The Eaker Institute
for Aerospace Concepts
"Transforming the
military to meet the challenges of the 21st century "
The Honorable Stephen A. Cambone
Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
March 20, 2002
Dr. Stephen Cambone: Well, good morning everyone. I have a
handful of notes here which I’m happy to take you all through,
and I will try to not take all of the time that’s available,
because I’m sure that there are some questions that you want to
ask.
When we came into office, Secretary Rumsfeld was given a
singular charge by the president, and it was given to him
directly. And the president asked the secretary to get about the
business of transforming the U.S. military in order to enable it
to do two things. One was to be prepared for any of the
contingencies that might arise in the near-term, but equally to
prepare the force to meet the kinds of situations it might
confront in the years to come. And the president did so in the
firm belief that we were seeing an underlying change in the way
that wars would be fought, and the means that people would use
to fight them, and that the American military had to make itself
ready to take on that challenge.
And so the secretary, some of you may know, he and I came
into the building together on, I think it was the 21st
of January, just a little over fourteen months ago. And from day
one, he set himself the task of going about meeting the charge
that the president had given to him. And it has been, in its
way, a quite busy year, and a great deal of the activity that is
associated with transformation has, I think, gone in large
measure unnoticed because it is the work that is necessary to
bring about the kind of lasting change that we are seeking to
bring to the American military. And by that I mean we have spent
our time doing the following, and let me just sort of tick them
off for you and you can begin, I think, to appreciate what I
mean.
One of the first tasks we turned ourselves to was remodeling
the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. And we took a good
deal of time through this part of the year, that is the January,
February, March, April time frame last year, and brought that to
fruition here about a month or two ago when Secretary Aldridge
initiated the new Missile Defense Agency. We set up a new
process for reviewing programs and so forth, and we hope we have
set that program and that agency on a track which will yield a
much more flexible organization that’s capable of meeting the
kinds of risk we face in the future.
Then we took on the task of reorganizing our space
activities, and in particular, space activity and organization
within the Air Force. The Air Force is now the executive agent
for space within the Department. It has restructured its
internal apparatus. We dual-hatted the Undersecretary of the Air
Force, both the Undersecretary of the Air Force and the Director
of the National Reconnaissance Office, in an effort to try to
bring together our space activities in a way that would make
sense over time. As a result of his work on the Missile Threat
Commission and also on the Space Commission, the Secretary came
into office persuaded that central to his being able to
accomplish the things that the president asked him to do, he had
to establish a close working relationship with the DCI, the
Director of Central Intelligence. And it is certainly the case
that George Tenet and Secretary Rumsfeld work very closely with
one another, every day, on the issues that matter, and
particularly those related to the capabilities needed to support
transformation.
About this time last year, we began drafting fiscal guidance.
We began the process of taking a handful of studies that had
been conducted and turning them into what came to be the Defense
Planning Guidance for ‘03, and the fiscal guidance in that
planning and the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) came to
fruition in what amounts to, I think – I’ve lost count – I think
it’s five budgets of one kind or another that we have done since
we entered. There was the one that was proposed, and there was
the amendment, and there was the supplemental, then there was
the ‘03, then there’s another supplemental, and now there’s ‘04
– I think that’s five. So this has been a process in which in
near real-time, notions that were embedded in the DPG, and then
were given public expression, in large measure, in the
quadrennial defense review, which we issued about August of last
year. Those notions were being translated even as we were
working them into those successive budgets.
Then there was the Nuclear Posture Review, which we finished
at the end of last year, and we are now busily in the process of
completing the DOG for ‘04. So that, and that’s not all of it; I
mean the services have gone through a great deal of activity as
well as the defense agencies. There’s an underlying set of
decisions and documentation that’s been done, which has given
the direction for the department.
In addition to that, we did some things in the process side
of the house, with respect to the planning and budgeting
process, by combining the budget and program reviews as a way of
making certain that programs that people thought were a good
idea were not underpriced, and therefore in the out-years,
create a big hole in the budget. And we’re trying to get and
have succeeded in getting legislation that will allow us to
reduce the size of the infrastructure of the department in a way
that rationalizes the infrastructure to the actual size of the
force we have and the needs we have for that force.
