 Well, you quiet down real good Thank you all very much for coming. We're delighted to have you here. Welcome to the global security forum global strategy forum 2011 we are very pleased to have you. It's going to be quite a quite an interesting day I must say I this is there's enough of me to clone, but unfortunately I can't get cloned I would like to attend almost all of the seminars we have today And I'm sorry that we're not going to let everybody attend everything But we just had too much to do and too little time And so we're very anxious to have all of you here and welcome. We're delighted you're with us I Would like to say special First of all, I can't thank all of the people that from the podium who've been instrumental in this We've got dozens of speakers who've been willing to give their time and participate and My remarkable staff. I gosh, I love these the staff. They're just fabulous Been working so hard for months now, and it's going to be a great day And I'll thank all of them in a very special way later, but wanted to acknowledge this contribution That they've done today I'd also would like to say just a very sincere word of thanks to our friends at Finn Mechanica Finn Mechanica has made this possible for us to be able to host This is the second year and I would like to invite Simone Bempera to come to the podium and briefly say some words of Welcome on behalf of Finn Mechanica Thank you Thank good morning, ladies and gentlemen Thank you John for your kind introduction and for keeping us today under their conditioning because it's gonna be 95 97 today I would like to welcome you to today's event and extend it to each of you the regards of our Chairman of the Mechanica chairman per Francesco Guardwellini and our CEO Giuseppe Orzi And if you mechanic a senior defense advisory committee who are in the audience this morning I would also like to recognize of course today's keynote speaker the honorable Billine and deputy secretary of defense and All the others team the panelists Finn Mechanica is proud to support the mission and activities of CSIS Under the leadership of John and his team CSIS has become one of the best regarded organizations in the global security issues We at Finn Mechanica understand the importance of contributing to groups like CSIS and to fostering an objective analysis of key policy issues Today's global security forum panelists are leading experts in their fields The fact that CSIS can attract that is a level of talent is a testament to its reputation of a commitment to excellence If you mechanic a shares the same commitment to excellence a value that is realized the daily by our 12,000 American employees and by another 63,000 around the world We are dedicated to delivering the best products and services to our customers and to supporting the servicemen and women around the world Thank you again for being part of this a special day. I hope and I'm sure that you will find this forum productive and interesting. Thanks It's my great pleasure now to introduce Bill Lynn Bill and I will we go back quite a few years actually over 30 years we first first started working together back up in the Senate at the time I was on the armed services committee and and Secretary Lynn was working at that time for the late senator Ted Kennedy and we became fast friends and our trajectories in life have interwoven since that time when During the Clinton administration secretary Lynn was at that time was the director of program analysis and evaluation initially and then became the comptroller So we've had you know those before he became a virgin. I mean it was a comptroller thing And so we've had a remarkable experience in life of having yet to know each other before that and Before I really knew Bill He was actually at CSIS. We did a landmark study in the 1980s that led to Goldwater Nichols and it was the intellectual foundation of Goldwater Nichols and Bill along with Barry Blackman were the two lead investigators that made that work possible. So it is So when I called the secretary and said we would like to have him keynote Speech today. I said, he said what do you want me to talk about? I said Anything you want? Well, I didn't anticipate the future of war to be the topic So but I'm looking forward to this more than anybody. So would you please join me in welcoming Secretary Bill? Thanks very much John. It's it's a pleasure to be with with you here today and Great to see how many people get up this early. I thought it was just at the Pentagon The past decade of has been filled with enormous changes and challenges in national security There have been been few constants But one of the constants has been the leadership that John has provided here at CSIS See he's made CSIS Firmly at the the the pinnacle of the think tanks here in Washington making enormous contributions to the debates both in terms of the substance of the debates as well as bringing people of disparate views together and trying to find common ground and And John is now just at the the point now of finding new ground For CSIS He tells me that not next year at this time But the year after we will be in the the new building that John's raised the capital for And we'll just broke ground on I think just in the last but yeah We'll have an offering later in the in the talk I Do have the one one complaint For John as he said that we do go way way back and given our friendship I would have thought he would have warned me About this job that that it turns out that well He's now the CEO of CSIS which means he has a deputy He's no longer a deputy and and what it turns out and John didn't tell me is is a deputy is the worst job in Washington What happens is all of the issues that have have Solutions that please large constituencies and then make everyone happy are picked off underneath you and under Secretary of Defense makes a decision issues a press release takes credit. It's everybody's happy except of course me It's only the the really intractable issues that move their way to my office And then once in a while a sexy issue will make its way through this maze and get there Which point secretary Gates reaches down grabs that one says don't worry about that big guy I I have it you don't you don't need to to go any go any further on it. So it's it's Except for that one one point John it's been a