 Ladies and gentlemen, thanks again for being patient with a little bit of a timing issue, and we'll get going with the panel discussion. As I said in the opening, we do really have a terrific group of panelists, and we're going to get going with them very shortly to discuss IW hybrid threats and the future of land forces. Just let me give you a little bit of context, and I'm going to bridge this context significantly. I think it can be argued that DOD is in fact flirting with a revolutionary rebalancing in capabilities and strategic priorities with the upcoming QDR. The extent to which it does so is probably an open question right now. You could argue that the rebalancing really began with the 2005 National Defense Strategy, but as advertised right now, the current QDR, its stated goal is to further institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities and capacities as the first of its five QDR focus areas. So going forward, I'm certain there are key policy and capabilities questions to be answered on irregular and hybrid threats, and their impact not only on land forces but the rest of the DOD enterprise, but in the near term, many of these questions will impact land forces first. I'm going to cut to the chase right now and really introduce the group of panelists we have here because I think you're all here to hear from them. On my immediate left is Lieutenant General Frank Kearney. General Kearney is Deputy Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. He's a 1976 graduate of West Point, and he's held a variety of key command and staff assignments in both general purpose and special operating forces in the last 33 years. Notable to me when I was reviewing General Kearney's bio is his vast combat and operational experience. He's a veteran of urgent fury and grenade, just cause in Panama, Joint Guard in Bosnia and has extensive experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to his current assignment with Special Operations Command, General Kearney served as the commander of all U.S. Special Operating Forces in Central Command. To lead it to Lieutenant General Kearney's immediate left is Miss Celeste Ward. Celeste is a senior policy analyst at RAND. Prior to joining RAND, she served as the DASD for stability ops capabilities in OSD. Celeste has had a number of other key government assignments as well. She served as a special assistant to the counselor at the State Department and in DOD's strategy office. Celeste has also served in Iraq on two occasions, first in the CPA and then as an advisor to the commander, multinational core Iraq. Finally to the left of Celeste is Mr. Steve Call. Steve is President and CEO of the New America Foundation. He is also a staff writer at the New Yorker. For 20 years Steve was a foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post. Steve is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has authored six books on a range of topics. Two recent works include 2004's Ghost Wars and 2008's The Ben Ladens. Ghost Wars netted Steve the second of his two Pulitzers. Please join me in welcoming them all. We're grateful to have them here with us today and look forward to their insights. Each has been asked to do a brief set of setup remarks and we hope to have a pretty lively question and answer period following. General Kearney, if you will. Thank you. Hey, great. Thanks. It's a wonderful opportunity to be here. It's always tough to follow General Mattis. He covers the breadth of the topic very, very well. And what I'd like to do is just fill in a little from the perspective that I have as SOCOM's senior QDR representative here in Washington, D.C. I spend most of my time here and it's largely because of QDR 2006 when Admiral Olsen did the same and it built us an opportunity to be involved in decision-making forums as a service-like organization that we were not in before and so we've maintained that. Right now I think that the QDR, two of the base assumptions that make a real challenge in the QDR is that top-end strength will not grow in the services and that the changes as we rebalance the force will be cost-neutral. As a comment on that, it stifles the discussion because the discussion is not about ideas on how to move forward, do things which I think folks generally are willing to have and probably do have great consensus on the changes that have been underway in the ground forces and the other components. But the bottom line as it comes down to is growth in one component is a loss in the other and we find ourselves often defending our interests, which is pretty natural as we move forward in this and it lessens the permeability of your mind for new ideas. The real piece of that though is identifying the problem. I think as General Mattis said, it's always been instructional to me going through my New York education and the Military Academy that you have to define the problem in order to solve the problem and I think he kind of hit at the crux of that is defining the problem and what is it we are trying to actually accomplish and have we articulated the right guidance to be able to do that in the timeframe given. We're pushed up against a PR 11 program, we're real 11 where we're trying to further shape the budget before POM 12 and the QDR are submitted together and as a result of that we are looking programmatically, which is the hard part of this, at what capabilities and capacity we need to be able to prosecute this balancing effect. It would be nice if all those capabilities were equal cost. However, the high end piece of this in space cyber nuclear to maintain that deterrent, that capability is extraordinarily expensive and encroaches on the piece of the budget that I sit down at the other end of which is part of the land force, the special operating component of that where we are trying to build capabilities and capacity that allow us to not just fight the joint fight as General Mattis said but also to shape and influence phase zero, the steady state and the post joint fight. Now all that is joint as well but it's not normally considered the fight. It is considered something different and that's where some of the balance comes in is do we have the right capabilities and capacity matched against the steady state environment and then being able to deal with those unexpected things where both states, non-state actors and populations