And, oh, by the way, while doing all that, beginning on the
11th of September, we conducted war half a globe
away.
In doing all this, and in transforming ourselves, we’ve got,
I think, one great challenge that we are trying to confront, and
I’ll give you a thumbnail of the approach that we’ve taken to
try to address that particular challenge – that challenge being
surprise. I think it is the view of those in the department, at
the senior level of the department, that surprise is the
hallmark of strategic affairs in this decade, and has been for
some time. Mention was made of the Rumsfeld Commission Report;
in that report, the commission put forth a proposition that if
warning time was what we relied upon in order to adjust our
policies and our programs and so forth, and that if you thought
you had a lot of warning time, you were wrong on both counts.
The likelihood of having a lot of warning of surprise was
shrinking, and the likelihood that you would have no time at all
was growing. And indeed, we have been surprised.
What is it that generates that kind of reality? Well, we live
in a global environment. It is a global marketplace; one can buy
or acquire in one fashion or another the goods, the people, the
expertise that’s needed to create all kinds of asymmetric
threats, weapons of mass destruction of one kind or another,
cyber-threats, that we confront every day. And when you take all
of that and put it together either in the context of the kind of
non-state actor that we have seen with Al Qaeda, or you put it
in the hands of states who may be hostile to the United States
in a territorial sense, one ought to anticipate that they will
try to use those capabilities to surprise us or our friends and
allies for what seems to me to be a very plausible reason –
which is, if they can surprise, shock and dismay us, and cause
us to take a moment and pause and wonder what to do next, they
may be able to consolidate the gains that they wish to make and
increase the price upon us for protecting our own interests.
So surprise is a critical element or feature of the new
regime in which we live. And so how do you plan for surprise?
There’s sort of the conundrum. I mean, nearly by definition, you
can’t do that. Unless, of course, you have in front of your mind
every day, as you sit down to do this, that indeed you are
preparing yourself to be surprised. And so what we said was we
had to shift the basis of the way we thought about our planning;
we had to let go of what had been a classic threat-based
approach to planning, wherein you had, during the course of the
Cold War, and quite frankly, even into the period between World
War I and World War II, a notion where you looked at orders of
battle, you looked at territorial dispositions, you looked at
lines of advance, you looked at rates of logistics flows, and
you could kind of reduce this in many respects to a
near-mathematical certainty, which, of course, is where we ended
up in the 1980s in the context of the Cold War when we all went
through those bean-counting war games. I mean, that’s sort of
how that all turned itself.
Well, if you live in a world in which surprise is not going
to go on a linear advance, it’s not going to do things in the
way that you anticipate, how do you prepare? Well, we said what
we needed to do was go to what we called a capabilities-based
approach to planning. And we came to the realization that in
thinking about the future and putting together a portfolio of
capability, what we had to be conscious of was the fact that we
would know less who – and maybe even when – who would be a
hostile power, and when they might act against American or
allied friendly interests. Then we could be more certain about
how they might go about doing it. And so, when you sort of shift
your focus from the who and when, specifically, to the how, and
open your mind to those prospects, you begin to ask yourself,
given the weapons of mass destruction, given the cyber-threats,
given the ways in which asymmetric means of warfare have become
very common, how do you prepare yourself for that?
And so what you’re seeing unfold in successive budgets now,
is an effort to come to grips with precisely that form of
thinking, and to bring to bear a portfolio of capabilities that
will allow us to respond, deter, defend across a wide range of
possibilities without locking ourselves into a specific threat.
What does that get us to? Well, what we’d like to do when
we’re done, is be capable of coming from our peacetime or our
status quo or steady state – people keep trying to figure out
what the right word there is, but your day-to-day posture – and
be able to transition from that rapidly, quickly, into an
effects-based campaign, whose purpose is to swiftly defeat an
adversary, to the point, if necessary, of bringing about a
change in their regime. And you’ve heard the secretary talk
about this repeatedly, and it’s going to take time to get from
where we are today in our approach, to that kind of
capability-based strategy, because as they say, you don’t know
where, necessarily, you’re going to be engaged, and you don’t
know necessarily when, and you don’t know necessarily the form
of the conflict in which you’re going to be engaged. But you do
know you want to have an effects-based approach that goes after
the capabilities of your adversary to pose a danger to you and
to others, and to try to bring that conflict to as swift a
conclusion as possible.
