 My name is David Burto, I'm the Director of International Security Programs here at CSIS, and I'm pleased to welcome you to our noon hour event, if you will. I'm going to provide a few remarks sort of transitioning from the previous discussion. This session is on the record and for attribution, so whatever is said, Otto and others, you're welcome to use it to your heart's content. At CSIS we sort of have multiple roles, but we see two of those roles. Number one is helping to figure out how to define what the problems and challenges are. And then number two to come up with options and solutions for dealing with them. We divide it up that way because much of the time a big chunk of your answers are embedded in coming up with the right problem description. And I think the issues that we're going to talk about during this noon hour clearly fall into the category of needing a better effort at the problem definition. Everything in defense now is dominated by the discussion of the budget drawdown. And the drawdown targets, at least in terms of dollars, are partially, perhaps even largely, out of DOD's hands. They belong to the Congress, they belong to, they're embedded in the Budget Control Act, they're potentially going to come out of the super committee, the White House has a little bit of a role to play there as well. But the decisions on what to cut and what to keep are still, by and large, in the purview of the Defense Department and the Secretary of Defense. And then, of course, over to the Congress for further review and improvement. So today we're going to explore one big issue that's inside that larger framework, and that's ground force capabilities and what do we need between now and 2020. But it's not a discussion about cuts to ground forces. It's more about what we need, if you will. There's two thoughts that I would put down as markers. One, we're struggling a lot to answer the basic questions of, for what do we need this military and what are we going to use them for? The force planning constructs that apply are a little bit obscure. I find it interesting that the Defense Department actually has a more detailed and accurate description of China's goals in 2030 than our own. And it's on the record. Of course, it's also required by statute. But if you look at that kind of a dynamic, if you will, there's a lot of talk about capabilities. And we clearly need to preserve essential capabilities. But I'll tell you, I don't know how to bound or limit or define the ultimate objectives of a capability, except by validating it against something that looks and feels an awful lot like a threat. It's just beyond my intellectual kin to be able to say, okay, now I know I have enough of something without having to bounce it off of something that ultimately looks and feels like a threat. So the situations and challenges that we just heard discussed earlier today are part of the basis for bounding those capabilities or supporting those capabilities. I hesitate to call them threats, but they certainly could play that role. But the issues that we tackle now are only somewhat connected to this morning's discussion, and they're only part of the drawdown discussion. But it's useful to keep in mind, we have had four big drawdowns since the end of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War. In each of those cases, military in strength has come down largely commensurate with the budgetary drawdowns. They also, by the way, went up largely commensurate with the budget increases. That is not the case in the aughts, where dollars increase substantially more than military in strength, offset to some extent by much larger use of garden reserve forces. In only two of those four cases, though, did we actually have a commensurate strategy adjustment to accompany the drawdown in dollars and forces. So will we do the same thing this time? Well, in terms of in strength, maybe so, maybe not. In terms of strategy, even less certain, if you will. So what issues do we take into our assessment of ground forces? First, we're going to have a short overview of the ground forces report that you have in front of you there by Nate Friar. Nate is a senior fellow at CSIS. He's currently seconded to the Army War College. He is the lead author of this study and of the report. He's a retired Army officer. He's done tours in Iraq. He's done tours in OSD. Both of them are tough places to work. CSIS is a respite in some ways, but this issue is not. And then I'll call on our two senior commenters for their views, and then we'll open the floor for your questions and comments. I'm going to introduce them after Nate Friar has finished his remarks. So, Nate, let me turn it over to you, and we'll do the rest from the table. Great. Thank you, David. Thanks, everybody, for being here. General Sheehan Kim, thank you for joining us on the panel. Very important topic. Let me just start off by saying the genesis of this project is really about 18 months ago by now former colleague, Martin Lee, who was the project director on this project until a short time ago and who has since left for the office of the Chief of Staff of the Army. And I basically grew concern that the dialogue with respect to the future of ground forces after Iraq and Afghanistan was largely either silent or not occurring in Washington. And there was really a lot of talk about sort of bringing the wars to an end, but not a great deal of discussion about what the ground force is, what the purpose and missions of the ground forces were going to be after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A great deal of that was, in fact, a product of the Secretary of Defense coming in in 2006 and essentially saying to the Army and the Marine Corps, we need to finish the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Successfully, we'll worry about the future later. So anyway, with the gracious support of the United States Marine Corps, we undertook a study that looked not necessarily at numbers and sizes but in fact actually looked at what we have determined to be the principal plausible demands on the force over the next 10 years and what the macro capability implications of those demands are. And with that, we basically sort of have come up with a few conclusions, many of them counter-cultural in some respects, but I'm just gonna review those quickly with you today as a setup piece and then we'll go ahead and talk through this with question and answer and with our other panelists. First, let me talk about our four principal findings. Two of them are reflected here. First, we identified that US ground forces have provide the US senior decision makers with three key advantages. This is not actually to set them up vis-a-vis the Navy and the Air Force or to make a qualitative judgment on them, but these are points of differentiation really with the ground forces and