fabulous 30 years What I'd like to do is as I said John Is talk I hope it's not as grandiose is the title suggests But I'd like to talk about some of the concerns that we have as we think about The future of war and we have to think about it in the fact that since 9-11 for the the decade after 9-11 We've had the ability to address new defense challenges by simply increasing the amount of resources We put against defense and it's clear however the debate on on deficit Reduction and the national debt come out. We're not going to have that luxury For the foreseeable future. It's clear that the deficit crisis Requires all of our government functions to reduce their planned spending levels and defense will be no exception It's not plausible programmatically or politically to exclude the 20% of Government spending that's encompassed by the defense function from deficit reduction plans So the challenge we face today is to manage the coming slowdown and defense spending wisely and responsibly This requires making judgments about the nature of our future security environment Which is an exceptionally tricky business as that great Strategist Yoki Berra said Predictions are difficult especially about the future in fact We have a poor track record of projecting when where and against whom we will fight Secretary Gates has described our record in that regard as perfect. We have never gotten it right But there is one area where I'd argue our predictions have a better record and that is that is with regard to the future of war itself That is how wars will be fought what technologies will be transformative and what tactics will be effective Nations that have accurately predicted prior trends in warfare Emphasize maneuver warfare over fortifications bought aircraft carriers instead of battleships and understood the paradigm shifting nature of nuclear weapons In order to sustain the right defense capabilities in the coming spending slowdown We need a similarly considered understanding of future strategic tent trends For most of human history We fought our battles on land and at sea It's only been in the last century that the terrain of war is spilled into the air and under the ocean and Space first figured in conflicts less than three generations ago Most recently we find ourselves operating in and depending on cyberspace So warfare first transformed by the industrial revolution then by the atomic revolution is Now being revolutionized by the information age This is the national security environment in the 21st century the first diverse military actors and capabilities acting simultaneously across multiple domains With more interdependencies than ever before The full scope of this extraordinary transformation was witnessed by a man. We paid tribute to earlier this spring Frank buckles was 110 years old when he passed away in February He was the last surviving us veteran of the first world war of the nearly five million who served The story of his life and how warfare changed during it gives us insight about our future strategic environment Born in a barn by lantern light buckles bluffed his way into the army at the age of 16 Weeks after enlisting he set sail on the ocean liner Carpathia the same ship that rescued the Titanic survivors in France Buckles saw the horrors of trench warfare First hand while serving as an ambulance driver on the Western Front The tide of history swept over buckles again in 1941 When the Japanese invaded the Philippines where he's working as a shipping merchant He was held prisoner for 38 months until the army rescued him and his fellow prisoners in a daring Parachute raid behind enemy lines The very week he was rescued the design for the atomic bomb was finalized Ushering in a new era of warfare that eclipsed industrial might alone Buckles went on to farm cattle in West Virginia. There he rode his tractor until well after the age of 100 Even at that age he participated in the next great transformative revolution the introduction of the informant information age Buckles as is Obituary noted was one of the few Americans born in the McKinley administration to have a Facebook page The three revolutions that buckles life encompassed brought an avalanche of military technologies and introduced whole new dimensions to war The implications of these past shifts for the military have been profound The issue for us to consider today is what capabilities and what programs to protect in a defense drawdown And what course future future technology technological trends will take In that context I'd identify three strategic strategic trends that could shape our future national security environment Lethality duration and asymmetry Each of these trends has implications for how we design our defense programs going forward Each if not carefully managed could weaken our security The first and most prominent trend in the global strategic environment has to do with access to lethality Previously when you looked at the range of threats we faced the more capable of the potential adversary The higher the level of lethality they possessed For centuries the most economically developed nations wielded the most lethal military power Secondary actors on the international stage possess second-rate capabilities Developing countries and insurgent groups had little access to highly lethal technologies Today that liddier relationship between economic power and military power no longer holds Terrorist groups with few resources can mount devastating attacks Insurgents can defeat our most advanced armor with fertilizer bombs Rogue states are seeking nuclear weapons and even some criminal organizations now possess world-class cyber capabilities The three revolutions that Frank buckles lived through have granted low and Actors access to high-end capabilities Lethality at the low end of the spectrum can now rival that at the high end As a result both sophisticated and unconventional opponents pose credible challenges to our security that the change in lethality has increased the risk of We face and divert and diversified the range of threats that we must be prepared to confront Defense planning must reflect this development Our military must be able to confront both high-end and low-end threats We must have what secretary Gates called a portfolio of capabilities with maximum possible versatility