Now what did it take, did we think, to do that? Well, we’ve
sort of surveyed our capabilities, and we focused, I think as
you know, on six broad operational areas, wherein we thought if
we concentrated our efforts, we could bring about the kind of
transformation for the force that we thought necessary, and one,
as I said a moment ago, that would persist – that is, to say
that this transformation activity is not done over a period of
time, it’s a mind-set. Again, if we’re going to go back to being
capabilities-based, then you’re going to have to be thinking
about surprise on a daily basis, you don’t do transformation,
put it on a shelf and say "we’re done," relax and go about your
other business; you have to constantly go back and remind
yourself of where you are. Are there better ways to do things,
are there different threats out there that we need capability to
confront, and so on...
But it can’t be open-ended; you’ve got to have some boundary
conditions, and so we set those boundary conditions with respect
to these areas of operational capability.
First and foremost, expressed in military jargon, it was
protecting the critical bases of operations. What that means in
plain English is protect the United States, protect the bases of
our troops and our capabilities abroad, both those that are
permanently stationed and based and those that are deployed, and
then contribute to the ability of our friends and allies to
protect their own territory and forces.
But unless you can protect your own base of operations, and
that’s not only territorial, but it’s societal, it’s the cyber,
it’s financial, it’s all of those instruments of the country’s
capability which are now, as we have seen, prey to attack. I
mean, remind yourself that the attack on the World Trade Center
knocked a trillion dollars off the American economy. That’s a
sizeable blow. So this is a serious undertaking, and therefore,
we have to get better in our ability to protect those critical
bases.
Second, connected with that, of course, is assuring our
information systems. You all know the problem you face every day
with viruses and access to information on the World Wide Web and
the network of systems you are a part of, and they are clearly
vulnerable, and we are, at the same time, highly dependent upon
them. Indeed, our ability to conduct the kind of operations that
you see unfolding in Afghanistan are heavily dependent upon the
ability of our people to network down at the level of E6s. We’re
not talking about the senior leadership talking to one another;
we are talking about people networked across the world,
literally, engaged in networked operations, focused on a target
in Afghanistan. This is a phenomenal thing that’s happened, but
if you don’t assure those systems, that they are not corrupted,
that the information on them is accurate, that you can have
access when you need it, and so forth, we’re not going to be
able to do that.
Then, having put our forces abroad, we have to be able to
sustain them while they’re there, and as everyone knows –
strategies, logistics – we have to find a way to make our force
more sustainable. And that reaches into many, many different
[areas]. You all know here, what’s the biggest problem – water.
Moving water is one of the biggest problems that the military
faces. Second to that, perhaps, is ammunition, I may be wrong
about that, but it comes a close second.
So how do you find a way to reduce that logistics tail? How
do you make each round that you fire more effective, how do you
make the force able to move more quickly? Do you trade out
gasoline – I mean, bulk things like gasoline, which is very
difficult? How do you get energy to move systems? There is no
answer to that question today, and there may not be an answer
for it for ten years, and there may not be one for twenty years,
but you do know that if you’re going to operate in the kind of
environment we can see around the world, we’re going to have to
solve the problem.
Fourth, was denying our adversaries sanctuary. There we
thought it was absolutely essential that we be able to, in the
areas of interest to us, be able to persistently surveil and
examine what was taking place, in order to be able to
effectively bring military power to bear. And most people think
about this in terms of Global Hawks floating around in the sky,
and Predators, and so on and so forth, but the special forces
people who are on the ground provide the kind of persistent
surveillance and linkage between what the people on the ground
can do, and what the aircraft flying overhead can provide.
