Globally
Engaged: the Air Force into the 21st Century
An Eaker Colloquy on Strategy,
Requirements, and Forces
March 7, 1997
National Press Club
Panelists:
Gen. Michael J. Dugan,
USAF (Ret.)
Former Chief of Staff of the US Air Force
Dr. Philip Gold
Director of the Aerospace 2010 Project, Discovery Institute
Gene Myers
Senior civilian doctrine analyst, Air Force Doctrine Center
Col. John A. Warden,
USAF, (Ret.)
Air power theorist and author of The Air Campaign
Moderator:
Phil Lacombe
Managing Director of the Aerospace Education Foundation and
Eaker Institute
Mr. Lacombe
Good morning. I'd like to welcome you to the first Eaker
Institute colloquy, a conversation focusing on strategy
requirements and forces. I am Phil Lacombe, a director of the
Eaker Institute located in Rosslyn, Virginia.
The Eaker Institute is a new joint effort between the Air
Force Association and the Aerospace Education Foundation. Our
inaugural program is an attempt to create a vehicle to
investigate aerospace concepts and hopefully to push the
envelope on thinking about aerospace, about doctrine and about
future issues.
Our goal is quite simple. We want to facilitate thinking
about the development and use of aerospace forces to meet the
nation's security needs today and in the future. We want to
investigate the significant contributions made by air power and
space power to our nation's defense and its economic future.
The Eaker Institute was born in late 1996 with a very
generous gift from the Eaker family. General Ira and Mrs. Ruth
Eaker were very strong supporters of Air Force education and
aerospace education. They left us a gift in their will which we
have put to use in starting the Eaker Institute to carry on the
intellectual and educational work that they have started. We
will continue to do that and this is our first outing. We
thought it would be a good idea to get together and investigate
some of these things and talk just a little about the aerospace
future of this nation and the capabilities of its United States
Air Force.
The Eaker Institute has a small staff, which is loaned to us
by the Air Force Association and the Aerospace Education
Foundation. Of the managing board, some are here today. I'd like
to introduce them to you. The President of the Aerospace
Education Foundation serves on the board, Mr. Walt Scott from
California. The Chairman of the Board of the Aerospace Education
Foundation also serves on that board, Mr. Tom McKee from
Virginia. The Executive Director of the Eaker Institute, who is
also the executive director of the Air Force Association and the
Aerospace Education Foundation, is John Shaud.
Let's get on to the program today. Our purpose is to push the
envelope a little bit in thinking about aerospace. To do that,
we've brought to you four very strong thinkers in aerospace.
None of their names are new to you, but I would like to take
just a minute to introduce them. On the far right is John
Warden, a retired Air Force officer. Many of you know him as the
architect of the strategic air campaign in the Gulf War. He is
also the author of a popular book on aerospace and the use of
the air tool in a campaign. Next, is Dr. Phil Gold. Phil is with
the Discovery Institute and is also a frequent columnist in the
Wall Street Journal and in the Washington Times. He also teaches
at Georgetown University. He is rather well known in aerospace
for his views on America's future as an aerospace faring nation.
On the far left is Mr. Gene Myers. Gene is a defense analyst at
the Air Force Doctrine Center. He is also a former Air Force
officer, a helicopter pilot and B-52 pilot, and a doctrine
warrior by having been at the wrong place at the wrong time and
being assigned to the doctrine shop. He has since gone on to
become one of our premier thinkers in that area today. Finally,
we have General Mike Dugan with us. General Dugan is a former
chief of staff of the Air Force, served a long and distinguished
career in the Air Force, and has since been i the business of
continuing to serve the nation as the executive director of the
National Multiple Sclerosis Society. These are our panelists
today.
Now, the ground rules, the rules of engagement. We have
prepared a list of questions, which the panelists have not heard
before, which we are going to put to them to start things off.
This is a starter set of questions. There is a microphone for
our audience to use if they wish to address a question to the
panelists. With that, let me start the first question.
Probably the hottest topic on defense in this town today is
the Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Defense Panel.
Secretary Cohen has stated that the QDR will be a
strategy-driven activity, but many of us see it as a
continuation of the competition among the services and among the
various missions. We know the services are entering the QDR
process and so is OSD. So our first question to the panel is,
what advice might you give to the secretary of the Air Force and
the chief of staff of the Air Force on how they ought to prepare
for and engage in the QDR? What should be the Air Force's
position?