across the widest spectrum of conflict The increase in lethality across the threat spectrum means we cannot prepare exclusively For either a high-end conflict with a potential near peer competitor or a lower-end conflict with a counter insurgency focus Because our ability to project force is challenged by either scenario we must maintain capabilities to meet both We do have decisions about how to size our forces for these disparate contingencies But we must equip for both in other words We will need both fifth-generation fighters and counter IED technology going forward the This increase in lethality also has implications for homeland defense For a century before World War two our oceans insulated us from attack Even after the advent of the nuclear age only a nuclear-armed superpower could truly threaten our homeland But now technology allows small groups with focused lethality to wield influence that only nation states Could wield before The increase in lethality whether due to weapons of mass destruction cyber attacks or IEDs has changed forever the relationship between Homeland Defense and national security the second strategic trend is the increasing duration of warfare For several decades of military planning we have assumed kinetic engagements would be relatively short and That is how we plan for intense, but ultimately short battles that yielded decisive victory Desert storm has been the prototype a month-long aerial bombardment and a hundred-hour ground campaign With clear transitions between conflict and post-conflict phases This construct does not fit with our current reality For most of the past decade. We have been fighting two wars Each began with an intense combat phase But then as the adversary persisted the transition between conflict and post-conflict Became unclear and the scope of our mission expanded dramatically Our deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have now lasted longer than the US participation in World War one and World War two combined The stress this places on our force turns out to be far more challenging to manage than the intensity of the of the initial kinetic phase A central concern then for the department is managing the burden the duration of conflict places on our troops their families and the national treasury This trend too has important implications for force planning We must plan for sustained long-term commitments for a range of plausible conflicts Because duration becomes as important a driver of planning as intensity We must maintain enough force structure to allow adequate dwell times between deployments This is likely to have important implications for how we size structure and utilize our reserve force components We need the ability to scale up for structure for longer conflicts and The long-term conflicts must be considered in our strategic calculus The third final trend in War is the increasing prevalence of asymmetric threats Battlegrounds used to be a meeting place of like-on-like forces Cavalry on cavalry armor-on-armor and in the Cold War nuclear against nuclear We generally faced enemies whose framework for the use of force was similar to our own Our challenge was to develop superior capabilities and tactics within that framework This like-on-like paradigm is disappearing in Stature the American military is dominant by almost any measure There are very few militaries that can or will challenge us directly Yet we are finding that very dominance causes our adversaries to become more creative in their approach Today adversaries can defeat us only if they sidestep our construct for the use of force Our adversaries depend on asymmetric approaches that target our weaknesses and undercut our advantages So insurgents such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Iraq avoid Engaging our military and direct force-on-force engagements Instead they use IEDs and assassination as their weapons and they hope to use the longer duration of war to wait us out But unconventional forces are not the only ones to embrace this asymmetric approach Traditional powers are seeking asymmetric capabilities Anti-access and aerial denial strategies are perhaps the most vivid example of this approach in conventional conflict Rather than confront our substantial conventional advantages and power projection at sea and in space Some nations are pursuing ballistic missiles that seek to push our forces further from the battlefield In this way, asymmetric tactics are being built directly into conventional capabilities our forces may face in the future The source of the aerial denial and anti-access tactics is the proliferation of precision strike munitions From Desert Storm to the present, United States and its allies have had relatively exclusive access to these sophisticated precision guided munitions Over the next decade or two though that technology will be increasingly possessed by a range of other nations The diffusion of precision strike technology will have a cumulative effect It will enable anti-access and anti area and area denial strategies thereby creating challenges for our ability to project power to distant parts of the globe To address these challenges, we need to develop a range of capabilities Particularly missile defense and long range strike The ability to strike targets worldwide is an important deterrent against aggression So we're making a major investment in a family of long range strike systems that will allow us to penetrate defenses and deliver munitions worldwide This family of systems includes electronic attack capabilities, more advanced intelligence and surveillance platforms and ultimately a new long range bomber capable of both manned and unmanned operations Asymmetric tactics are also spreading beyond the traditional domains Potential attacks in cyberspace perhaps best illustrate the growing asymmetry in warfare Internet technology increasingly underpins both our military and economic strength But in turn this reliance on information technology has created new vulnerabilities Those wishing to cause us harm no longer need an industrial complex to marshal deadly force Advanced weapon systems like a fifth generation fighter or a carrier battle group require major investments in research development and production and a significant technological base In contrast cyber capabilities have lower