Let me take you back up to the information systems that
conduct all that information back and forth are absolutely
essential that we figure out how to do this. Related to that, of
course, is – oh, and by the way, on the sanctuary issue, it is
not merely a technical problem – we have to figure out how to
separate the terrorist or the bad actor from the innocent
civilian. The issue of trying to make certain that when you
identify a target and you go after it, you do so in a way that
does not put others at risk unnecessarily or give an adversary
the chance to hide in ways that you can’t affect his behavior.
Space systems are important as well, obviously; we move a lot
of communication through space, there’s a lot of important
national security capabilities that are located there, and I
think you may have seen Admiral Wilson’s testimony just
yesterday. You know, people think about space, and think it’s
secure because everything’s up there and it’s hard to get to. A,
it’s not hard to get to, in the sense that there is
plenty of technology available to put payloads in orbit, but
that’s maybe the hard way to go after it. Ground links, ground
stations, the fiber optic cables that connect the people to
those systems, I mean those are all part of a space system, and
one has to keep that in mind and not focus only on those assets
that you might find in orbit.
And then, lastly, leveraging information technology is
absolutely essential, and if we don’t leverage that information
technology in ways that gives us the information systems and
networks that are secure, you’ve got to have a way to organize,
collate, take the information, use it, return it. One of the
important things you learn is that feedback loops are essential.
Taking it all in, using it, [and then] not telling the system
what you did with it, or what the effect was of your use of it,
doesn’t help the rest of the system learn. Now, you all know how
much code you need to make that happen. Well, we’ve got to find
a way to allow those information systems to be far more
effective than they are today.
So there’s a portfolio there then of capabilities along those
six areas that, I think, we need to be able to develop, and that
takes me back to the point which, if we are able to do that, can
we move swiftly, rapidly into an effects-based operation,
leading to a swiftly-conducted campaign that denies adversaries
their objectives, and assures the achievement of ours. I mean,
that’s kind of the strategic objective or goal that we would
like to be able to obtain.
Now let me just take a minute to close with the "so what," I
mean, there’s a lot of theoretical stuff there. What does that
mean in sort of a practical sense, especially for an association
like this? And I would say, by the way, the same things to the
Association of the United States Army or the Navy League or any
other organization who is interested in the six problems. And
let me just touch on four, and we can talk about many others.
If surprise is a problem, then warning becomes an important
tool, capability, idea, mind-set, thought. And again, you see me
searching for the word because what does it mean to warn? And
it’s something we probably have to learn again – what’s
important, what isn’t important, where in the world do we need
to concentrate our assets, what is the activity that you are
seeing that gives you concern? How do you separate intention
from capability? We spent a long time doing that... The trickier
part is to combine intention and capability and say "I now have
a risk that I have to address in some fashion."
How do you take the technology to do that in a human mind,
which needs to apply itself to the information that you get, and
produce a result that isn’t Chicken Little? I mean, if you run
in everyday and say, "there’s a problem, there’s a problem,
there’s a problem," after a while, you don’t hear it anymore,
you all know that, and so how do you come to grips with this
question of warning?
And this is not a military problem – this is a learning
problem, this is a human factors/human learning problem. How do
we learn, how do we respond to information, and how do you do it
in a way that the analyst and the policymaker then have a
dialogue which is meaningful to both of them? All right, I mean
those of you who have been receivers of intelligence know
sometimes it’s rather difficult to get them to tell you what you
think is important. For those of you who have been analysts, I’m
sure you’ve been frustrated by the inability of the policymaker
to tell you what they want. And so, there’s a culture change
that we have to go through in order to get some idea of what’s
going on there. Obviously, the intelligence associated with the
conduct of the kinds of campaigns we’re talking about is very
different than it used to be; you know, orders of battle and all
that sort of thing. If you’re living in a dynamic world, what is
intelligence in a dynamic environment like that, where things
are changing constantly in front of you?
Third, command and control, communications. I’ve already
touched on this in the context of information, but if you can’t
tie your networked capability together in a way that allows you
to oppose a networked organization on the other side, well then,
you’re not getting the most out of your capability and the
likelihood that you can move swiftly to defeat your adversaries
is that much inhibited.