the other services. We also found in the second case that ground forces remain highly relevant to a variety of contingencies. I'll talk about those contingencies in some detail in a few moments and they're increasingly, our ground forces are increasingly unique among the community of like-minded allies. The third and fourth of our conclusions really have to do with these macro capabilities choices we talked about. Again, in certain respects, these are somewhat counter-cultural given the tenor of the debate going on inside the Department of Defense right now. The first of these, as you can see, is that demand may be greater in three specific areas than is currently anticipated. And then the fourth is that supply or either current supply or anticipated supply in two other areas may actually be greater than we actually will need in contingency events in the future. Let me just talk a little bit about how we went about this study. Essentially we took a fairly straightforward approach to this study. What we did was we identified a range of demands identified in the study you have in front of you as operational types located on page two and three. They can't, you know, the one big critique, the report maybe there was no strategic chapeau. However, that was done purposefully frankly because currently we're at a transition point and what we really wanted to do is sort of in a vacuum determine what the potential demands for ground forces are and not necessarily make a political judgment on what the strategy is gonna be post-Iraq and Afghanistan. So from that we identified these 14 ground-centric operational types which essentially are basically archetypal scenarios. Then we identified a set of 19 subordinate missions that occur inside of those tasks. And collectively these operational types are archetypal scenarios and the missions inside each one of those tasks became the, collectively they became the demand that we determined we should evaluate capabilities against. So what are the implications? The implications we found are these four listed here are not all that surprising. Operations are gonna be more complex in the future but we did basically conclude that wars, ground wars would likely occur mostly within states as opposed to between states. Certain operational types would merit increased consideration and I can go over those in greater detail. And then I wanted to talk just briefly about this fourth point that significant violence is more likely across operational types. This chart is not meant to actually, it's not meant to be an impressive PowerPoint chart. Really what it's meant to say is there's always been this in all Department of Defense deliberations there's always been this depiction of violence and contingencies as having an inverse relationship between likelihood and level of violence, i.e. those contingencies that are most likely have a lower level of violence and those contingencies that are least likely have the highest level of violence. What we found really in breaking down again these archetypal scenarios is the fact that the violence can vary within these operational types significantly. And therefore moving on to some of the other conclusions the force is gonna require significant combat capabilities. Regardless of what operation you deploy on many circumstances will be highly lethal regardless of whether it's a humanitarian intervention to start out with or in fact that it's a major combat operation you'll still need significant combat capabilities in the deployment. In addition responsiveness will increasingly be at a premium which will mean the strategic warning associated with many of the archetypal scenarios that we've come up with the strategic warning will be very low and the requirement to deploy significant forces will be very high. And then finally let me just make a point on security force assistance and stability operations. The contemporary or current logic is that the demand will be higher but what we found in sort of our analysis of the different operation types is that current capabilities are either currently sufficient or sufficiently adaptable to account for the requirements and stability operations and security forces assistance going forward. Everybody knows what the trends and ground forces are right now. Essentially the aggregate supply for the allies and for our ground forces the trends are all going down with the sole exception of special operating forces but let me just point out a few things. We did find that the capability for what we call armored maneuver and additionally the capability for a forcible entry and for power projection are increasingly unique in U.S. forces. Our allies are simply not able to actually bring any substantial capability to bear in that regard and actually our foreign partners are largely migrating to what would be what you would call universally a middleweight force and not really capable of independent operations. And then finally we did find that in spite of our conclusion on stability operations that with our interagency partners their capability is obviously if the defense department's budget's going down then clearly the interagency partners they're facing similar periods or similar austerity pressures and therefore their capabilities are largely declining as well and therefore the Department of Defense will still actually be responsible for a significant amount of non-military stabilization tasks in missions abroad. Finally, let me just get to a couple of bottom line slides. I've repeated these at the beginning. Let me just point out that we think there's a lower demand in certain areas, stability operations and security force assistance and future contingency operations whereas we believe there's greater demand in the future for capabilities for strategic responsiveness, forcible entry and armored maneuver. In the end, our conclusion actually is that the United States will need a force that can respond very quickly under severe time constraints, force entry into theater under a variety of circumstances, initiate operations with very little necessity to stage a reconfigure and then finally maneuver effectively in a protected manner and fight in a very distributed fashion over a widely dispersed battlefield against an array of lethal capabilities against and with that I'll turn it over to my colleagues. All right, thank you, Nate. That was a good, quick summary. I would like to welcome our two distinguished commenters here. First, we have General Jack Sheehan. He had a distinguished career in the Marine Corps, a series of commands and awards, which I won't list here. They're available on his bio. He had joint assignments, J3 and special military assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. And his last assignment was as the first Marine to command the Atlantic Fleet. I was saying he might also be