you, I have no doubt, have experienced that involvement at first hand. But tick off the countries in that region in the greater Middle East that U.S. forces in recent decades have invaded, occupied, garrisoned, bombed or raided and aware American soldiers have either killed or been killed. Since 1980, that list includes Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. But also Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Gutter, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and now Syria. The list just keeps getting longer. To judge by the various official explanations that have come out of Washington over those years, the mission of the troops dispatched to these various quarters has been to defend or deter or liberate punishing the wicked and protecting the innocent while spreading liberal values and generally keeping Americans safe. But what are we to make of the larger enterprise in which the United States has been engaged for well over three decades now? What is the nature of the military struggle that we are waging? I think the seldom stated premise underlying this war can be simply stated. With disorder, dysfunction and disarray in the Islamic world perceived to pose a growing threat to vital U.S. national security interests, the adroit application of hard power we profess to believe will enable the United States to check those tendencies and thereby preserve the American way of life. Choose whatever term you like. Police, pacify, shape, control, dominate, transform. Back in 1980, President Carter launched the United States on a project aimed at nothing less than determining the fate and future of the peoples inhabiting the Ark of Nations from the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Since World War II, American soldiers had fought and died in Asia. And even when the wars in Korea and Vietnam ended, U.S. troop contingents continued to garrison that region. In Europe, a major U.S. military presence dating from the start of the Cold War signaled Washington's willingness to fight there as well. But prior to Carter's watershed 1980 statement, no comparable commitment toward the Islamic world existed. And now, of course, that was all starting to change. Only in retrospect does this become clear, of course. At the time when President Carter declared the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest, that was the literal meaning of the Carter doctrine, he himself did not intend to embark upon a war, nor did President Carter anticipate what course the war was going to follow, its duration, costs, and consequences. Like the European statesmen who 100 years ago touched off the cataclysm that we know today as World War I, Carter merely litifused without knowing where it led. But look closely enough and the dots connect. Much as, say, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even the invasion of Grenada among many other events, all constitute episodes in what we call the Cold War, so to seemingly disparate events such as the Beirut bombing of 1983, the Black Hawk down debacle of 1993, and the Iraq invasion of 2003, among many others, all form part of a conflict that we might call America's War for the Greater Middle East. Acknowledging the existence of that larger conflict, seeing America's War for the Greater Middle East whole provides a start point for evaluating the overall performance of the United States military during this enterprise. Let me state plainly my own assessment of that war. We have not won it. We are not winning it, and simply pressing on is unlikely to produce more positive results next year or the year after. So what's gone wrong? Why has victory defined as conclusively achieving the political purposes for which we fight? Why has victory proven so elusive? After all, ours is by any measure the best and most capable military in the entire world. Well here are a few preliminary thoughts which taken together define what I believe is the crisis confronting your profession. First, the center of gravity. Devised by the German philosopher Klauswitz, the phrase center of gravity as I think you probably know refers to that factor upon which a war's outcome ultimately turns. The center of gravity could be the enemy army or its capital. It could be some critical resource or a piece of valuable terrain. Correctly identifying the center of gravity does not, of itself, guarantee victory. But at least you have an inkling of how a war might be or even whether it can be won. Yet even today, it's not at all clear that the United States has correctly identified the center of gravity in this conflict. The war for the greater Middle East began in the desert with President Carter's failed 1980 attempt to free the Americans held hostage in Iran. And since then, the war has featured campaigns in other remote and desolate places. That said, Americans ought to have learned by now that in their war for the greater Middle East, the key terrain is urban. In this contest, outcomes turn on what people think and believe. What matters most is not killing adversaries, U.S. forces know how to do that, but influencing populations. People constitute this war's center of gravity. And here the United States labors under massive disadvantages that we ought to acknowledge. When American soldiers venture into this key urban terrain, they do so as alien intruders. They arrive in cities like Baghdad and Kabul as heirs of a Western civilization that has seldom acted to further the well-being of Muslims. Further, U.S. efforts are unavoidably tainted by the