And last, and this is particularly of interest here, I think,
to this organization, is the issue of precision strike, and this
has been an issue, a concept, a capability that has been
promoted very strongly by the Air Force over the years. But I’d
like to suggest that precision strike – we need to open our
minds on this – it isn’t merely geographical, it isn’t merely
putting ordinance, whether from an aircraft or a cannon or a
ship-based system, a missile, on a particular point on earth.
It’s also about how you do that, in a way – that you have the
effect that you wish to have on your adversaries. So merely
becoming more precise and being able to put more bombs on a
given point on the globe, I mean, it’s an interesting
development and essential, but by itself it isn’t enough. We
have got to be more attentive to the effects that we wish to
have, and in the process, minimize the risk of unintended
consequences that is associated with those kind of strikes.
But, I think as well, this notion of precision is not any
longer merely a military concept. It’s also gotten to be
associated with the other elements of state power. And so our
diplomacy needs to be as precise as our targeting, our financial
activities need to be precisely drawn, and we need to do it in a
way that gathers others in the international community to be a
part of the kind of efforts that are necessary to go after those
who would disrupt the international peace.
And lastly, I would argue to you it is not air-centric. It is
a case that all of the branches of the Armed Forces in a joint
environment need to be able to be precise in what they’re doing
both in time, in space and effect, in order for us to be able to
conduct the kinds of military operations that we think are best
suited to defending the American interests supporting our allies
and our friends abroad, and giving pause – that is to say,
deterring – those who would wish to use aggression for the
purposes of political or territorial gain.
So where does that leave us on the way ahead? We will finish
up the DPG for ‘04, the budget is going in, you will have seen
what we tried to do in the amended budget for ‘02, you will have
seen what is in the ‘03 budget, you will see now what is coming
in the ‘04 budget. You will be the judges in the end – you and
your colleagues, members on the Hill, the public at large – as
to whether or not we have done what we said, which is to put in
place with respect to those six operational goals, a series of
changes over time that will bring us the kind of
capabilities-based force which will permit us to be able to
conduct the kinds of campaigns I described for the purpose, in
the end, not of preventing surprise – you can’t do that – but
deterring those who would attempt to surprise us from making
that effort. And if we’re successful, you know, you’re only
going to see that success taking place over time, in the
behavior of others.
And then, lastly, let me just say this: the senior leadership
of the department took a great deal of time thinking about, in
relation to all of this, the question of risk. I started here by
saying to you that the president gave the secretary a sort of a
dual challenge – you’ve got to meet the near-term threat that we
see, and you’ve got to prepare us for the long-term prospects
that we face. And we need to transform the force to be able, by
the way, to do both, because the near-term is the same place in
time. The near-term today is three years, and in 2006 it will be
in three years, and in 2009 it will be in three years. By the
way, the long-term is 2009.
So you’ve got a situation where this is the kind of rolling
problem, where you have to be able to deal constantly with your
near-term threats, even as you’re anticipating what the far-term
is going to be. And so they said, "let’s seriously consider
whether we have properly managed risk in doing this," and they
put risk into four categories.
One was with respect to force management, optempo. Are we
using our people in a way that is to the greatest effect? Force
tempo. Are too few people trying to do too many things, and have
we found the right balance in skills and the balance between
active and reserve, and do we need to shift the internal balance
of a force in order to be able to operate the kinds of systems
that will come online in 2010, 2012, 2014, because that’s about
as long as it takes to grow, to educate, to train both the
colonels, who you’re going to want to direct this, and the E6s
and 7s, who are going to be the people upon which you are going
to rely. So we have to start thinking about that.
Secondly, what about operational risks? You’ve got some
near-term operational risks. Let’s not forget that there are
some thirty thousand people in Korea, there are other threats in
the Middle East, there are problems elsewhere in the world, we
have to deal with those problems, and our Commanders-in-Chief in
those regions need to have the munitions and the equipment and
the people in order to be able to deter and, if necessary,
defend in those near-term environments.