the last. We'll have to see how time progresses. And we also could even ask the question how long we will have an Atlantic Fleet. But that's not today's topic, if you will. Since he retired from the Marine Corps or became a former Marine, he's been working largely for Bechtel Corporation, a lot of work in Europe and Asia, including China and the Far East. And he will be followed by the Honorable Kim Windcup. Mr. Windcup is a former Staff Director of the House Armed Services Committee, former Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, and was a recent chairman of the Reserve Forces Policy Board. He is also a senior advisor here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. So we'll go in order. And first, over to you, General Sheikhan. Thank you, David. First, as David said, when I left the military and the Marine Corps, I worked for Bechtel Corporation. I run the oil and gas business around the world. And so in terms of not living here in Washington, DC, I'm very fortunate that I don't get contaminated by the vocabulary or the thought process that exists. I'm in the business of making money around the world. And so I'm approaching this problem from a standpoint of somebody who says, if you are an operating entity, A, would I invest in you? And B, what can you do to make yourself better? So I would start by saying to the authors of this study, it's a good starting point. For what, as David has said, needs to be a very serious debate about our defense and security structure. The study, after you scrape through all of the nice words, basically has three operating premises. Number one, that the American people are tired of a protracted land war. Number two, it doesn't have a stomach for large standing armies. Number three, they need money for a budget deficit reduction process. Third one is absolutely operating entity that's driving this process. It's not because, as David has said, there was some kind of overriding strategic concept that the United States is working towards. As a matter of fact, I would argue the case that the budget, the budgeteers, the Green Eye Shade Weenies, have already started cutting budgets in their own downward trajectory without any framework for that conversation. Now, I recognize that this effort is not starting from a clean sheet of paper. We need to recognize the weapons inventory system that drives most of what we do in the business will constitute the same weapons mix that we'll probably have in 2020. Especially in the high end items. And if we're lucky, and the institution has some good prudent business practices, we might even be able to refurbish some of that equipment and not just put broken and used equipment on the shelf and hope that it works 10 years from now. Now, the use of their 8x14 operational capabilities matrix is a very good starting point. How you mix and match those capabilities is very much a legitimate debate that I think you should participate in. Words and concepts in Washington, D.C. are important because they translate into defense guidance or budget authority and henceforth structure. So words mean something. What I do reject though is a clearly stated comment that defense experts think we should shift our focus to Asia, i.e. China, and structure our forces accordingly, or that should influence the structure of our forces, especially naval and air forces. Now that's fine as long as you don't accept the express corollary associated with the concept that you do not fight a land war in Asia. Do you think you can conduct a naval and air campaign against China or a peer competitor with a credible threat of land forces both as unwise and extremely flawed? Conflicts do not come to a conclusion unless your adversary's capital or center of gravity is at risk. The use of a peer competitor as an analysis tool is fine but the analysis has to be equally applied across the entire spectrum of conflict, not just a particular piece of it. In the same vein, I struggle to apply useful analytical tool maybe with the exception of illustrious scenarios to benchmark the relative merits of one capability over another. I do absolutely agree though with the three main tenets that have been expressed. Ground forces will remain relevant and necessary. Two, there's an aggregate usefulness to capabilities like strategic and operational responsiveness, forcible entry and armored capability. In my definition of armored capability is not anti-IED 50 ton vehicles. Necessary, but that's not armored capability. Future demands like stability forces will be more important in that category. I would add the enabling capabilities that other forces that do not currently have nor will they invest in becomes more and more important. So as a result, when you look at NATO, NATO cannot go to lunch unless we provide them both the bus and the cookies to eat after lunch. Before I conclude, I'd like to add some ground truth to this discussion. We've embarked on efforts like this to define capabilities of ground forces before, especially when we're looking now to 2020. This is not something we were doing for the first time. In the past, we have called it rightsizing or transformation. The definition of both phrases that it's transformation is oftentimes what you do to somebody else's organization. Now, what's the real history? The real history of the defense process, if I go back to 1980, since 1980 changes in terms of total budgetary, constant dollars. The defense budget has increased 44%. Current dollars, it's increased 289%. Yet during that same timeframe, with those kinds of increases, we've taken out 54% of tactical fighters, 47% of the army divisions, 45% of commission ships, 23,000 out of DOD, 1% of the reserves and 29% of the active structure. Where is the growth? The growth is in overhead, defense agencies, et cetera, in staffs. So if you look at last year's 2000 numbers, which we have the best capability of, of the 1.3, 1.4 million active duty service people we have, 560,000 have never deployed outside the United States. Only about 400,000 have gone once or twice. So you have to ask yourself the question, what are we doing with 600,000 people in the structure? And I would argue the case that how we structure ourselves, it's not a question of what a division looks like, but we have to ask ourselves a kind of very fundamental question, what is the fighting ratio to the support ratio? When I came back from the Middle East last night, I stopped off down in Crystal City in Starbucks, and there was a whole bunch of people in there, 20 people around numbers, we're in BDUs. I sat down, started talking to them, what do you do for living? How's the parakeet doing, yuck, yuck, yuck. Invariably in that group, they said, my job is to support the warfighter. Have been in Iraq? No. Have been in Afghanistan? No. What do you do? I support the warfighter. So I've created