who we are competing for their relevancy get outside the band of acceptable behavior and we all try as a world of nations to put them back in there. So I think that frames it and rather than dwell on opinions I'd rather answer your questions and so I'll pass to Celeste. Thanks very much. I'll try to be quick. I not only have to follow General Mattis but General Kearney so the only way they're going to hurt me worse is to actually put me last. I'd like to just thank Dr. Hamry and Martin Leid and Nate Friar and CSIS for inviting me to be here among such a distinguished group of people today and then also my remarks are my views alone and don't represent the RAND Corporation. I thought I would just talk briefly about uncertainty and complexity and anyone who usually talks about uncertainty in this domain usually begins by quoting the British military historian Sir Michael Howard who paraphrasing said that military planners will probably always fail to accurately predict the future challenges their forces will face but the trick he said is not to get it too wrong. And so you all have probably heard that one before but it seems to me that we're in a particularly confusing time for this to not get it too wrong and it's peculiarly challenging and I think this is because as one of my professorial friends told me that the ancient Greeks philosophers believed that you didn't stride forward into the future in broad daylight able to see what was ahead of you instead you walked backward into darkness carrying a lamp guided only by the dimly lit ground you just trod and I think that's a very lovely and vivid metaphor and if you think about the ground that we've just trod it's especially confounding and presents substantial risks of overinterpretation as we think about the future. I think that our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan risk determining to a large degree how we organize, train and equip our forces and so how we understand those experiences might matter a lot. I'll take your grenades on this later but my view from my experience is that the surge in 2007 was one of several factors and one of several as yet poorly understood variables that contributed to the outcome that we saw and I think that though the narrative is that it was the application of the Army's Field Manual on Counterinsurgency that led to the outcome I don't actually think that this is accurate or complete in interpretation so if we focus too much on what happened in Iraq and try to draw conclusions about our future force I'm afraid we'll go down the wrong path. Moreover I think if you look at the strategic payoff of Iraq over 4,000 in lives until billions, tens of thousands wounded it's quite modest so far. I'll leave the specifics of Afghanistan to others who are more expert in it but again I think we should be quite cautious about how we try to apply Iraq's presumed lessons to Afghanistan. I think that even though we tend to lump conflicts into categories for the purposes of doctrine and to try to understand the challenges we confront I think it's obvious but worth pointing out that each conflict has its own features, feedback loops, characters, uncertainties, interests and its own complexity and you have to take each one as its own. So what do we make of the ground that we just trod? I recently wrote something in the Washington Post that discussed the risks of over-interpreting Iraq and as you might have mentioned I received many emails about this but some of the most interesting ones to me were those people that declared to me with absolute certainty that the wars of the future would be more like Iraq and Afghanistan than like the wars of the past Well it's quite comforting that some people seem to be quite sure about what the future looks like. I tend to be with the Greeks on this and that we are backing into darkness and I'm not sure if these people predicted 9-11, the Gulf War, Vietnam but I think if you look back at the American strategic community and the wars they thought they were going to fight didn't usually turn out to be the wars that they ended up fighting. I think the interpretation of events also as we talk about all these capabilities sometimes we tend to get obsessed with the how. Is it counterinsurgency? Is it hybrid warfare? Is it a regular warfare? And sometimes that leads us I think as a strategic community to overlook the question of what wars we should be involved in in the first place and what we're willing to fight for. And I think that General Mattis alluded to this in talking about a grand strategy but I think an overwhelming focus on tactics risks distracting us from this more essential discussion of strategy and our fundamental national interests. So let me get to my bottom line. So the fact of uncertainty doesn't actually excuse us from saying well where do I put my next defense dollar and just because we're likely to get it wrong doesn't mean we can't give it our best shot. So I'll save most of this for questions but in my mind it's really a question of where you want to put your risk and there's sort of three basic ways you could go. You could optimize your force for irregular threats and of course you would be risking your capability in conventional warfare. And the Israeli experience in Lebanon some argue represents a cautionary tale in going down this road. And to some this is not a big deal and this is a risk worth taking but as a retired Army general is alleged to have said an armored division is like a tuxedo. You don't need it very often but when you need it nothing else will do. Option two would be you divide your force to focus on different parts of the threat spectrum and you sort of assign tasks to different parts of your force. Well in a sense we already do this. We have forces optimized to combat irregular threats and they're called special operations forces. And so the argument seems to be that the general purpose force should be further subdivided into specialties. And I think we should only do this with quite a sense of caution and while it sounds good in theory it's actually probably quite difficult to do in practice because there are a lot of unintended consequences and actually it relies on your ability to accurately predict which capabilities and how much of which you're really going to need. And so if you really look at what the third option is you have multi-purpose