But at the same time, you can’t take your resources, plow
them into meeting those near-term needs, and still meet your
third risk, which is: are we properly preparing ourselves for
the future challenges that we are going to face? And so, if you
take those three, sort of your force management, which is sort
of the base upon which everything is done, then your near-term
and your operational risks and your future risks, you see a sort
of pure middle structure there that one has to judge, and your
choice of programs, your choice of budget priority, and how you
want to then lastly, in the fourth area of risk, actually
conduct your business as a department. If the department doesn’t
transform the way that it does its business, none of what we’re
talking about is going to happen. You know, we’ve got to find a
way to change internally, how we go about our business. We have
to work very hard to change the relationship with industry in
order to assure that they understand what’s needed, and there
has to be some agreement with the Congress about how we are
going to oversee and manage what is, in fact, a very complicated
activity, that is to say, transforming the military to meet the
challenges of the 21st century.
That, sir, is the substance of what I have this morning, and
I’m more than pleased to take any question you might have.
[Applause]
Q: I’d like to ask you a question with regard to the Space
Commission, which you and the Secretary were very much involved
in, and the challenge of that was to paste together DOD, DCI,
NRO and a host of other, if you will, scope-like organizations.
How is that going so far? Can you give us your assessment?
Dr. Cambone: It’s going swimmingly. With any process, it
takes time, but I can say this: I think that the Secretary of
the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force are
four-square behind the effort to accomplish that small
transformation, that part of a transformation, inside of a
larger effort that we are undertaking here.
Under Secretary Pete Teets has been on board only since
December and he has the responsibility for pulling together the
two halves of our space efforts. He has been very active in
developing the current defense planning guides, he has been very
active in trying to reshape the programs that are being
conducted, so I think we’re in very good shape there.
General Lord has just been sent out to take over the Air
Force’s space activities, and so I think that he is a fellow who
has had a lot of experience with respect to space and will bring
a perspective on it that is terribly important. And overall, I
think, between those four people, and others in the
organization, you will see, again, over time, I mean there’s
this expectation that things will happen very quickly. The
Pentagon’s a big place, lots of things going on in there. Over
time, that will come around to the point where there will grow
within the Air Force, I think, and the department as a whole, a
much greater appreciation for what’s happening in space. And the
current experience is only underscoring how important all that
is.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between
the Space Commission recommendations, and where that stands with
other agencies such as missile defense? How do you see that
evolving?
Dr. Cambone: They are clearly related, but not the same, or
integrated. The Missile Defense Organization, in terms of its
mission, is a bit more narrowly focused. It is intended to be
able to intercept obviously, missiles in all phases of their
flight. They make use of space, but there are clearly other
elements of the program which are ground-based, and so on.
General Kadish has a proposal for his testing-range approach,
and I think that this the kind of activity which obviously
begins to intersect with some of the other aspects of what one
might want to be thinking about in terms of space.
It’s also the case that Pete Aldridge, as the Undersecretary
for Acquisition Technology, in essence, oversees both of those,
so those two programs come together in his office. I think the
establishment of the Missile Defense Agency was an effort to
give to General Kadish and his successors the kind of ability
that was once the hallmark of the NRO alone in terms of its
ability to move technologies around, move people around, without
having to tie specific dollars to specific programs. He needs a
little more flexibility to move his program forward and to
explore those technical opportunities that exist in order to be
able to come forward at any given time, and the Secretary would
say, well, if we need some capability to deploy, Ron Kadish
needs to have been able to go through as much of the technical
choices as he possibly can. So opening up the management
structure for General Kadish was modeled on some of the things
that had been done in the space world, but was not meant to be a
kind of overlay. They remain a separate but related activity.
Q. Is granting the Air Force Title 10 authority in space
still under active consideration?
Dr. Cambone: I don’t know, if you send me a note, I’ll ask. I
don’t know, I’m not recalling how we ended up there. The paper
went back and forth, and I honestly don’t remember, the paper
went up and went down, went up and went down, and I just lost
track. I mean, if you want to send me a note, I can find out
where it got to. I’m sorry, isn’t that awful? That one got by
me.
Q. What changes can we expect to see in the ‘02 and future
guidance?