a very simple kind of rule that you might want to consider from a management perspective. I use this in my business, which is about $28 billion a year. So I suggest a simple metric. For every rifleman that you cut, you take 200 to 250 people out of DoD's overhead, and then you'll get the right number. Well, thank you, Jack. I can see that you've mellowed a good bit in your post-DoD era. So, Kim Winkup, over to you, sir. Well, thanks, David. Fun to follow General Sheehan, I think is a former congressional staff, political appointee and corporate officer. I'm one of the contaminated that you mentioned, and it'll probably show through in my comments. I'd like to just sort of congratulate Martin and Nate and his team for this report, because I really think it's very timely. The secretary said yesterday at AUSA, he asked the question in his speech, tell me what I need to retain in terms of ground forces, and I think this helps that debate. Because I think you've highlighted both risks and capabilities. So it's not being framed by divisions and brigades, but it's by capabilities, and there's some rigor to the argument, which I think will be helpful. As your study points out, and David did also, we've been through this many times, although really not recently. There's not a lot of recent experience in the building on going through these kinds of reductions. So we're gonna have to learn our way one more time. But typically, every president wants to reduce ground forces. It's where money is, they feel they don't need them. And yet, what the Joint Chiefs often will say is their job is to provide the president options. And maybe what our allies and partners probably understand more than we do is that our political climate shifts quickly. And it may well be that the president will feel that need more quickly than we can anticipate, even after comments like Secretary Gates made recently about the likelihood of ground warfare. I particularly liked in this study the use of examples tied to the capabilities because it kind of, it brings it home. It makes it tangible the kinds of places where ground forces can provide capability that you don't get otherwise. Now, I guess from my standpoint, there's sort of two friction points I'm gonna watch from as this all develops. And General Sheehan talked about it. Somehow our strategy has gotten separated from resources. We can all conjure up reasons, but it's happened. And the budget to some degree is in freefall because it's not tied to a specific strategy and it's not a good situation. And ground forces are where most of that money is made up. People is where the most of that money is and that's a favorite target of budgeteers. So it's gonna be in the crosshairs. The other part that I would like to kind of watch is this inevitable trade off between the active and the reserve, which is going on, it's started in the building. It's mainly a ground force issue, but it's also going on on the air side. And it's gonna be one of the tough decisions that any serious decision maker is gonna have to make. On the active side, you've got this deployment situation where you've gotta be conscious of the pressures on the force and you've gotta somehow maintain enough force to not make that worse. And then of course the need for quick reaction forces. On the reserve side, on the balance is the fact that Congress does not like to cut reserves. They much rather cut, not much. They probably, given the choice, they tend to be more willing to cut the active side than the reserves. It's a less expensive place to maintain capability. And if we're worried about maintaining these kinds of capabilities over time, the RC is a good option. And one that I find particularly intriguing is we've got 10 or 12 years of remarkably experienced people, junior officers, senior enlisted and people, junior enlisted, who lot are leaving the force and we're losing enormous experience that the reserves could provide a place to retain that for a significant period of time. So reserves provide a capability that I think gives it even more attraction than normal. So David, as you point out, the battle's just beginning. This is just one of, but I think it sets up the debate very well and I think it's a good study. Thank you, Kim. I'm gonna slide this back a little bit because there's a whole table over here that I can't see, which means I'll never call on you for questions unless I move this out of the way. That might actually be a good thing. Let me just review the ground rules for our questions, if you will. If you're in the room here, you raise your hand, we'll bring a microphone to you. We'd like you to speak into the microphone and identify who you are, with whom you're affiliated, and then you can make your comments and questions. We would really like the comments to be short and there to be actually a question mark at the end of the question, which would give our commenters a chance to reply. Those of you who are watching on the web, you can send an email. I've got my my silent phone up here, but if you send an email to D-B-E-R-T-E-A-U at CSIS.org, I'll read your question and you might get the chance to have that come into play as well. So we're still working a little bit on our sophisticated web presence in terms of two-way communications. So with that, let me ask for volunteers to raise an issue or a question. Anybody in the audience? All right here. Yes, gentlemen, Colonel Chris Naylor, United States Marine Corps. I'm just curious as a, had a chance to read through your report. We're coming off probably one of the most unique, obviously historic times in our national defense history, bottom line. That's master the obvious. I think what's interesting, a lot of time, when you look at cutting forces, so often it starts at the top and you work your way down. I'm curious from methodology, was there any interest or opportunity to look quite frankly at a 11-year laboratory in Iraq and Afghanistan and kind of start from the ground up and see what's really required for ground forces? Thanks for the question. I mean, in our general approach, obviously you can't do anything like this without thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan, right? I mean, that's obviously gonna be one of the elephants in the room, but what we also did and what we wanted to do is we wanted to look beyond, we wanted to take the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan and for lack of a better term, project forward the contingency demands beyond that and identify the capabilities that are required for those new and sometimes old challenges that are just still with us, right? I think one of the things, one of the ways I'd answer your question, though, for example, the stability force SFA conclusion. I think part of what informed our idea that we are either sufficient or sufficiently adaptable in that area