barriers to entry A small number of highly trained programmers using off the shelf equipment can develop quite destructive tools and deploy them to great effect This cyber threat is maturing in two dimensions To date we have primarily seen cyber tools that have been used to exploit information or to disrupt networks We're only beginning to see cyber tools that can be used to cause physical effects But tools that can cause physical destruction are out there The cyber threat is also intensifying in a second dimension Presently the highest levels of cyber capabilities reside primarily with nation states But because our military power provides a strong deterrent most nation states have no more interest in conducting a destructive cyber attack against us than they do in conducting a conventional military attack The risk for them is too great So even though nation states are the most capable actors They are the least likely to initiate a destructive attack at least in current circumstances Terrorist groups however have no such hesitation With few assets to strike back at they are hard or impossible to deter If a terrorist group gains a disruptive or a destructive cyber capability We have to assume they will strike with little hesitation So in cyber we have a window of opportunity to act before the most malicious actors acquire the most destructive technologies We need to continue moving aggressively to protect all of our critical networks Our military networks, our government networks and the networks that support our critical infrastructure The bottom line is that in the cyber arena as well as the other asymmetrics threats All require us not to become complacent with our conventional military superiority Just as World War I showed the obsolescence of cavalry and World War II the battleship We may be surprised at how rapidly our current state of the art systems are overcome by developments that we cannot foresee today Let me conclude by saying that in predicting the procedure I proceed cautiously I don't have a crystal ball I do agree with Yogi Berra But I also believe that we can make informed judgments about the future of war by looking beyond specific scenarios To the underlying trends of warfare and the historical forces that drive them The three trends that I have just described the increasing access to lethality across the threat spectrum The longer duration of warfare and the growing prevalence of asymmetric threats pose challenges to our projection of power They are each in different ways the result of our entry into a new era of warfare One driven primarily by the overlay of the information age atop the industrial and atomic revolutions They can and must inform our defense planning What we need to do at this juncture in this fiscal environment is to take the long view about what strategic trends are important Which brings us back to Frank Buckles In his lifetime he saw firsthand the impact of the industrial age on warfare in World War I He witnessed the dawning of the atomic age during and after World War II And he lived to be a participant in the information age The 16 year old farm boy who fought in the first World War and survived the second To see the impact of each of these revolutions in warfare During this same period Frank Buckles also witnessed an extraordinary series of US military innovations From biplanes to UAVs, from machine guns to precision guided weapons, from telegraphs to satellites Buckles watched these innovations help our forces maintain and expand their edge over our adversaries Now the challenge for us is to navigate our nation's fiscal circumstances without disrupting the capabilities of the world's most effective fighting force We need to make the right judgments about the nature of our future security environment We need to invest in the right capabilities and force structure that address trends in warfare that I have just outlined And we need to relentlessly adapt our technology and our doctrine as threats evolve and mature If we're able to do these things we'll ensure our forces are ready for the future of war Thank you We'll take questions and so please indicate the secretary is going to field them himself But identify who you are We're going to pass the hard ones to John We need somebody down in the front Good morning, thank you for your comments My name is Paula Stern and I came to hear about the future of war But I came away from your comments to ask you on behalf of one of my clients Which is the National Center for Women and Information Technology To address the personnel issue in the information age You emphasized particularly in your third trend This increasingly important trend regarding America's preparation for the future in defending our nation Can you address please the ability to access in our citizenry The adequate numbers in quality and diverse thinking for the information age Specifically we had the National Foreign Defense Language Fellowships years ago when it came to the Soviet Union Do we need something like that from Department of Defense to assure that we have the adequate capability And numbers and in quality and diversity of thinking to design those forces that you described Going back to just the kind of historical sweep I think the implication of your question is right is that as we've moved through each of these revolutions In military and industrial affairs the importance of trained people has grown When you move from the industrial age to the atomic age it grew When you move from the atomic age to the information age it's grown still farther And I think indeed it doesn't go too far to say that the qualitative edge that our military enjoys today Is largely due to the quality of our people Our equipment is great too but at the end of the day if you don't have the trained people to operate it It won't be effective Going to more precisely your question I do think we need to focus on how do we make sure that we are able to continue to bring the right trained people in Or the people trained in the right fields into our military And cyber is certainly a critical one The Cyber Command National Security Agency, the Homeland Security Department Other agencies are very much focused on that At DOD we've set up exchanges with industry We're looking at innovative programs with the National Guard and Reserve Where