prior actions of Europeans who in attempting to incorporate their Middle East into their own empires made such a hash of things. Like it or not, we are the successors of those imperialists. The so-called West may be an artificial construct, one that has long since outlived its usefulness in my view, but having for decades declared that we are part of that West, we cannot suddenly divorce ourselves from its deservedly unsavory reputation throughout much of the Islamic world. Washington's insistence that U.S. intentions today differ from and are more benign than those of, say, Great Britain a century ago, invites only ridicule and incredulity. This is especially the case when we stride into Iraq or Afghanistan arm in arm with our British cousins. To our ears, the phrase Anglo-American conjures up glorious memories of a partnership forged to free a continent gripped by slavery. Back in June 1944, General Eisenhower summoned the Anglo-American forces under his command to embark upon what he unabashedly referred to as a great crusade. When George W. Bush in an unscripted moment referred to the Iraq war as a crusade, he was alluding to those memories. But residents of the Islamic world will inevitably assess Anglo-American purposes somewhat differently. Furthermore, their own collective memory includes repeated encounters with crusades. Those that their forebears experience and that remain part of their shared consciousness drew their inspiration not from a desire to free, but from a determination to conquer. And this poses a dilemma that the officer corps itself ought to grapple with. Second point, the role of technology. As the Cold War was winding down and the war for the greater Middle East was heating up, leading members of the US National Security Elite, very much including influential members of the officer corps, persuaded themselves that technology was transforming the very nature of war. I'm referring here to the so-called revolution in military affairs. I'm actually not sure if that's still a term it's commonly used. Fast computers and precision-guided munitions promised to enhance, by orders of magnitude, the efficacy of force. And since technological superiority was ostensibly an American strong suit, this high-tech approach to warfare promised to endow US forces with a decisive edge against any and all adversaries. Well, the United States has now fully tested that proposition, trying various approaches in various places. And except in the narrowest tactical terms, it has proven to be utterly false. As a means to pacify or control or liberate or transform, in over the past three decades we've professed to do all these things, the preferred American style of warfare possesses limited utility when applied to the greater Middle East. The ongoing campaign against ISIS offers only the most recent illustration of this point. Precision airstrikes can destroy specific targets. For example, all the US manufactured equipment that ISIS has captured from the Iraqis. But as Pentagon leaders candidly acknowledge, air power alone will not accomplish the announced mission of defeating and destroying this latest enemy. That will require boots on the ground. Yet boots are hard to come by. Apart from a handful of militant politicians and pundits too old for military service, few Americans have much stomach for undertaking another large-scale ground campaign. The disappointments of our last Iraq war are still too fresh. And as for would-be allies, some are reluctant to dive in, others possess little by way of effective capabilities. So we are left with this strange circumstance of the world's most powerful military doggedly doing what it does best, even when what it does possesses only modest relevance to the problem actually at hand. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once touched off a minor furor by remarking that, quote, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want. Well, 30-some years into the war for the greater Middle East, the army, or more broadly the military establishment that we have, has still not adapted itself to what fighting that war entails. Each of the services remains deeply invested in a model and an identity that might be appropriate to some war, but not to the one we find ourselves fighting. Seems to me that this is a problem requiring sustained military professional attention. Third point, strategy. In present-day Washington's strategy, defined here as the principled application of power to achieve objectives of first-order importance, strategies become a lost art. Any strategy worthy of the name sees around the curve. It expands the range of plausible and affordable options. In short, it creates choices. What passes for a U.S. strategy in the war for the greater Middle East has been almost entirely reactive. Rather than principled, it has been opportunistic. It has repeatedly failed to anticipate second-order consequences. Instead of creating choice, it has fostered the sense that the United States really has no alternative but to press on, vaguely hoping the persistence will produce a different result. And again, the campaign against ISIS illustrates this point. Now sometimes, surely in war, doggedness can be a virtue, but sometimes it's a sign of stupidity. And in this case, I submit that the latter applies. Where is the debate over strategic alternatives? In academic circles, it may exist, as the writings of Richard Betz or Barry Pozen or Stephen Walt or John Miersheimer, among others, may testify. But in Washington, no such debate exists, which is an astonishing fact, given the paltry results achieved over the course of three-plus decades trying to bring the greater Middle East to heel. Now during the Cold War, the United States made many costly mistakes. That said, the concept of containment did provide at least a basic framework for sound strategy. 