was exactly the point you're talking about right now, where we now have a force that is widely experienced in stabilization across the Army and the Marine Corps and the special operating forces and a good chunk of that force is also very experienced now in direct security force assistance, which used to be the purview almost exclusively of the special operating forces. And so given that, and I think in keeping a little bit with the point you were making, Kim, about making sure you retain the right experience in the force in both the active and reserve component, I think that was one of the things that informed, for example, our ability, our idea that you could assume some risk in those areas. So I mean, that's just one area, I think, where the Iraq, Afghanistan experience and capturing it in a bottle and making sure we retain it. That's one area where I think we took that into account. I've got one thing I would like to add to that. Stability operations and building partnership capacity and so on are noble and worthy objectives, but they don't drive force structure worth a darn. You don't need anywhere near the kinds of numbers that we're looking at for those purposes. And I think that's where the bottom-up piece has to go elsewhere as part of that process. Can I add one just very quickly? The other thing I'd say is, let's be clear about the conclusion. The conclusion was not that, for example, stability operations are not important, nor is the conclusion that security force assistance are not important. The conclusion is that specialized capabilities, if you have to make a choice between having general purpose capabilities that you can adapt to a mission versus fencing a significant chunk of your force for specialized contingency demands in the stability operations area and the security force assistance area, if it's a choice between that, our report essentially falls down on the side of airing on the side of general purpose capabilities. Kim, you had a comment? I don't. Okay. I have a question. I have C1 era table number two. AutoCrisher with C-Power Magazine, among others. I'm gonna go back to the issue that John Hamry brought up with Admiral Willard and General Sheehan kind of touched on it. The big emphasis here in Washington is, all of future battles, we don't wanna fight on the land, so we're gonna do, we need to preserve LC and air. But Admiral Willard didn't think that was a good idea, even in his command, which is supposedly the most air-enable centric. I'd like to, particularly General Sheehan and Mr. Winckup to look at that, deal with that issue. Going forward, if we're gonna have to cut something, everybody says ground forces are the most expensive, but air-enable forces are the most expensive to buy. So how do we make this balanced? Well, terribly tough. You ought to ask one of your table mates, Steve Cortezzi, who used to be the staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Defense Committee. And- Recovering budget money. And budget, it's easier to cut people. It's just, you get short-term outlay impact immediately. It's a much easier computation to go through when you're dealing with it. So in some sense, I think you back into that strategy where China seems to be the largest peer competitor, and so we'll never fight a land war against them, and so we get all these their force that come from that. But to a large degree, I think it's budget-driven because it's where the money is. As I said in my comments, the inventory weapon systems we have are gonna remain with us till 2020. So the current naval capability, air force capability is not gonna shrink except for washing out of the system very old platforms that don't have, any use, so that drives your O and M accounts up. And the same thing, like I said, if we don't refurbish the current inventory of ground equipment, howards of tubes, trucks, whatever have you, then we're gonna very quickly have a hollow force. Like as I said in my comments, aggregate utility of ground forces is absolutely essential because you cannot predict what it comes out over the horizon. I rejected it because it's in the study of we're not gonna fight a land war in Asia. Don't ever say that because if you start as soon as you start from that assumptions, like our no first use policy, you limit your strategic options. And if you have the capability to put an enemy's center of gravity or capital at risk, he has to recalculate his thinking. And so I would argue the case that should North Korea fail, which has been on the path to do for a number of years, you're not gonna win an air campaign or a naval campaign in North Korea, unless somebody walks downtown Pyongyang and either puts a flag on someone's capital or a bayonet in someone's chest. Okay, David, can I add one quick point to that? I wanna, the other thing I think that's important relative to the study as well is that the debate in Washington has become almost cartoonish in that it has pitted a fight against a major peer versus like a coin world, a counterinsurgency world. I mean, and those are the choices. And one of the points of the study, one of the reasons that and one of the criticisms we've opened ourselves up to is that we went down into relatively minute operational sometimes detail in certain areas is that we were trying to unpack that binary debate and say, look, there is a, we called it the messy middle I think in their report, but there's a great deal of either old or new missions that exist where only land forces can be applied to the problem and get a favorable result out of it. And that's why we did, there's a mission in their season secure talking about critical infrastructure, a territory that was brought up by Admiral, I mean, that was close to what Admiral Willard was bringing up about strategic choke points and things like that. So I mean, the whole idea that this broad utility that General Sheehan brings out is I think one of the great sort of messages that comes out of the report. But let's look at a couple of facts from your question, Otto and the comments here. General Sheehan's got a very good point about don't rule out a land war in Asia. In fact, if you set aside Panama 1989, Grenada 1983, the Dominican Republic 1965, I wouldn't categorize any of those as major land wars. When's the last time we actually fought a major land war that was not in Asia? It's a pretty long way back before anybody in this room was born. So that's a very relevant historical point. The second though has to do with where we're gonna make the cuts. And let's look at the reality situation that we have today. We've still got almost 100,000 and by the end of next year, we'll still have nearly 70,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan. It's pretty hard to cut force structure much while you're actively supporting, and I take your comment that everybody's supporting the