forces that are trained to deal with a set of requirements. And in some sense you're taking risk here too but it may offer you the maximum flexibility in an uncertain world. I think I would echo what General Mattis said about the importance of education and training. And as Lieutenant General Victor Krulak commented that most often the ingredients of victory are initiative, resourcefulness, adroitness and improvisation. And if that's true then you really put a premium on training and education rather than force structure per se. So with that I think we should treat our recent experience with some caution and the world is still a messy and uncertain place and is sure to surprise us. Thanks. Well thank you Celeste, that was terrific. I'm at that age where I'm not quite sure whether to take my glasses off or leave them on. But I tried to think how I could contribute something at all original to this and I started with the premise that my professional experience for 20 years is mainly as a traveler in a regular war outside the wire with a notebook open started out as an accident of assignment increasingly became a professional choice. And I was heartened by General Mattis' presentation because I thought he described where U.S. capabilities lie and don't lie in those environments remarkably well. But I sort of assigned myself the question as a traveler in those environments where does U.S. effectiveness scream that it needs the most help? Where does a policy, it seems to me, fail in a pattern? And so I came up with a couple of thoughts. One is very directly responsive to the framework that General Mattis laid out and the other is a little bit sort of over the horizon. It might be the sink after the one after the next but maybe something worth thinking about. So the first piece is I wanted to talk just for a minute or two about the political military environment that surrounds these hybrid conflicts and to try to conceptualize a problem that U.S. effects seem to struggle with if there are signposts all around as General Mattis said there's a signpost in front of us in Pakistan right now that I think has global characteristics. This involves political military environments that are not associated with ungoverned space which I think the American system has come to terms with pretty systematically. And it's not a political military environment associated with failed states which I think is also a conceptual framework that the U.S. system has come to terms with. But I'm talking about political military environments where you have semi-failed states with intact leadership in institutions but hostile or potentially hostile militia, terrorist or transnational formations such as drug cartels tucked into them and where the U.S. approach can only be indirect. So you take that environment and you talk about where the U.S. approach can be direct and you're talking about Afghanistan, Iraq and even places like Columbia and the Philippines where advise and assist access is not full of friction. But if you think about the places where U.S. access must be indirect for a variety of complicated reasons and you're talking about some pretty significant environments so Pakistan made my list and Sudan, Nigeria, maybe Mexico. And so what are the implications of these kinds of hybrid sort of models and environments where only indirect effects are possible? And I guess my main observation was just to make the point that our thinking doctrine, strategy, policy about these environments is the least well-developed and the least effective in the range that General Mattis described. So what are some of the characteristics that I see as a traveler in these places where we're not so effective? One is that because there's intact leadership and intact institutions but a complicated environment there's a natural momentum of liaison relationships to take over policy and actually to distort U.S. effects and distort U.S. policies in ways that are unhelpful. So you see that certainly in history in Pakistan but in some of these other cases as well. There's an underdeveloped thinking about regional and multilateral engagements and capacities that might be brought to bear to create more purposeful indirect effects. There's a lack of multidisciplinary thinking and integration in U.S. policy that can overcome some of these access problems. And so I guess I just left myself with a set of questions which was essentially what does this imply for defense doctrine and policy in sort of forcing strategic awareness and improvement in these kinds of environments and how does that fit into the processes that are underway. I would think it would have something to do with capacity, something to do with doctrine and something to do with thinking more purposefully about the tools. Then the only other point I wanted to make was also sort of covered, I thought very passionately by General Mattis and I thought I was largely in agreement with what he was saying about, of course I understand the sort of cultural history of his skepticism about technology. But I think it's important to recognize if you're thinking out 10 to 15 years and we had a terrific conversation with General Kearney about this recently, nothing is going to abolish Moore's law either in the digital space or in biology. And so Moore's law basically holds that capacity doubles about every two years. And on the digital side, which is where technology is more pervasive in current thinking and debates, there's still an implied approach in the U.S. system as far as I can tell in which our bits will defeat their bits. There's still a kind of vertical structure, whereas the implications of Moore's law are actually all horizontal. So how do you cope with that? I think General Mattis had a kind of intellectual framework for that, but what its implications are, I'm not sure. And then just on the biology side, you know, sort of the future of human enhancement, and not to get too science fiction-y about it, is accelerating at about the same pace and so I'm sure that's a DARPA subject, but I just thought I would mention it outside the wire. Thank you. Just by way of sort of wrapping up to sort of kick the conversation off, I mean, my sense in each one of the panelists hit on this, there are sets of unresolved questions with respect to the IW slash hybrid slash unconventional world. And I think the first