Gen. Dugan
I'm glad you put the tough questions up first. I'd tell the
secretary and the chief that the air forces of the nation --
that's "air forces" with a small "a" and a
small "f" -- have a great deal to offer, and have
demonstrated a great deal of progress over the less than 100
years that we've known of air forces. There is 5,000 years of
history of men going to war in organized formations on the
ground and 3 to 4 thousand years of men doing that in ships but
less than 100 years of men and women doing that in the air. The
air forces of the country have come a long way in that period of
time. They did start off with a number of assumptions that were
not true 50, 70, or 100 years ago.
The assumptions on which air power and space power of the
nation are based, on which air forces were built years ago, said
that aviators could navigate accurately, aviators could employ
their weapons accurately, aviators could find the target,
achieve the effects they needed to by doing something to that
target and they could do it at an appropriate level and cost.
They could survive. The well-planned bomber attack would always
get through.
I tell you that it has been just in the past few years that
the navigational tools have been available to air crew members
to get to the target area with a high probability of accuracy, a
high probability of arrival on the basis of the commander who
sent them. It has just been in the past few years that we have
had weapons that, once they left the platform, or once they were
employed, had a high probability of going to the target they
were pointed at. It is just in the past few years that the
ability to attack the target, to identify the target -- this has
a lot of different dimensions -- or put the cross-hairs in the
right location or putting the right coordinates in the missile
system have become so accurate.
One of the continuing nuts and a problem that hasn't been
solved is selecting targets -- the intellectual activity of
selecting the right target, and then selecting a target for
which you get operational effects. There are a lot of things
where I have been out myself personally and where I've sent out
captains who just came back prouder than hell that the bridge is
gone. The bridge was not the objective. That was the captain's
objective. The operational commander's objective was to delay,
deny, destroy, or to do something with men and materiel moving
in the vicinity. In many cases we didn't achieve the operational
objective, but we got the tactical objective.
Lastly, in terms of the ability of modern tecnology to
support air forces and enable them to be able to go do their
missions at an acceptable cost level and at acceptable risk.
Techniques to do that have improved just terrifically in the
past couple of years. We finally reached the doorstep where air
and space power can deliver what the assumptions said for the
better part of 100 years that we could do. I would tell the
chief and the secretary that they ought to be very positive,
they ought to be very proactive in this activity. There are
things that air forces, and the U.S. Air Force in particular,
offer the nation that is not offered by other activities, other
military capabilities. There are operations and capabilities
that meet what I would describe as the American way of war that
the Air Force needs to continue to invest in at a high rate.
Col. Warden
The only thing I would add is that I would suggest to both
the secretary and the chief of staff that they have an
extraordinary responsibility and also an extraordinary
opportunity to make it well known to everybody, the public, the
other members of the defense community, that the technology, the
concepts, the people that are loosely and somewhat more directly
associated with the Air Force and certainly with air power have
some remarkable opportunities to save lives, to secure American
objectives and to do it in a way that creates far less problems
than you otherwise might live with. To the extent that they
succeed in getting those sets of ideas out, the country has a
higher probability of making the right sorts of decisions. Also,
they've established a true intellectual debate and discussion on
the subject as opposed to some parochial discussion about
dividing up a budget that exists in a particular way, largely
because it is the way the budget existed in 1946.
Mr. Myers
I guess I'm going to step out on a rather drafty limb. For in
my opinion, and I emphasize that it is my opinion, since I am a
DoD employee, the U.S. Air Force, as a service, is going to
continue to take cuts, we read constantly in the press about
losing three more wings, we don't know if that is going to
happen or not, but it seems to be a prediction. If this is to
occur, the U.S. Air Force and indeed all the services must
decide what is at the core of their being, like any industry,
any business decides what is their core competency, what it is
they do that is the most critical to the joint force, to the
nation and to the CINC for whom they work when they go into
combat. We have a set of core competencies now.
I would argue that we need to look at those again because
what we say is, they are not unique to the Air Force. We say
that other services can do them and indeed they do. No one here
needs reminding, but global mobility, precision strike, air and
space superiority, information and agile combat support. I would
suggest that the Air Force needs to decide what it is we do that
is different from the air arms of the other services, Army, Navy
and Marines. They all have air arms. Why are we unique? What do
we do that makes us the U.S. Air Force? I can throw out a couple
of concepts. Probably everybody in this room can. My first
thought is, we are the only service that provides the nation's
aerospace power by law. The other services provide it in
relation to their other environments, land or sea.
We are the service, as I like to describe it, that has
strategic perspective. We are the only global aerospace power,
really and the world's only true global aerospace power. We
proved it in the Berlin airlift. We proved it in Desert Storm.
We proved it in a lot of places that a lot of people don't
necessarily think about.