we might be able to utilize people who with their day job is in the information technology industry We might try and bring them into that field specifically in DOD rather than just a more general recruiting So we need to look at that And then finally I'd say a role that DOD I think can play more generally is broader than just people in training In cyber security I think is similar to the role DOD played with high performance computing There's an important defense needs for high performance computing But obviously has much broader societal impacts And what DOD was able to do was seed some of the research and accelerate some of the research And I think in cyber it could be the same We'll be a fraction of the research in R&D but I think if we focus it appropriately we can help accelerate And maintain our competitive edge in this critical field Hi I'm Hank Gaffney from CNA I hear as you speak about all this future warfare and warfare all over the world And all these adversaries nobody ever specifies those adversaries They're quite finite actually Plus the fact that two state wars have just about disappeared as you said Conventional wars, internal wars are going down at a very rapid rate as shown by all the studies So it sounds like there's a lot of exaggeration here because when you come down to it What do you got North Korea which is collapsing and starving China which is embedded in the world economy Iran, Hezbollah which some have described as the biggest threat since the Soviet Union And of course a big problem in Mexico And of course the terrorists who are wildly dispersed at this moment How do you corral in all the work you do within defense To avoid exaggerations and be more specifics about the situations, adversaries that we have to face Well I think the thrust of my remarks went in the opposite direction of where you're going I think that our ability to predict in the way you're trying to do has shown itself to be a failure time and time again The statements that you just made could have been made a decade ago You would have said well China has problems, North Korea is the principal threat but they're starving And then we went on and fought Iraq and Afghanistan without anticipating We have as Secretary Gates said we have a perfect record If you look I'd say a year out from most of the conflicts that we've gotten involved in There may be one or two exceptions, you would have had no idea we were going to be in them a year before they happened So I think it's a very difficult proposition to try and do your defense planning Based on specific scenarios that you lined out Outline, I think that what you have to do is more along the lines of what I've said You have to assess what kind of capabilities do you think we might need, what kind of threats might we face if the conflicts appear And how do we develop capabilities to counter those threats I don't see your alternative really is workable Thank you Mr. Secretary, Don Lauren from the Tory group Thank you for joining us this morning, thank you for your use of service to the nation I think your analysis is excellent, the trends are right on the mark Good comments, there are many obstacles to executing a plan to address those trends And the two that jump out are extremely burdensome and bureaucratic acquisition process That could take as long as 15 years from concept development To actually producing a piece of kit and getting it out there for use by our forces Many milestones along the way, lots of decisions, lots of influence from Capitol Hill Many many factors that require us to take excessive amounts of time to produce pieces of kit The second I think would also be funding with respect to R&D And rapid fielding for the type of equipment, the type of counter strategies that are required to address your trends So what do you see on the horizon for the Department of Defense to address those two major obstacles To executing a strategy to plan against your trends I mean I agree with your description of the obstacles and the difficulties of the acquisition process And we are trying to address those, we're trying to in particular break out the information technology world as different In terms of how you ought to acquire things from the major end item weapon system A major milestone process that we use The cute little example I use is it takes us on average 81 months To field an IT system and Apple field the iPhone in 24 months Well it takes me 24 months to get a budget approved for a system So it's not really fair that Steve Jobs gets an iPhone and I get a budget It's not the same But and then we have some broader efforts to see if we can just fundamentally attack the paradigm for manufacturing technology Change by an order of magnitude the time, now that's a long running project I'm not sure we're going to see immediate results from that But with all that said with acknowledging the challenges of that Those challenges have existed for decades and we still have the best military in the world So as much as they exist for us in general they're worse for other people So in that sense it's a relative game that you're playing here And we need to make sure that we're able to at least stay ahead Is that I think is a goal but the longer run goal is to fundamentally improve the system We go all the way in the back behind you I'm sorry I'm Robert Cherett of International Investor Representing a little bit more the business and financial interest in communities especially I'm glad you brought up cyber war because we have been hearing some anecdotal evidence that Some of the attacks that have been launched against the business communities have been reciprocal nature From their understanding at least some of these investigations The countries that have launched these attacks are claiming that they themselves have been the victims of attacks launched by our government Can you tell us has the Defense Department been probing or launching any cyber attacks on other nations just to see how weak or strong their defenses are? As I indicated the U.S. is more dependent on information technology for both its security and its economy As a consequence the focus of our efforts is on defending our networks I think we've done a reasonable job in the last couple of years in terms of increasing the strength of our military networks We're working with