set of questions is, do we really know what we're talking about? Are we really all on the same page? The defense-interested communities, DOD, defense analysis community, et cetera, do we actually know what we're talking about? The second set of questions I think revolves around the idea of balance. General Mattis talked about this, and by that we all know the Secretary of Defense is very fond of the term balance, and with what we perceive to be an inevitable rebalancing toward unconventional threats, how much do we still need to hedge against conventional threats, which I think Celeste talked about quite nicely. And as important, what unconventional operating environment should our forces optimize for? I mean, you have very different environments, insurgency, state failure, Civil War, global terrorism, they all manifest themselves in certain respects in different ways. And then, of course, what's the right balance between today's wars and tomorrow's wars? One of the questions I think is about culture. Have we gone too far with IW and hybrid? Have we gone far enough? Or actually, have we gone in the right irregular and hybrid direction? Or are we actually conceiving the irregular problem wrongly? And I think actually General Mattis brought that up very nicely as well. And then I think actually Celeste, I'd like to point out just sort of the synergy between you, General Mattis, who touched on this, the fourth set of questions is where's the strategy behind the approach and how are we assessing risk? I think that's very important. And then just one shout out to Steve's point on the indirect approach. I mean, this has become a bumper sticker and we really need to figure out what we mean by it because there are environments where we clearly want to apply the indirect approach, but we haven't actually figured out what that indirect approach looks like. Is it money? To some people, the indirect approach is advisers. To me, that's very direct. You still have people on the ground. So with that, I'm going to open it up to questions. I'll just please identify yourself. Raise your hand. I'll identify the direction for the mic guys and we'll go from there. Thanks. Talking about the indirect approach and training and advising, I guess the question I'm going to ask for all of the panelists is do you think it would be going too far, tipping the balance, if you will, to have specialized U.S. ground forces, perhaps non-special operations forces dedicated to the training and advising mission, or is the multi-training approach that Celeste Ward was talking about is at the right balance? Where would you tip the balance, if you will, for training and advising missions? Yeah, I'll jump on that one. I mean, I think the core function before 9-11 of the Army to Marine Corps Special Operations was training. I think we know how to train. I think we have done very, very well at training our force. And I think we may not have the right cultural and language applications to be able to do that delicately with the entire force across the spectrum, but if you seed it with the right kind of capabilities, one of the things we're trying to do is gain more immersion in language and culture. Part of that we hope to do through recruiting. There's a great program called Matinee out there. We're trying to recruit first-generation aliens here that have culture. They got it in their family. They have it in the ghetto they live in, in the city of the United States they have language. Bring them in, move them through the military, and put them in our organization. So we have a 3-3 native speaker who's actually lived there on the ground, whose family understands this. The question is how much depth are you after? We want depth, but depth doesn't have to be spread across the force. So I think you can do that with the force that you have. It is training. And then I think you need to know where to do it. And that comes to Steve's point, which I think we'd agree with 100%. In SOCOM, we have done a strategic appreciation that kind of shows the main factors, cause and challenges in the world is crime, migration, extremism, poor governance, with a sprinkling of anti-Americanism, at least on three of the five continents out there, and more continents than that, I guess. But I mean, the bottom line here is that that's the challenge we have out there is seeing far enough into the future to adjust our training systems to be able to provide the depth to deal with the environments that we have, yet not lose that breath of war-fighting experience. Tough question, Timothy. Let me just back up a second and say I think the whole issue of training other nations and building partnership capacity suffered the fate of many meritorious and useful concepts in Washington, and that is it sort of became this sort of grand idea and it was the solution and it was this key that would unlock our problems. If only we could train other people to do to solve our problems for us, then we'd be doing great. And I'm not sure if that's true. And so I think the whole issue of what are we training people for, what do we think they are going to do with that training, and are we prepared for them to not do what we hope they're going to do? Because after all, once we've conveyed the training, well, they can do with it whatever they like. And so I think that there's a sort of nettlesome, strategic part of this question that probably hasn't been addressed or I haven't seen it addressed to the degree that might be satisfying to help justify major investments in the capability. So that is something that's concerned me about it. The other thing is I'm not sure we totally understand the unintended consequences of hiving off part of your general purpose force and devoting them to this purpose. And so I think until those would be better understood, in other words, until we understand the price and is it worth it? So what is it that we're trying to accomplish? I would say it's maybe not time to do it. I don't have much to add, but I would just say that certainly as a journalist you hear repeatedly that the incentive structure is wrong, whether that addresses your framework or not. I don't know. And I would just say though I have not qualified to give an opinion about the training per se, my observation would be that in a lot of the environments that I work in, there is no integrated conversation