Dr. Cambone: We didn’t do the ‘02, we’re one year off, so
we’re presently doing the ‘04 guidance, so we are eighteen
months out. The ‘02 guidance was done by the Clinton
Administration and those folks. Let me bring you through it,
because it’s kind of interesting. It’s kind of a big old
document like this [opens fingers], and that wasn’t unique to
‘02. It had been that way for a long time, going back to the
late ‘80s. What had happened was that the document became the
place where services and agencies – by the way, and it’s both, I
mean it’s often times the services who were the ones who are
criticized for this, but the agencies used it as well – as the
place in which they received blessing to go do specific programs
that they wanted to pursue. And it is a document that can be
used for that and it was.
This team came in and said we want to take a different
approach to how we are going to manage the department, and what
we would prefer to do is to use the Defense Planning Guidance as
executive level direction, and so rather than a – I’m not
remembering the page numbers now, but it was 200 pages, whatever
it was in ‘02 – I think the ‘03 guidance was 30 some-odd pages.
So it was intended to say, look, here’s the direction we want to
go in, these are the priorities that we have set. What we want
you to do in the agencies and the services is to come back in
your budget and show us how you have responded to the guidance
you have been given. And so, when I made mention in my remarks
about the change in the planning, programming, and budgeting
process, an important change that got made is we took what had
been two separate reviews, one for the program, that is to say,
the out-year, the program, ‘03 to ‘07, the POM, the Program
Objective Memorandum, which used to be a separate review from
the budget, that is, the FY ‘03 budget, and we said, no, we’ve
got to bring those together because we’ve got to have what
you’re going to do in ‘03 and its tails, if you will – program
and budget played out over the years – so we need to see that.
The ‘04 guidance, then, picks up where ‘03 [left off], or will
pick up because it’s still in draft, and it’s being coordinated.
I want to be clear that it’s not near being done, but it
picks up on that ‘03 guidance, and says, here’s what we did in
‘03, now here are the priorities that flow from in part, what we
learned, in part, what we didn’t have agreement on or we didn’t
think of, or we weren’t able to incorporate in a way that was
appropriate. It will still be an executive-level guidance to the
department for services and agencies now to come in the
August-September-October time frame, and one more time, then, go
through these reviews and you start the process, then, of
trading off one set of investments against the other, given the
guidance that has been agreed to at the level the Secretary, the
Chiefs, the Chairman, the Vice, combatant commands, I mean all
of those folks comment on it, so it is agreed that those are the
priorities for the department. Then you begin to see a big
shift, so it will take the DPG in ‘03, the DPG in ‘04, the DPG
in ‘05, and on I think, because by the time you get to ‘05, you
will be in the ‘07, the ‘12, period of planning. So that’s about
how long it’s going to take, for all of that to sort of settle
itself down and for the programs then to start coming to
fruition.
Q. As you move to capabilities-based planning, are you taking
into account the capabilities of allies that may at some future
point become a threat? And can we really say we’re
"transforming" our air force when in many cases we are not
building new planes at all, but simply bolting new technologies
onto old aircraft?
Dr. Cambone: It’s a fair question. On the first, no, we’re
not looking at the capabilities of our allies and planning
against them. Are we looking at our technical capabilities,
technical capabilities of allied and friendly countries that
find their way out of the United States or out of allied and
friendly hands and into the hands of those who are hostile to
the United States? Yes. But that’s a perfectly reasonable thing
to do, and that’s what the proliferation problem is all about.
So, if I didn’t modify that by saying, you know, those who would
employ those capabilities in a manner hostile to the United
States, its interests, or its friends and allies, I apologize
for that. it’s an important point. And without getting lost in
whether it’s a threat, in that sense, I think what you need to
do is think of threat as the artifact of planning, not as a
present danger that one faces. So the notion about threat-based
planning is that it became a kind of structural approach to how
you thought about your problem, and that’s why I made mention to
orders of battle and what mod[el] tank and what the particular
phase times were. And it got to be very formulaic, quite
frankly.
To look at the capabilities side of the house, it is to say,
yes, potential adversaries have certain equipment, and they have
certain organizations, and so on and so forth, but what are the
combinations that can be put together? What capability does it
give them, and how might they use it, which is kind of a
different approach, I think, to the problem than we had in the
past.