Homeland Security on a plan that will extend protection to our government networks And we're at the first stages working with Homeland Security of looking at what kinds of protections that we can offer critical infrastructure as well By that I mean transportation power grid and so on At the end of the day the U.S. is the most dependent on I.T. and we need to act that way My question is based on the last question that was asked It sort of tells you that your notion pushes you on the one hand to a very responsive acquisition system very quickly procured Things like I.E.D. where you field them very quickly to become obsolete very quickly as the threat evolves and you have to go off and get new things But the other sort of interpretation of the future you laid out is that you're looking for programs like the next B-52 Something that is infinitely reconfigurable very adaptable to very different kinds of missions and stays in the inventory for sort of 50 or 60 years And as you start to think about how you want to you know reconfigure the DOD and re-equip the DOD Are you thinking more in terms of solutions that are like the B-52 where you can apply them to everything Or are you thinking in terms of more like lots of very quickly procured point solutions that depend that are responsive to the threats as they evolve when they happen I don't see how you could choose between those two I think you're going to have to have to do both and how much of each you do is going to depend on your assessment of the threat and the trends that I laid out I think in some cases with you know certainly with bombers we've kept them far longer than we expected to But we've modernized them several times over with aircraft carriers sort of a similar story with other things as you said Whether it's communications gear, cyber equipment, some counter IED technology you have to have a much faster replacement rate I just think the challenge is to define which things fit in which category I don't think you can but I don't think you can go to a one size fits all approach Let me go to the side here This is just to make the people with the microphones run My name is Nathan Taves from the Center for Justice and Peace Building And you've talked about the weakness of not being able to predict where conflicts and where we're going to be fighting in the future But all the solutions that are being talked about here are how we can continue to fight and be on the defensive or the offensive However it may be and thus continuing to keep making the same mistake of not being able to predict where those are So why aren't we putting more energy into trying to figure out where those conflicts might be Instead of more technology into continuing to protect ourselves from the same mistakes that we might make Am I being clear? Yeah, although I think I'd answer a little bit along a different line We are investing, we have very large investments in the intelligence arena both open source and less open approaches And we do try and do the best we can and hopefully we'll get better I think to pivot off your question a little bit, I think the stronger approach though than to try and predict them Which as I suggested I think is going to be very difficult to get much more successful than we've been I do think we might have more success in preventing conflicts And that means more front end investment that's more heavily state department focused Or it's a partnership between state and defense and things like security assistance, economic development, improvements in governance And the hope would be is that you would head off crises before they reach the stage where the U.S. was needing to deploy military forces That you've addressed the problems in advance, that's a little bit different than predicting them It's more looking across the scope of the challenges you face identifying the ones that might become cauldrons of conflict And not necessarily try to identify which is going to be the conflict but try and address the panoply of them And bring them all back down from a boil so that we won't have to as I say deploy military forces I think I should add though, I think that is going to be a particular challenge in the fiscal environment that we face Because as I indicated defense is clearly going to be part of overall reduction in government spending But there's generally strong constituencies for defense spending, for the kinds of security assistance, economic development spending That I think is critical to that prophylactic impact that I was talking about I think the constituencies are much weaker and they may suffer in a fiscal tightening that we're in Let me go back Honor de Borgrave, Mr. Secretary, CSIS, adding to your dramatic examples of what happened in the last century From the time the Germans were dropping bombs by hand from biplanes in World War I until we dropped the big one on Hiroshima It was only 28 years So my question is how long do you think it will be before we move into something that could be called robotic warfare I mean it's hard to say, as you just suggested things have moved faster than people generally project at the time So I think with robotics, I think with cyber, I think possibly with things like composite materials, with fuel cells All of those are potentially revolutionary technologies I think at least some of them, maybe not all of them, will move faster than we anticipate And so I think our planning needs to try and take account of that And we should try and be at the outer edge of this development rather than waiting and seeing I can't give you a timeline, but I think we need to plan with the anticipation that we don't know what the timeline is But whatever it is, it's likely to be faster than anything we had projected to my right Thank you. My name is Nike Qin with the voice of America at Chinese service. Thank you so much My question is regarding the US arms sales to Taiwan is one of the most sticky points between the relations of the United States and China But however the administration has faced a huge pressure from the Congress to push toward such sale and to abide by the Taiwan Relations Act So I would like to get your take on the upgrade of F-16AB and the sale of F-16 fighters And if I could get a timeline of that, that would be great. Thank you I think where you're going is the underlying