about the relationship between the training mission and multidisciplinary strategy in the country. So if there is a way to address that with even 10% of the capacity that goes into thinking about training per se, probably end up in a better place. Good afternoon. Raja Gundu from CSIS. Do you believe that this is to the entire panel, do you believe that somewhere in the new modes of information warfare that we are seeing? In fact, it seems to be that the enemy in particular is winning wherever he is in Afghanistan, for example, primarily because he has an edge in terms of information dispersal. The moment whether it is an attack staged by him or it is an airstrike gone wrong, he is there first and he spreads out a message first even before we can even begin to assess actually as to exactly what happened. So do you believe, for example, that there is a case for more decentralized information dispersal? For example, perhaps by embedding an information officer in every forward operating base or in every reaction team that is out there in the field? Steve? I think... Oh, okay. I'm going to you next. Well, no, I guess I don't have a view about how the Defense Department should conduct its information operations in that environment, but it's obvious that I took heart from General Mattis' analysis again because I thought he was correct to say that's the way the softball is pitched and there's no sense wasting time trying to change the environment. You're just going to have to think creatively. My observation as a wanderer in the National Security Bureaucracy, both in the Uniform Services and outside, is that there's a generation of young Americans coming into public service who know exactly how to play, but who cannot persuade their adult supervision to let them, and that there are certainly structural and appropriate obstacles that have to be worked through at the policy level, that's a question that belongs to the civilians, but we're stifling a generation of innovators in our own National Security Bureaucracy by not allowing them to just be themselves in effect on behalf of our constitutional system. I'll just echo. I agree. Let's go back to General Mattis' words. You need to decentralize to the point of discomfort. The people on the ground who know exactly what's going on are the people who are on the ground and the small crevices, nooks and crannies out there wherever they might be globally, and they have a view and they have access sometimes. Okay, so they don't get that opportunity and I don't know that there are enough media personnel put globally to do this. Clearly you can do that in a war zone where there's that degree of interest. But what we are is prisoners of our culture and our culture is a protective culture and it goes back to saying that if there's something frictional that's occurred on the battlefield where a soldier's right, soldier, sailor, airman, Marines' rights could be violated by making a statement before a year of investigation is complete, then we will cede that domain of competition to protect the rights. I think that may be an overstatement in the minds of some, but that's kind of how I view it both as a practitioner caught in the middle of it a couple of times. You've got to use the media. You've got to use all the forums. This is a fight about information. It's about perceptions and it's about shaping and competing with the population. And if you choose not to engage in that domain because of your culture then you cede one of the tools that you have to win the fight. Air Vice Marshal Mike Howard and the Defence Attaché in the UK. I wrote down a few things here just to try and get my mind around these things. Having read your article, Celeste, having read a lot of this, having been in Afghanistan, Iraq and done all these bits. One of the things that I think is good because it's getting it out in the open and making people understand what the problem is. We in the military understand it because we've been facing it for years. The first time I went out to the Gulf was of 1919. I think I've been there ever since so we all know that feeling. But we've got to get our publics behind us and we've had that business about Europe. It's a huge problem getting the publics behind us. You've started the debate. We then have the paradox that the debate might become self-fulfilling and the debate an enemy that's bigger than he really is in some circumstances. We tell them that General McKeonan isn't a very good general at all because we fire him and I don't think General McKeonan is a bad general but the enemy is watching all the time and he'll watch tomorrow when the Congressional business goes ahead and General McKeonan and other fine people go through that process. What I'm worried about now is the tendency culture that's growing where you start the debate but meanwhile the enemies continue to do things and test you and can you be patient to continue the debate when something else happens if it, God forbid, does happen when the debate is everything to get everybody else on side so that another thing about that joint operating environment says that America's overall superpower status has to work with other superpowers so we've got to get that international consensus however bloody impossible it sometimes is to actually try but we've got to keep doing that otherwise we're going to fail so can America be patient and keep going against the sort of remorseless electoral cycle you've got one, you've got a bit longer than some of our other nations but you've got one coming up where the voters will then say no thanks just leave them to it and make the bigger army a smaller foreign policy I'll take that on I mean I think that it implies something very important which is that in the environment of irregular warfare and terrorism that the United States finds itself we have yet to develop a national experience of strategic patience that we can articulate to ourselves and that makes us different from some other countries that have been in this environment for longer and I feel very self-conscious about in our sort of think tank world trying to develop the muscle mass that will allow the United States to acquire strategic patience in the face of irregular threats I was in London on the morning of 7-7 and I remember what the Prime Minister said to the British public and if you go back and you read his