30-some years after it began, we cannot make a similar statement regarding America's war for the greater Middle East. In lieu of strategy, we have platitudes recited to justify a seemingly endless list of costly and inconclusive military campaigns. And yet feasible alternatives do exist. For example, what supposedly endows the Persian Gulf with such huge importance is the concentration of world oil reserves in that region. Ensuring access to that oil is what promoted the US to embark upon its war for the greater Middle East in the first place. But what if, as appears to be the case, the United States stands on the brink of something approximating energy self-sufficiency? Should that not affect the reigning perception that the American way of life is somehow tied to the fate of Saudi Arabia and its oil-rich neighbors? Shouldn't that emerging fact create options? It should, but thus far, policymakers seem to be oblivious to that possibility. This too, I submit, is an issue that should engage the attention of the officer corps. Fourth point, national security apparatus. I refer here to the sprawling network of institutions that emerged in the aftermath of World War II and that have grown ever since like topsy. Today, that network centers on the Department of Defense and the so-called Intelligence Committee, yet it also includes select congressional committees, think tanks, advocacy groups, lobbies, defense contractors, certain academic programs, and even specialized publications. All of them devoted to the proposition that national security must remain priority number one to say that this network exists chiefly to perpetuate itself, maybe slightly unfair, but only slightly. In his recent memoir, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates complains about the unresponsiveness of the national security bureaucracy, even when called upon to meet the pressing needs of troops during wartime. In his time, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made the same point. Here is Rumsfeld speaking to Pentagon employees on, please note the date, September 10, 2001, quoting Rumsfeld now. The topic today, he said, is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans with brutal consistency, he continued. It stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Rumsfeld continues. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone. Our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world, but this adversary is closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. Well, wildly wrong and misguided in so many ways, on this one point at least, Rumsfeld was right. And nothing that has occurred in the years since to reduce the salience of his critique. The national security apparatus suffers from a seemingly irreversible sclerosis. Of course, things look different to those who labor within the bottles of that apparatus. Their efforts to streamline and to achieve greater efficiency are ostensibly always underway. Not long ago, Secretary of Defense Hegel announced plans to reduce the size of his own staff. At present, the office of the Secretary of Defense has 2,400 employees, some office. Hegel's senior staff currently includes a deputy secretary, an executive secretary, five undersecretaries, six deputy undersecretaries, 15 assistant secretaries, and five principal deputy assistant secretaries. Hegel's plan is to reduce OSD staffing by 200 spaces. Oh, and he's given his people until 2019 to figure out how to do that. Don't hold your breath. Military professionals, I would argue, should be first in line in declaring this sort of over-bureaucratization to be utterly unsatisfactory and should demand real reform. Fifth point, generalship. In any war, larger, small, superior generalship does not alone guarantee a successful outcome. If it did, Richmond, Virginia might today be the capital of an independent nation. Yet competent generals increase the odds of coming out on top while inept ones can all but single-handedly turn a potentially winning hand into a losing one. At their worst, bumbling senior military officers may actually aid and abet the enemy. The American Civil War lasted as long as it did for several reasons, but prominent among those reasons was the quality of leadership under which the army of the Potomac suffered when commanded by the likes of Irwin McDowell, George B. McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker. We should not presume that present-day US military leadership is all that much better. Daniel P. Bolger, a recently retired three-star US Army general, is about to come out with a book called Why We Lost. It's his account of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He served as a general officer in both. We Lost, Bolger argues, with an honesty rarely seen, in large part due to the inadequacies of the senior officers charged with waging those wars. It's an argument that deserves serious consideration. Taken as a whole, the performance of senior US officers during the decades of America's war for the greater Middle East has been decidedly mixed. And this is true even with regard to that elite group of top commanders sometimes referred to as savior generals. Operation Desert Storms, H. Norman