I would advise them to identify the core competencies, core
beliefs, that are held most dear. This is the central essence of
what we provide. However, we do other things, certainly. But
sooner or later we are not going to be able to salami slice
across the mission areas. Sooner or later it is going to have to
stop. Then we are going to have to decide what it is we do. I
think it is to operate at the strategic and operational level of
war as compared to some of the other services that operate
primarily at the operational and tactical level of war.
Dr. Gold
If I were giving General Fogleman and Secretary Widnall
advice, it would deal with four points, two relate to the role
as military statesmen and women, two to the role as warriors and
war planners.
The first point is, forget the post-Cold War stuff, forget
the MRCs, forget all of this. The age of the wars of ideology is
over. The age of the wars of terror and identity has begun. It
probably began in the late 1970s. By identity, I mean ethnicity
and religion. The American people have not begun to get any idea
of what this might cost in terms of money, vulnerability of
their homeland and any number of other ways. We don't even know
if we want to participate. Your job first of all is to make sure
if the decision to participate is made, or is forced upon us, we
are ready to do it, whatever form that might take.
Second point as statesmen is that the United States is first
and foremost an aerospace power. We are not a land power and we
are not a sea power as these terms have been traditionally been
understood. Other countries have certainly had very strong air
forces to support land or sea forces. We are uniquely dependent
on aerospace. We are uniquely competent at it. We don't know
what this means, either. As General Dugan pointed out, people
have only been in this business 100 years. We have not yet
scratched the surface of what it means to be an aerospace power.
As a rule of thumb, in your dealings with the Joint Chief of
Staff and the civilian secretariats in DoD, if something can be
done from the air, probably it should be done from the air but
from the air does not always mean Air Force. Keep the core
competencies, but aerospace is far more than the Air Force.
Conversely, if something can't be done from the air, don't try
it. Don't get involved in those fights. Do what you are good at,
extend it, protect it, work out the ramifications.
As warriors, the problem is to make our unique power relevant
to the tasks at hand. It does no good to have the finest cavalry
in the world if you are up against tanks. It does no good to
have the finest tanks in the world if you are fighting in
tunnels. How do you make our aerospace power relevant? The key
to this is remembering that we are involved in three
interlocking, but nonetheless, distinct arms races. One is the
conventional thing: five tanks are better than two tanks and so
on. The other are two asymmetrical arms races. We are out of the
weapons of mass destruction business, the planetary bad guys are
not. They are building, they are buying, they are stealing
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons along with very crude,
but very serviceable delivery systems. How do we make our power
relevant to that? The second is, as we build this great
information age infrastructure and go through the revolution in
military affairs, remember other countries might not be building
it, but they are certainly working to acquire ways to counter
it. How do we make our power relevant to that? The final
thought, as statesmen, as warriors, as war planners, probably
the real test of your success will come about 50 years from now
when people who haven't been born yet are sitting in this room
celebrating the inaugural colloquy of the Sheila and Larry
Institute, saying, well, we got through the age of the wars of
terror. Now what do we do?
Mr. Lacombe
Dr. Gold, you raise an interesting concept. As one has, as
you've said, left behind the post-Cold War and moved into a new
arena, we see increasingly that America's forces are being used
for activities other than the more traditional types of warfare
that we are used to. At the same time, we have a strategy that
drives us toward two major regional conflicts. Would you addess
that disconnect for me?
Dr. Gold
It is fair to say that the two MRCs, our contingency plans,
should not be elevated to the level of strategy. The question
is, what do you want to accomplish? I think it is getting more
and more clear that if you are going to be doing so-called peace
keeping or peace enforcing, you are messing in other people's
problems. And, if you are messing with other people's problems,
you are going to get hit.
If we are serious about peace keeping and peace enforcing
there are two things that have to happen. One is to separate
peace keeping and peace enforcing forces from the standard
military. This is particularly true in the Army; to some extent
it might be true with air lift. The other is, we are going to
have to get serious about home defense. As long as we are
messing in other people's problems, it is going to come back at
us. This is importantly an Air Force core competency -- defense
of the American homeland. One of the most refreshing things that
could come out of the Quadrennial Defense Review would be to see
for once, on paper, a clear commitment to defend the American
homeland. This should evolve into an Air Force major mission
only to the extent that we are going to do peace keeping and
running around the world doing these other things. If we were to
come home tomorrow, if we didn't care where we bought our oil,
who we bought it from, if we didn't care what people do to each
other around the world, we don't need it. It is only to the
extent that we are going to be active in the world that we do
need it. Beyond that, the role of the Air Force in peace keeping
should probably be kept limited to air transport, to
humanitarian relief. The best way to do this would be, whenever
possible, regional and local forces using U.S. airlift, not
American forces themselves.