speech he was bracing because it essentially was not a speech about evil or the enemy it was a speech about Britain and resilience and what struck me about it was not that he's a better politician than any other politician but that what is the political environment in which you have the knowledge that you can deliver that speech and walk into Parliament the next day and not be questioned by the opposition it's an environment in which there is an impact that has been earned by experience failure in many cases in national policy during the confrontation with the IRA and in other instances in which there is now a national understanding of what strategic patience sounds like now in the United States we have strategic patience and ability to take casualties that seems to exceed any other democracy but we don't have that strategic patience around irregular warfare and threats yet and so you see that in our politics and I worry about it too not on partisan grounds but because we're going to require resilience in this environment for a generation if we're going to continue to defend the values that Tony Blair spoke about that morning I don't think I can do much better than that but one thing I would say is that I'm not sure we've begun to fully appreciate where we are strategically now versus where we were eight years ago and I think we've lost some ground and I think getting a better understanding of where we really stand I mean many of our competitors and maybe future adversaries have had a nice long strategic pause and we haven't had that benefit and we've been working pretty hard at these projects and I think we probably need to step back and ask ourselves what we're willing to continue to pour resources into in light of where we are and I do think Gerald Mattis is right that in particular technology areas we are not as dominant as we once were and those are major considerations that I hope will be looked at in the QDR I haven't heard that yet mostly you hear a lot of discussion about a regular warfare but there are these other vital areas that need attention Yeah Jeff then you next Yeah I'll ask the panel a question where this all comes out and I'm going to quote General Kearney so he can take a mulligan since he's part of the process I think General Kearney's opening assumptions were starling but very valid that this is going to end up being budget neutral and there's no grint with an end strength and if you take the last comment sort of breaking the force down and sort of three options we'll probably take the the grand level or third option of multi-purpose forces which at the end of the day really aren't very multi-purpose because the ground forces are doing what General Mattis said all they're doing is preparing for the next deployment to Iraq or Pakistan or Afghanistan rather than really trying to be go back and regain their conventional capabilities if that is true and you throw in the third thing which is of course the Secretary of Defense laying out a budget which many people would say makes the whole QDR a stillborn process because we said where the budget movements are going to go then what at the end of the day is your prediction for this QDR particularly for ground forces or we're going to end up after a lot of gazillion digits of power point slides pretty much where we were with a division of labor that's translating the budgetary figures about 28-30% for the Army, Navy and the Air Force No, I think it's a very very valid question and it is the challenge at hand and I mean it comes down to taking a look at this joint operating environment that we've talked about with some print of the chairman on and what SOCOM has done to taking a look at the strategic appreciation out there and then we have to look at that through the prism of strategy how do we get the ends right in this and then it comes down to Ways and Means and that's what the QDR is supposed to be about but I think we're having a parallel dialogue about the strategy we will never agree on whether the Joe or some alternative world or 100% correct but you've got to have some templating to base that on and so I think we're moving through that because uniquely this secretary is extraordinarily involved and I only say that because I've seen a change in his behavior as he was asked to stay on and I won't postulate on why that is but he took a hold of the 10 budget process very senior leader level and when you have to do things in compression then leaders come together and they make those hard decisions and then we are asked to execute and I think right now in the QDR process we are moving through the gears turning heat being produced but soon I think the secretary will have a meeting where he will bring his senior leaders together again and I think they've got two of them scheduled here over the next month or so and they will begin to apply the discipline required to move forward quickly on this because he does want to impact this from my understanding by getting a head start in 11 on what the QDR will tell us and what we'll program the force for in 12 and so they are all interrelated and interconnected but there are hard positions that people have again based on the fact if you take the assumptions and if they are assumptions that their budget neutral and there is no real growth in the strength of the force so I mean that creates a little bit of heat in the cauldron and so people are cooking right now hopefully none of the frogs will boil and die but that's a really tough question Jeff but I don't know how the QDR is going to come out I mean if you look at past QDRs the changes haven't been huge they haven't been big swings in the QDR I mean arguably we go through this process all the time right it's not just the QDR the QDR gets lots of attention lots of focus and lots of friction and heat generated but you know we're always making adjustments and some of these happen over longer time periods anyway so I mean I don't think we rely on the QDR to sort of give us this magnum opus revolutionary change and then well that's it but I do hope that it does look out the 20 years that it says in legislation it's supposed to and doesn't just focus on some of these kind of irregular warfare versus conventional questions because I do think that there are some larger strategic questions that we need to start getting our arms around as far as