Schwartzkoff, along with more recent worthies such as Tommy Franks, David Petraeus, and Stanley McChrystal, were once mentioned in the same breath with George S. Patton. With the passage of time, however, their achievements, the achievements that earned them wide renown, have lost their luster. Today, Operation Desert Storm seems less like a historic victory than as an opening act to a chapter in US military history that most Americans would prefer to forget. Why? Well, not least because of massive errors of judgment by Schwartzkoff himself in negotiating the terms of the ceasefire that brought Desert Storm to a conclusion. No one thinks of Tommy Franks as the liberator of Baghdad as they did ever so briefly a decade ago. His failure to plan for phase four of that operation was a monumental blunder. As for Petraeus' famous surge in Iraq and the Afghan equivalent engineered by McChrystal, whatever they once appeared to achieve has since become unstuck. Whatever Senator John McCain might persist in claiming, the United States did not win the Iraq War. It merely bequeathed to the people of Iraq, a war that the United States fecklessly began but failed to finish. A similar outcome is likely in Afghanistan. We will leave. The war there will continue. And as demonstrations of superior general ship, General Patton will be decidedly unimpressed. The armed services know how to grow lieutenants and captains, by which I mean O1s and O3s. But their apparent inability to do the same when it comes to identifying, developing, and selecting officers for the very top jobs is troubling. And the officer corps itself ought to ask why. Sixth point, the US military system. The intensification of the war for the greater Middle East after 9-11 revealed hitherto unsuspected defects in America's basic approach to raising its military forces, notwithstanding the very considerable virtues of our professional military, notably durability and battlefield prowess, the existing system ought to rate as a failure. Here are the problems with that system. It encourages political irresponsibility. It underwrites an insipid conception of citizenship. It's undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive, and it doesn't win. Dishonesty pervades the relationship between the US military and American society. Rhetorically, Americans support the troops, but the support is seldom more than skin deep. In practice, the American people subject the troops that they profess to care about to serial abuse. As authorities in Washington commit US forces to wars, that are unnecessary or ill-managed or unwinnable, or in sort of a trifecta, all three, the American people manifest something close to indifference. The bungled rollout of a health care reform program might generate public attention and even outrage by comparison a bungled military campaign elicits shrugs. Now certainly, our reliance on professional soldiers has relieved citizens of any responsibility to contribute to the nation's defense. But is that actually such a good thing? Back in the 1970s, when Vietnam induced Americans to abandon the tradition of the citizen soldier, President Richard Nixon responded by creating a standing army. That's at least what the founders would have called the all-volunteer force. And in their day, in the founder's day, standing army was a term of opprobrium. An army consisting of professionals rather than citizens, they believed, was at odds with the principles animating the American Revolution and infused into documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Well, the shadow of Vietnam lingers even now, albeit with ironic implications. Americans today seem intent on making amends for sins committed or you've said to have been committed back when supporting the troops had become optional. Today, blaming the troops for the wars that they were sent to fight has become all but unthinkable. Thank you for your service, trips off American lips as easily as have a nice day. And with this little real meaning, the theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a phrase for such posturing. He called it cheap grace. The actually existing relationship between American soldiers and the American people is shot full of cheap grace. And it's time for the officer corps itself to consider whether the all-volunteer force actually serves the country's interests. Seventh point, the political economy of war. The second order consequences of relying on professional soldiers are likewise unfortunate. Washington's appetite for waging war in the greater Middle East has exceeded the willingness of young Americans to volunteer for military service. This has created a gap, too much war, too few warriors. And this gap has created an opening for profit-minded so-called private security firms to flood the war zone. As you probably know, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors ultimately outnumbered uniform military personnel taking on tasks once performed by soldiers. That is to say, contractors inserted themselves into a sphere that was once exclusively yours. And the results have fallen well short of being satisfactory. The recent conviction of several former employees of the notorious Blackwater for murdering Iraqi civilians in cold blood is but one indicator of the problem. But the issue goes beyond simply contractor misconduct. Waste and corruption have occurred on a colossal scale, so much so that the Pentagon literally is unable to say where all the money went. War has always created opportunities for some people to make