warfighter, but the optics of it are difficult and the politics of it are difficult. It's pretty hard to cut operations while you're in the middle of operations. There's a lot of room to cut overhead, but there's no line item in the budget for overhead. And one man's overhead is another man's place that he lives while he's waiting for the next war. And so it doesn't feel like overhead to them. And that leaves us with what we typically end up doing in the initial round of cuts, which is we take it out of the investment accounts. We take it out of procurement, we take it out of R&D, because you don't see the effects of those anytime soon. The times when we don't do that is when we've actually got a strategy that says, here's how we balance all of those elements together. Forces, operations, investment, and overhead. And that strategy is just not there today. And that's the biggest piece that's missing. Other questions? Let's go to the back one in the middle here. Mr. Hugo first. Yes, Jim Pinkleman from the Marine Corps. Talking about security forces assistance, and I took your earlier point that it's general purpose forces, if you opt for one or the other, better to opt for general purpose forces that can adapt to more specific missions. That said, is there still a role for specialized forces in particular areas? And if so, where might those be? What I'll say about that, I mean, what we didn't do is spend a great deal of time going down into the itches and ores of, I mean, there's all kinds of specialized forces, in the logistical area, in the combat area as well. The security force assistance issue, I think, was, the reason we brought that up is there has been a trend, as of late, in especially in the Army, to begin considering significant shifts of force structure dedicated exclusively to security force assistance. And it was our view that the opportunity cost associated with building those specialized forces versus having general purpose forces that through their ARFRAGEN process or through their readiness process are readied at some point to fall in on a foreign security force and help them build up. We thought that the opportunity cost was excessively high, accepting that we were gonna lose forces anyway, right? I mean, so you're gonna lose forces and then you're in the process of building more specialized forces. Therefore, in the aggregate, your contingency response capability is by definition gonna go down. And that was really the issue. Does that mean that you can't have any? No, not necessarily. It also, in certain respects, means that there's gonna be some kind of writing of the special operations forces post-Rock in Afghanistan where they return, in certain respects, to that role more as they have in the past. I mean, they have migrated into the direct action area over the last 10 years. They too will have to do some sort of writing over the next few years as we transition out of Iraq and Afghanistan back into that area. So I mean, I would stick to just our conclusion on that and just say, look, be aware of the opportunity costs that's associated with specializing. Your question reminds me a little bit of the debate we had a number of years ago when we fell in love with peacekeeping operations. How do you train people for peacekeeping, peace enforcement, Article 5 operations? We created a whole generation of people who loved to redefine definitions, et cetera. And what we found out at the end of this mental exercise is that an 11 braver or an 0331 who knew his skills was the best peacekeeper we ever invented. And so I would argue the case, the same thing comes true in terms of general aggregate utility and forces. If you give me a good corporal who knows his combat skills, he can do security assistance because what you don't want is somebody who grows up in a schoolhouse who's trying to teach the ground forces in Abu Dhabi something about a very serious problem that's ongoing, especially in the Arab world now with the transition in the Arab Spring, there are genuine real issues that you don't need some academic, I taught in SFOC in Fort Bragg for two years. So I understand the difference between mindset and how you train people and different kinds of people you put out. I will tell you the tougher, the smarter infantryman that you have who knows combat arms, you can do more things with him than you can with somebody who has a very narrow view of the world. Doesn't mean that we don't go back to the additional role of SFOC where they do nation-building kinds of activities where they teach things, but you cannot get combat operations wrong. Yeah, General John Foss, Association of US Army. There was no discussion at all about resiliency of the force. And if you go back and look at our operations since World War II, Korea, Vietnam, certainly Iraq, Afghanistan, they have been long wars that required we generate additional forces and the reserve forces while they're there take a while to spin up. Where you have defined operations, such as Panama and other things like that, they were quick and over with, the Gulf War very defined, over with and gone. So when they start to look at the capability of ground forces, and the Marines know this just as well as the Army does, that you can't just generate the mud of nothing and you have to have enough so that if you're gonna go over an extended period of time, you're able to replace them and bring them back. Now the last eight years of the Army of brigade overseas, brigade back home, brigade up and right back again, they've been going back and forth like that every 12 months as far as the infantry brigades. Comment? As far as the study goes, I think that where we didn't go is right sizing yet, right? We haven't gone to because the fundamental question we wanted to answer first is what did we think the force was gonna be employed for? And then we wanted to match we wanted to match sort of what the macro capability mismatches potentially are. I mean, the next step clearly for the Defense Department is force sizing is right sizing based on their demand. In our case, we've identified a demand signal. They have to basically take that, I mean, as a suggestion, they could take that demand signal now as one example and start stacking contingencies, start talking about duration, et cetera, and then right sizing the force based on that. Right, I mean, it's a fair point, but I think that it's a fair point but it was beyond the scope of this particular study. General Frost, nice to see you again. You had this problem down at Forces Command when you were with the Army, so it's a real issue for you. Although it strikes me there's an intriguing unique aspect of this in that the reserve forces are gonna have legitimate combat experience throughout their ranks for the next 20 years that we haven't seen in the past. And they may well be a place where active officers