multi-purpose forces and now we don't have time to train for other capabilities that's certainly true or I think there's certainly evidence that that's true but the hope is that once we draw down in Iraq to some degree you get longer dwell times and then you can start training against core metals sorry lingo not just these directed activities for these conflicts but I mean that's what we hope happens but if we can't grow the force then that's kind of where we are I just want to jump in on this I mean one thing I would say too is my sense is that the force itself is not going to look much different coming out the other side of this process but especially the land forces with you know increases on the margins etc I think what's really going to happen actually is you know five years from now as you're going through readiness cycles we may fundamentally be training for different missions than we were focused on prior to you know I mean I know over the last eight years we've been kind of focused on the IW but that may carry into even as we go down to a new normal that may carry on so that's one observation I have a burning question that I have to ask so just if I could take prerogative of the chair here for a second and this is for everybody but Steve I want to start with you actually given the so we've seen sort of evolving in not that this is you know an overly you know sudden strategic crisis but given the attention that's been paid to Mexico recently and sort of the challenges of Mexico and using Mexico like challenges looking at Mexico like challenges around the world is there a danger that we're becoming too myopic in our view of IW and focusing too much on a specific region and too much on a specific problem IE you know extremism generated out of the Muslim world is sort of the source of our persistent challenge yes I mean in my sort of narrower way that was I guess what I was trying to get at which is that there's a in my opening thoughts in the sense that I think there's a global structure of political military challenge that is relatively under nourished in the U.S. system and that that structure is neutral as to threat in as to the kind of vernacular that the threat speaks but it's observable if you wander around in it especially where and the U.S. system is built naturally it's not a nothing to be surprised or disappointed about but it's built for direct access it's built for those environments where the mission can be defined and executed and it's and it simply avoids in a strategic sense those environments where it has to work in multidisciplinary and indirect ways I'm Harlan Allman let me test the panel and in absentia Jim Mattis in a couple of ways supposing we're exaggerating the danger in the threat what do the Europeans know and I realize the weaknesses of Europe and the fact that NATO's political leadership was publicly called a wall by John Craddock not too long but what do the Europeans know perhaps the Russians the Chinese and even the Clinton administration about the dangers we're facing the Clinton administration chose to regard this more as a law enforcement issue and to take that a step further the Bush administration clearly militarized responses but for example in Pakistan I would argue that 10 billion dollars a year given the corruption in the problems and the very small likelihood of us getting that money to fill the civilian and economic size would probably be the best thing that could happen for Pakistan that's not going to happen so the first part of my question is to what degree do we perhaps exaggerate or to militarize the dangers and second nobody's talked about money the Defense Business Board has hit the Department of Defense across the side of the head saying you guys don't have a clue over the next couple of years you're looking at 20 or 30 percent more real cuts given the increases that you're going to have and what's going to happen finally when the budget takes hold so how do you deal with a looming budget disaster because you can't depend upon the American public to continue this large yes and indeed how do you deal with decades worth of general officers who've only know budgets going up and not knowing budgets going down well characterizing the threat is again I mean all this is challenging I think the threat's real I think the threat of extremism, the threat of migration the threat of crime powered by poor governance, drugs and some of those things I think it's very real I think it's global but not globally connected the question is how much do you need to apply against that military way and I think I won't argue that we have militarized our response to that the question is what other response was there what were the options, what were the paths not taken and are they still available today so I think the threat's pretty real out there I think as General Mattis has stated and I've seen talking to folks they believe what they say their goals are their goals and there appears to be enough turmoil in the world to be able to move the ball in certain areas that will take our time as far as the budget the threat's going on I think you're probably 100% right there I think we do have a generation of senior leaders to include myself who've watched rising budgets in there in fact it is my job to try and neck that down inside of our own headquarters to take a look and go what are your alternative structures how are you going to reshape the force inside of the budget you have but we haven't moved far enough along to believe it even though we've gone through this budget cycle and there was some compression and we have cut down what the supplemental was and there's predictions that the OCO the Overseas Contingency Operation fund will drop by a third or two thirds depending on whose estimate you have out there those are real things that we recognize we're not going to be able to do them we're all feeling those right in the budget right now so we're we are skinning those things down but you're absolutely right that is not what my son the captain on the army wants to hear that's not what the headquarters below our command are coming in I mean they're coming in for requests for more people more money and that's aside from resetting the force this force full of equipment that's out there that was drawn from reserve war stocks and has been used for the last eight years that has to be