relationship between the United States and China And we just recently had a visit. Admiral Mullen hosted his counterpart from China And Admiral Mullen is hoping to reciprocate that visit to China And we think that that will help build up the relationship between the two militaries as we've built up the economic and diplomatic interaction between the two nations As you indicated, there are always going to be issues between the two great nations where there are disagreements I think the challenge is going to be to maintain a positive relationship going forward despite those agreements And I think that the kinds of steps that have been taken most recently suggest that we are at least taking some small steps down that path on the aisle Mike Wheeler, Institute for Defense Analysis Thank you Mr. Secretary for your very cogent comments My question is triggered by what Admiral Denny Blair testified on two weeks ago His first appearance since he left the office of DNI And he was advocating creation of Title 60 to reflect the reality that the clandestine service covert operations and the military department special operations are increasingly integrated as an arm of warfare My question isn't so much Title 60 but it's where this all is going Do you see this as another strategic trend which is going to affect how the United States conducts warfare and perhaps as warfare conducted against it Not only at the low end of the spectrum but potentially at the high end of the spectrum as well I guess I wouldn't put it no and I think the split between Title 10 and Title 50 is I don't think I would put it in a strategic trend That's a U.S. construct That's the split that we have between our intelligence functions and our military functions You're always going to have seams and you're always going to find situations when you have a legitimate choice to choose either And you have to set up a construct for how you're going to make the choice between using intelligence and using military assets I agree with Admiral Blair that I think we could improve that construct particularly as we get into newer forms of warfare I think it's probably too far to think that we as with anything that you're going to eliminate the seam You can move it, you can make the criteria by which you choose clear but at the end of the day you will not be able to eliminate the seam You won't be able to eliminate the necessity at the end of the day for the president or others to make those choices Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Saraya Sadeed. I'm the Executive Director of Healthy Afghan Children I just want to know is that given the fact that there's a ghost war going on in Afghanistan and the conventional wars are obsolete What would be the next step that United States would take in Afghanistan? Thank you Well I mean I think we're in the midst of the beginning of the next step The general Petraeus will make recommendations in the very near future about how to implement the phase drawdown that the president announced almost 18 months ago I think he'll it will be as as the secretary and the president have talked about will be conditions based It will depend on judgments about the strength of the Taliban about the progress in terms of the capabilities of the Afghan national security forces And the ability of the Afghan government to take an increasingly larger role in the security function So I think that that shift will start very soon and will progress over the next couple of years to that full transition that's projected for 2014 Good morning Mr. Secretary. Paul Sullivan, USEC. You discussed in your talk the need to balance the agility and flexibility for future wars that you just don't know how they're going to start And then you have to balance that against the long term 10 year, 12 year wars. Those are conflicting force structures and organizational challenges Do you foresee any changes in either in any of the military departments or in the DOD organization to facilitate the rapid or flexible balancing of those two conflicting concepts? I guess in the thrust of my comments was that it's I think you're right that the high end near peer type preparation is quite different than the lower end counter insurgency There's some overlaps in terms of lift and intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets but a lot of it is different What I guess what I've been was trying to do with the thrust of my comments was to say I don't I think you can decide which of those two you want to emphasize I don't think you can eliminate either I don't think you can go to the extreme as I think some have suggested that we should just abandon one or the other I don't think that's possible I think it's going to it's going to be less satisfying than that it's going to be a matter of emphasis rather than than choice Gene Proknoa, Delight, you suggested areas we're going to have to add funds and invest in in terms of asymmetric warfare cyber place to work on to spend more money and longer durations How about the flip side? How can we afford that? What things can we end? What missions can we end? How are we going to get the cost savings to fund those kind of needed investments? That's one of those questions that makes it to the deputy it only goes to the deputy and doesn't get either either side of me doesn't answer that I mean we've laid out a process that we're trying to do do exactly that I mean obviously the first choice of everyone is to try and gain further efficiencies The effort Secretary Gates led over the last year yielded 178 billion dollars largely in reductions in overhead headquarters systems at the lower end of need I think we can find more in that presidents laid out a goal of $400 billion be frank with you I don't think we're going to find $400 billion of pure efficiencies By pure efficiencies I mean things where you're able to do the same thing or the same mission just for less for less resources fewer people and so on I think there's some of that out there you know for example cloud computing offers some potential in that regard you can get same or greater capability with less equipment with fewer support But that that's going to be limited so we're going to have to I think we're going to have to do things like make the choices that we're talking about with the prior gentleman is you know