money. America's war for the greater Middle East today has become primarily a means to make money. And that's unconscionable. And I suspect at least some of you agree with that. Why permit such things to persist? Now, I don't mean to imply that the officer corps somehow exercises jurisdiction or sovereignty over each of these matters. That's certainly not the case. But if you agree with me that America's war for the greater Middle East has not gone well, then I submit that these are the sorts of issues that demand sustained and critical professional attention. Well, I'll stop there, and I look forward to your questions and comments. Thank you very much. Sure. Andrew, let me just start with this. I think we're about the same age. So one of the reasons that a Vietnam War ended was because it was a draft E. Force, I think, because the realities of the war were palpable to almost every American family. And that made the political will to deal with it rise. So can you talk a little? Is this the fundamental problem that we have in all volunteer force? You can treat them like the French Foreign Legion and send them somewhere because they affects such a small portion of the population? Well, I think that's part of the issue. Many people now have made this point to include some retired general officers. General McChrystal, I think, has come out posing questions about whether the all volunteer force makes sense. General Eichenberry, the retired Army three star, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs questioning the system. It does, it seemed to me, reduce constraints on civilian decision makers in Washington as they evaluate questions of what's worth fighting for. Because politically, they have, in the last couple of decades, made those decisions without taking fully into account how the American people are likely to react. Now it's not just a question of who's doing the fighting and the dying. It's also the question of who's doing the paying. When the George W. Bush administration committed the United States to what in those days we call the global war on terrorism, one of the most striking things about the entry into that war was the conscious decision made by the civilian leadership not to mobilize the country. When you think about the US military history, we have always, at a minimum, increased the size of US forces as we embarked upon what was perceived to be some large-scale military enterprise. That was true in the War of 1812. It was true in the Mexican War, certainly in the Civil War, even in the Spanish-American War, in 20th century wars. When you go to war, you raise up more forces. More often than not, when we went to war prior to the post-911 period, there was also a decision made by civilian leaders to impose a requirement on citizens to pay for that war, or at least to pay for some of that war. How? By increasing taxes. On occasion by putting curbs on the production of consumer goods so that the ongoing, the day-to-day American way of life was subordinated to. The larger requirement to ensure that the American way of life next year and 10 years from now would prevail. When you think about what happened after 9-11, none of that occurred. The assumption, I think it was an assumption driven by excessive confidence in what the revolution of military affairs was going to be able to deliver in terms of effective force, the assumption was that the existing force basically was, in terms of size, was adequate to the task that came. The existing, remember, the administration was very clear this was a global war. Global war on terrorism wasn't some pundit's invention. That was what the president said. And the president said at the time it's going to be a long war. He didn't say we're going to win the global war on terror in six weeks, or two months, or a year. So a global war that was going to be a long war, and yet we didn't expand the size of the armed forces. Why? Because we thought that the armed forces could be absolutely assured of achieving victory whenever committed. That was the assumption that existed back in 2001. Again, in many respects, I think, was an assumption that derived from this unfortunate infatuation with the revolution and military affairs. But the other thing that the Bush administration did not do, it did not require the American people to make any sacrifices. The administration cut taxes rather than raising taxes. The administration was quite adamant in insisting that the American people should continue to live the way they lived, as if there were no war. And for the most part, that's what the American people did. Was the consequence of that? Well, one of the consequences, of course, was massive increases in indebtedness that at least some economists argue, I'm not an economist, at least some economists argue, contribute to the current prospect of a sustained period of economic stagnation. Not so much for your generation, but for the young people that are coming out of college right now, that they can look forward to a period of low growth, high unemployment. We'll see if that turns out to be the case. That's the argument as one of the consequences of having simply run this war on Red Inc. All of that, I think, in one way or another, stems from the conviction dating from the post-Vietnam period that the citizen-soldier concept had outlived its usefulness and that embracing the model of a standing army was the way to go. I think in retrospect, that proposition deserves to be critically reexamined. OK, we're open to questions from the floor, please.