arguably put back into the cans parked so that it can be used again in the future but the question is can we afford that and right now there's there's some debate on that I'll just say really really quickly I think we need to look at the issue of whether us continuing to tell our enemies that they're really big and really scary actually is helping them more than more than it is us I mean I think that's a question that's worth asking we need to examine that but I do think that the moral effect of an unanswered attack could have been quite bad too and so I think you're always trying to balance between overreacting and making them bigger than they are versus not responding to an overt attack so I'm not sure how you balance that but I think it's a legitimate question since I've been working in defense which is now about 15 years I've been hearing about these defense budgets and oh the belts are going to tighten and the budgets are going to go down and there's going to be hard choices ahead and I haven't quite seen it happen yet and maybe I just haven't been in the business long enough but I mean in the end it still comes back to the tradeoff question what are you willing to give up and where do you want to take risk two questions if I may quickly one the panel the group chosen to critique the QDR why don't you think there has been more I think criticism of the personnel selected I think they're all very qualified but are they really do they bring another intellectual diversity to Secretary Gates' viewpoints and then two how do you look to frame the question of the threat 20, 30 years down the line how do we frame the question in this QDR to assure our allies in the western pacific our allies throughout the rest of the world that we're not focusing too much on the threats that we see today the threats that we saw five years ago Celeste you get to start this one off quick I'm not sure how to respond to the personnel issue there's a bench in this town and elsewhere of people who make a profession out of this and those are the people that are probably going to get the jobs so it's I know many of them and think they're all very qualified so it's kind of hard I'm not sure who you'd get if you didn't get them but in terms of how to frame the question I think that is the problem and I think you in a way have to start with what do you want the U.S. role in the world to be given how our adversaries are catching up to us or potential adversaries or competitors are catching up to us along a number of dimensions that is the tough part of what they're charged to do so it's a tough one but you have to do your best and not get it too wrong just on the threat strategy piece I mean $1.95 on a cup of Starbucks is probably the same for everybody on these things but I was thinking of the same question that was asked before as I was listening to General Mattis and I'm sure that I hope that there will be very serious deep thinking about that set of questions recognizing that today we're inside the framework of the irregular warfare piece so kind of hard to insist that that be entirely informed by a grand strategy that as others have pointed out hasn't been conceived or written yet but if you looked out 20 or 30 years and tried to guesstimate part of the problem with the threat analysis that I see with alkydolike groups is that of course you have the problem of intent which is persistent in capacity which is variable and you also have the problem that in their intent lies the pursuit of strategic surprise so that's really hard if you're going to try to make some kind of grid about threat analysis over top so I always feel very cautious about that piece of it looking out to the medium term that the subject that general Matt spoke about to me is about stability and all of the implications of stability and they are the question of U.S. capacity and U.S. roles, U.S. institutions, U.S. strategy seems to me very much appropriately being reexamined and then finally if you look out 30 years I mean really my provocative sort of thought is that it's really all about the G2 and what kind of environment evolves between ourselves and China in that period and if you could think forward a little bit purposefully about that and feel as if you were, you had a constructive strategy that wasn't presuming competition excessively but also wasn't naive then you'd probably be someplace in the right zone. Just real quick I mean I actually think the past of characters assembled has got a great deal of talent, I mean I get to sit in rooms and listen to them talk they have come in from organizations like this, their previous government and they have been directed by the secretary as best I understand it to reach out to our international partners who are invited and participating, they're going to reach out to the think tank communities, they're going to reach out to business communities and try to bring a full range of thought about what the future looks like and how we ought to apply a strategy and resources against that down the road. So I think they have the right model it is just tough to do it quickly and really we're operating in two phases, we're operating in a programmatic phase for a short period of time here which is where you see the energy today arguing about do we have enough of this and enough of that and where we ought to invest our resources and then there's the beyond that, the policy the where we're going, the strategy kind of pieces. Now some may say the carts coming before the horse, well unfortunately they're both coming and the cartway way more right now and it's got more momentum and it's going there but I think they've got this thing set up to have the dialogue that we want to have now the outcome of that is yet to be seen over. Well unfortunately we've come to the end of our time I think the one thing I'd say just to wrap this up I mean this whole IW hybrid debate started nearly four or five years ago or six years ago now really if you go back to the initial origins of the 05 defense strategy and it's one of the more emotion laden debates inside the Pentagon because there's a great deal bureaucratically at least it is perceived that there's a great deal at stake for all the players involved. So I hope you'll join me in thanking our panelists this has been a terrific event and we look forward to having another couple of events.