which end of the spectrum do you want to emphasize Not to the exclusion of the other but which end are we going to emphasize I think that there's some important judgments there I think we're going to if as in all the government departments we're going to get into some very politically contentious things Things that we would say are not justified on the merits but seem to have strong constituencies so the justification of the merit doesn't rise to the level that we'd fund them And I think a little bit the debate on the alternate engine presages that I mean the department's judgment that it is not worth the $2.9 billion investment up front in this fiscal environment for a very very uncertain benefit Over frankly decades but that there's a constituency for that and so we're it's a very very difficult challenge I think we're going to see many more of those and we're going to have to make those hard choices if we're going to reduce defense spending I mean I think in the 90s for a variety of reasons we oversteered on privatization we thought it applied to everything and so we in a relatively across the board way we pushed all sorts of functions out I think without appropriate consideration for whether those functions should be retained in the government or whether they should be privatized I think over the past couple of years that we've tried to rebalance to make those judgments and to pull things into the government where such as acquisition oversight where we think that it really there really is a government function or where you need a certain critical mass of expertise in the government just to be a smart buyer just to be able to bring value to the government in the so I think we need to make those judgments going forward so it's going to have to be more nuance There's not I don't think you're going to see a big shift to privatize that you saw in the 90s I think that you know there was at the beginning a couple of years ago there was more of a pull to bring things in I think that's it's rebalanced a little bit I think targeting things that we want to bring in but we're trying again not to do it and trying to do it in a based on an analysis of the merits of the individual function rather than do it across the board when either you're bringing things in or pushing things out Thank you Mr. Secretary. My name is Tiffany Chaun. I'm with Secure World Foundation. Many of the evolving threats you mentioned here especially in the space and cyber environments defy classic deterrence theory and strategies. What is the defense department doing to develop and divine its so-called red lines and the information age and how can we make these clear to our adversaries? I mean it's an interesting question as to how deterrence theory applies in in these areas such as cyber right I mean the in cyber attribution is is enormously difficult and I wrote in an article earlier that the missile age you know missiles come with return addresses so you pretty much know who launched it cyber attacks it's not nearly as clear so and then as I suggested in the in the remarks you may be facing terrorist or criminal groups who have no assets to to deter so you know the classic deterrence theory which was represented by you know mutually assured destruction doesn't doesn't work very well if you don't have attribution and the other side doesn't have assets. There is a different though theory of deterrence that you could that can apply here which is denial of benefit if you're able to strengthen your defenses in a way in cyber and other areas such that it's it's either you you've so raised the costs of an attack that it makes it less interesting and the adversary goes on to other areas that it's I think that that is indeed the path that we're going to have to proceed down is we're going to have to be able to deny benefits. Two attackers in in in cyber let's see the winner is why I skipped over you so I think they thought. Thank you sir. Let's achieve a Japanese Embassy on the budgetary aspect of warfare. I was told the other day that if you don't have enough money to spend yourself let your adversary spend and go into a shopping spree so that it will leave them into bankruptcy and it's called the cost imposing strategy. And I think that Star Wars resembles that now if you look at the huge deficit that your government is suffering today and if you look at who's buying all these treasury bonds. Do you see any conspiracy somewhere in there. Yeah by most of the people in this room. No. The I mean the theory that you said I mean it went in the in the 80s and 90s that that theory is called competitive strategies is the idea of imposing costs on your adversaries that you know Star Wars is one air defenses is another. I think you certainly have to to you know look at what the relative costs are. But at the end of the day the primary judgment is what is needed for US national security and and how do we afford that and we have to balance the fiscal needs that I started to talk with. But I don't think we cannot buy things because we don't we don't think the relative cost versus the adversary is in the in the right balance. I think we're going to have to try and meet the national security needs within the fiscal constraints we have and it's that's the core set of judgments rather than than trying to play a game with comparative costs. One last question. Sure. They're they're paying for the ballroom. Brian Burridge Finn Mechanica UK. Mr. Secretary in addressing the threats that emanate from the trends in warfare that you've outlined. What are your assumptions and what are your expectations of allies and international partners. That's I mean that's a great question. I mean the we obviously have enormous fiscal challenges and we're we're in the midst of trying to wrestle with them. I would say Europe is probably a little bit ahead of us in in in that regard and has already started to make hard decisions. I think our our expectation and and and hope is that as our allies and international partners wrestle with their equally tough fiscal challenges that they will keep in mind the importance of the security dimension and ensure that the core functions and missions that the the NATO Alliance and the other partnerships that we have are protected even as they do so with with the devoting fewer resources. Let's thank Secretary.