On the issue of what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained, and
are we are just bolting things on – I don’t think that’s
correct, that we are just bolting things on. There is an
impression that unless you get rid of things you aren’t
transforming. That’s not necessarily true. On the other hand,
you can’t do everything that one would anticipate or one could
have imagined wanting to do [without doing so]. So this process
I just described between ‘03. ‘04, ‘05, as the guidance gets
clearer, as the choices become more obvious, as people have to
begin making choices over against the priorities as they emerge,
as opposed to the ones as they existed, you will start to see
those kinds of trades being made. And it’s a process of trying,
it isn’t something that one does overnight.
Now, would you go in and terminate a given program? Sure. And
Secretary Aldridge did, as a matter of fact. He terminated the
Navy Lower Tier Program. Could something have been done
differently with that program? Sure, it has been in the past.
There are ways that you could paper that over, bridge it into
the next year, do all those other kinds of things, but he said
"no, I’m not going to do that, that program doesn’t meet the
kinds of concern I have at the moment, we need to start anew,
and do that differently." So, there are occasions for doing
that. He took the V-22 program and put it back into a test
program, because it wasn’t ready, in his view, for going
forward. So I think that there are cases where we have said no,
we have to start shifting where we’re putting this.
Q. What changes are being made to the acquisition process to
accommodate for near-term threats, surprise and the new thinking
you have shared with us this morning?
Dr. Cambone: Well, I hesitate to walk on Secretary Aldridge’s
turf here, but I think he is the one who has laid down a series
of requirements on those who would propose and manage
acquisition programs. The Missile Defense Organization, again,
is a very interesting example of what that change could mean. It
has, since 1991, been organized around a series of major defense
acquisition programs which were planned, budgeted, and pursued,
and what that tended to do is it tended to lock you into a
specific programmatic approach, often times with a specific set
of contractors, and you found yourself working very hard to take
an activity which is bound to have its ups and downs over a
period of time, and trying to keep it on a trajectory over time.
It tended then to prevent you from ratcheting back that program
because when you put it into that setting, what you’re trying to
do is to get it acquisitioned. So you tend to put more money
against it in order to make sure it gets there, meanwhile,
neglecting some other things that you might otherwise do. So
what we said was no, let’s not do it that way. Let’s instead
organize this as in General Kadish’s proposal, what he wanted to
do in the mid-course, what he wanted to do in the end-game and
so forth. And within that, let me pursue the combinations that
make the most sense, and then let me say that I can take the
capability within those areas, and I can do one of two things
with them. They’re not mutually exclusive, by the way.
One, in the event that there is a requirement for a
near-term, very quick deployment of a capability, I can take
what I have in development, move it into the field for a short
or extended period of time, in order to meet an immediate kind
of threat. On the other hand, if I come to the point where I
think, no, I understand how to do this, I can produce it, I can
deploy it, I can operate it, and I can do it in ways that make
sense, he can bring that forward to the secretary and say, "I
think that this is ready now to be acquired," and therefore it’s
going to the acquisitions system. The third possibility on that,
of course, is that you take some combination of these interim
capabilities, and you never do go ahead and buy hundreds when
you’re persuaded that tens will do the job. So if I think that
I’ve met the near-term threat and I don’t need to spend enormous
sums of money to take that interim capability and turn it into a
full-fledged program, I’m not compelled to do it.
Now, Pete’s talked about that in terms of spiral development.
Others have talked about it in different ways, but the idea is
to try to bring more flexibility into the system, and not get
yourself to the point where you are 20 years into a program
before you see the first unit delivered, or 25 years before you
see the first squadron aircraft, squadron battalion, you know,
actually put together. I mean, that’s a long time in a world
that is moving very, very rapidly. So, one of the hardest things
we’re going to have to confront, and then again, it isn’t going
to happen this year, and it isn’t going to happen next year, and
it’s not going to happen the year after that, but with
persistence and determination it will happen, that acquisition
has got to be adjusted and modified over time.
Again, thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.