and enlisted who come off who now don't choose to join because they don't wanna get back into the deployment, but once the deployment's slowed down, they may well choose to groan, where you can actually have a residual capability in large numbers that change that the resiliency question of how quickly you can get that force ready and probably good for the country to think about how to take advantage of them under any circumstances, but it certainly has military value that we haven't seen in the past. Yeah, one comment. I think this is one place where the service departments can control part of their own future and their deployability criteria. As I said, we've only got 350,000 people who have been deployed once out of 1.3 million. We have a lot of non-deployable people for a lot of different kinds of reasons, so deployment policy sits within OSD and the service departments to figure out how to get that size right. We also have over 350,000 military people serving outside of DOD in round numbers. So you have within your capability and study to kind of right size this force, that essentially says DOD is not the manpower pool for state, aid, and the rest of these organizations that if they want that capability, they need to fund it. Conversely, the military departments need to stop populating Washington, DC with people who make better riflemen than they do horse holders here inside the Beltway. I can muster four battalions worth of people by going down Route One and just with a bus and taking people out of Starbucks who don't do a goddamn thing during the course of the day when we have young Americans who've been to Afghanistan three and four times and they have never left the Route One corridor. Any other questions? Let's say we'll go to the side here. I don't think we've been on the left side at all here. Hi, my name's Rob Nower. I work at the State Department. I'm also a reservist in the Marine Corps and Mr. Wincup, I appreciated your comments on the availability of the reserves to be a less expensive force and to retain talent. I would also offer up that it effectively connects the nation more strongly to the military than the active duty forces. But I was hoping that the whole panel could maybe talk a little bit about how we should use the reserves in a little bit more specificity. There's obviously some different models out there between the way that the Marine Corps goes about it and the Army National Guard Air Force and the Navy. And I was also wondering kind of along those lines how reliant we can be on the reserves. What are the limitations that are out there? Thank you. Well, I came from the hill is kind of in my formative years. So cutting the reserves is hard. Leave aside any other aspect of it, it's a hard thing to do. And I guess maybe I backed into being an enormous believer in. So I would tend to think you can rely on them more so than probably General Sheehan would feel in terms of large numbers of people over a relatively short period of time. I mean, all the reports I hear are that the Guard and Reserve have performed remarkably well in the theaters of late. And I would hope that would lead to a deeper ability to take advantage of them for the future. I don't see how we're gonna have enough money to do it otherwise, frankly. I think there are a couple of different models and since you've raised the Marine Corps as an issue. You know, my contemporary history of reserve system in the Marine Corps and combat operations is that we took reservists out of the system who've never been to boot camp and put them on a boat and sent them to the Korean conflict during the Busan perimeter. And the only terrain they got was when they fired their M1s off the fan tail of a ship and they did reasonably well. Our next large experience, obviously, was Desert One or Desert Storm when we took mechanized tank organizations and they weren't ready because the complexity of war, a lot of different reasons. It's not a personal criticism of individuals but the complexity of warfare is such, especially in the integrated of combined arms. It doesn't mean that you can't teach it. You just need to make sure that you make the investment in those kinds of capabilities. I know active duty people who couldn't integrate, you know, things also. So it's not a criticism of active division reserve but the study clearly indicates the complexity of warfare that we have to deal with is gonna require an investment in training and the retention of the right kinds of people who've got eight to 10 years of experience in that business. And so I have no problem with a reserve structure with helicopter pilots, you know, fixed wing aircraft guys who fly this stuff in a weekend. What my concern is is that we, as we move up the food chain and we ask whole organizations to perform at a combat critical capability that we struggle with sometimes in the active structure. So I think that's kind of part of the problem. We also have a bigger problem in the ground side that the report doesn't address. It's over eight years we've developed a generation of supporting arms people who don't know their trade. We have our children who have never commanded beyond the company battery level who should have gone through their fire support training, maneuver, fire, fire, et cetera, et cetera. Now the lieutenant colonels without any real experience in either mechanized operations at the lieutenant colonel level or artillery operations at the lieutenant colonel combined fires operations. So if we recognize that and have a need to make that investment, yeah, putting those people in the reserves we can bring them in. The learning curve is slightly less steep but the active structure in terms of rightsizing needs to put a huge amount of money into the T and E accounts to get people back up to speed because we have a generation of captains and majors who have been doing road security operations and they're not competent. They couldn't pass a tact test at the grade level to the need in their skill levels. There's also a third element that comes into these calculations and that is the dramatic change in the use of contractor support for logistics and operations. And the theory used to be that's what we used the reserve component for is that would provide us that support. It turned out, and this is somewhat back to General Foss's question, if you've tricked yourself into thinking you're only gonna be there for a little while you don't actually build that into your capability. If you believe you're only gonna be there for a little while it makes a lot more sense to rely on contractors. If on the other hand you can be there for 10 years you don't really have a structure that's aimed at that way. So it's another element of the calculation that I think needs to come into play. Got a question here on the right table that I hid myself from but now have revealed. Nice try. Colin Clark, AOL Defense. Um, there has been an enormous amount of talk about the fact that we aren't going into this straw down with a strategy ahead of time. I think General Aschian's comment is spot on about they're already cutting. I mean, 24 hours there were three programs that were basically whacked in the last week. And given all that my question would be isn't especially the army which is gonna have to we presume take the burden of these cuts shouldn't they simply say we are going to lose you know, 15, 20, 25, whatever they think they can lose and do it now so that the costs are saved as quickly as possible and we should just move ahead. Especially given the hill. Let me comment for the army first. Don't ever do that in this town. Yeah, I agree. Do not ever in this town offer up your force structure on the altar with the budget cuts. Preemptively. Because they'll take that plus some. This nation needs a strong, healthy army. There are a lot of things the Marine Corps can do and do well. But there are a lot of things that we shouldn't do, and we don't need to buy the equipment for. We need a balanced force capability and a strong, healthy army is absolutely essential for what we do as a country for security. So, A, don't offer anything up to these budget weenies. I mean, God love Ken Wynne Cup. He's a wonderful human being. But when he sits behind his desk at the hill he's a communist. We will. Equal time. Equal time. Well, thank you for those titles. I guess I would say you're exactly right, but there's another view on it. And it's because I've seen the active forces, The leadership of the military departments wait too long to cut. They hold on to, they try and retain more active duty. It's particularly with respect to active duty forces. They try to retain them too long. So they wipe out their procurement accounts. The training money starts to disappear. And then the hill and or probably the hill decides that they really don't, because they also try and spread that across the reserves. And they don't wanna go along with that. So they go back and double dip them. And as a result, they end up with none of the above. So it's a horribly complex decision for a military leader as to how to deal with a budget around here. But I guess from my standpoint, I've seen them wait too long to offer things up, particularly with respect to active duty force structure. When it seemed inevitable, it was gonna happen. I just want, we have in the report, actually there's a sort of implied nod to this point. And it gets back to actually the specialization point. We have thought for some time, and in fact over the way back to when we began our thinking about doing this report close to two years ago and in our deliberations during this report. We believe actually, in fact, this trend towards specialization in certain respects makes you more vulnerable to significant cuts than you actually accept. Because again, the philosophy right now, for example, is all about prevention. And prevention is all about having specialized stabilization forces, having specialized security force, assistance forces, et cetera, et cetera. And aside from my more strategic argument that every dollar, Marine soldier, et cetera, you devote to specialized capabilities is one less you have for contingency response, exclusively to specialization, might be one less you have for contingency response. The other argument is that if you suddenly build all the specialized capability and it proves to be less employable or less employed than you have anticipated, and you've done it strictly on the basis of believing you're sort of saving your force structure to sort of regenerate it in another form sometime later, I think you're exposing yourself to extreme risk to having that force structure taken from you in the end. You know, General Sheehan and I both learned some of our Washington DoD budget negotiating skills from Cap Weinberger. And Secretary Weinberger sort of took the Winston Churchill approach to budget negotiations, which was basically the famous quote, never give in, never, never, never, never. One could argue that in fact the defense budget stayed up at a higher level for a longer period of time as a result of Weinberger's negotiating style than it would have had he followed the logic that Colin proposed in his question, which is offer up that what you're gonna get to. But I think that begets the much more difficult question. The Army doesn't know where it wants to be, and therefore it cannot say what it doesn't need. What function is gonna force them to come to grips with that is the basic question. We all know the first answer to that question. When you don't have enough money, you figure out what to get rid of. But what you get rid of is frequently not what you need to get rid of. You go back to at the end, the early 1980s, the Army had a whole cohort of enlisted men, mostly men, who had come in under a misnormed set of vocational aptitude battery tests, ASVAPs. And a lot of these people had been categorized as cat 3s and cat 3a's and 3b's, and they were really cat 4s. And they were now sort of found out, right, because it turns out, we discovered, but most of them had records of service that had no blemishes on them. And when it came time to reenlist, they kind of had discovered they liked the Army. And one of the hardest things for the Army to do, and Kim, I think this is harder for the Army than it is anybody else, is to say to a soldier who wants to reenlist, who doesn't have a blemish on their record, I'm sorry, we don't need you. It took a lot of grown up help to help the Army get rid of those guys, and they were not who we needed to have in the Army. And it wasn't budgetary help. It was, in fact, clear guidance from the top. So it is both a top down and a bottom up issue that I think needs to be dealt with. I think we're at our appointed hour. I want to thank all of you for being here. I do want to point out that in addition to the short report that you have by hand here, there is on the web a substantial amount of additional analysis and documentation in the form of appendices. There will be, it is not there yet, okay. We're still doing the analysis to support our conclusions. No, no, that's not quite true. No, it's an edited approach. Right, but I think for those of you who are lying awake at night and need something to do, this is going to be a rich body of additional analysis to support and form the basis. Clearly what we've done here today, what we've attempted to do is to lay out the issues. We have not come up with the answers yet. It's not solely up to us, obviously, to do that. But it is clearly up to more than just DOD because the path we're on right now is not going to produce that. So thank you all for being here. And with that, we'll convert. Thank you, sir. Well, but not never. Never.