Mr. Lacombe
Mr. Myers, do you agree that the Air Force role in peace
operations should be strictly air lift?
Mr. Myers
I would suggest primarily, yes. However, to the extent that
we have people on the ground and are available to support them
if they get in trouble, then there is the obvious answer to
that. But I think as far as long range, long-term policy and
planning, I don't know that there is really much else other than
airlift for the service.
Gen. Dugan
It is a national question. It all goes back to your issue of
core competencies. I would argue that America and Americans have
some special capabilities that we can bring to bear that other
nations that might be allied on a particular issue with us don't
have. I tell you that when the United Nations or some other
world body brings together a group of countries and a
Bangladeshi battalion wants to go to Africa to support a peace
keeping operation, the mode of operation, that is the ideal
sought all around the world is U.S. mobility resources,
specifically C-17s and C-5s that can move the people, the
equipment, they can do it in one haul. They do it fast,
reliably. This is a special core competency that we as a nation
bring to these kind of affairs. And we ought to participate in
these things only where we have something special to offer and
not in every one of the routine activities.
Mr. Myers
I think that is true. We have something that some of us refer
to as T-tail diplomacy right now. There is nothing like the
American flag on the back of an airlifter sitting on an airfield
with a load full of food and support to show, one the flag and
two, what military can do other than breaking things and hurting
folks. I wouldn't argue that we should stop.
Col. Warden
I'd like to take a slightly more expansive view of this and
maybe in fact a little bit different. t least in one sense that
war is about having some effect on enemy centers of gravity and
we can debate how many centers of gravity there are, etc... I
think there are probably multiple centers of gravity, those
centers of gravity exist whether you are in a combat situation
or whether you are in a peace keeping situation, peace
maintenance, disaster relief or anything, they are there.
The only difference between a conventional combat and a peace
keeping or disaster relief operation is the kind of energy you
are putting against the centers of gravity that interest you. In
a war situation, you do something that takes energy away from
the opposite side, you break things as required, you make
functions stop. In something like a disaster relief or peace
keeping situation, you are probably putting energy into the
system. The question then becomes, how are you going to deliver
that energy? A fellow on the ground can hand a candy bar to a
child. That puts energy into the system. It has certain value.
You probably can also drop that candy bar from the air in some
sense. We certainly saw that happen in the Berlin airlift as
well as other places. It seems to me that maybe what we need to
be asking about air power is not what are the limits, but what
are the possibilities of air power because air power, if nothing
else, gives us the ability to deliver a wide variety of
different kinds of energy very effectively putting very few
people at risk and creating a relatively small infrastructure
that is in the operating zone.
I find it difficult to think of things that can be achieved
by regular forms of military power that can't be done either by
air power of some sort or at least where air power cannot make a
significant, substantive contribution well beyond merely moving
people or things into the general vicinity, when you then are
going to ask a lot of Americans to be cannon fodder or to be
hostages, as we saw in several instances in this Yugoslavian
thing that has been going on over the last couple of years.
Gen. Dugan
So, if I heard him right, peace is an extension of war by
other means. Indeed, the national policy now is engagement and
enlargement. One of the difficulties of the chief and the
secretary and the secretary of Defense with engagement and
enlargement is that there are no borders, no edges, no bounds.
Engagement and enlargement are engaging and enlarging. While it
was difficult to make an argument in public or in private about
how much was enough when we had those much clearer definitions
provided by containment, not only are there no edges, there is
no focus in engagement and enlargement. One of the serious
problems that the chief and the secretary are dealing with is,
what does this mean for energy consumption over the future? How
do we provide it from a national viewpoint first of all
efficiently and then what is the Air Force's role in doing that?
I don't have the answer to this, but I can tell you it is a
serious problem engaging all of the services and will well past
the Quadrennial Review.
Mr. Lacombe
One hears today the discussion about whether the need
remains, ultimately, to apply decisive power. That would seem to
indicate at least in the context of how it is discussed from a
land warfare point of view, that applying that power, that
energy, is the ultimate process here. What I would ask you then
is what is the role of the Air Force with regard to that? How do
you react to that? Does that address doing from the air what can
be done from the air?
Dr. Gold
I think in a certain sense, yes, because we are hearing a lot
these days about the reversal of fire and maneuver. For as long
as there has been air power or artillery, the assumption has
been that supporting power is support the infantry. It was shown
in Desert Storm that the infantry did not win the job, the
infantry finished the job. There is nothing new about this in a
lot of ways. There have been many times over the past 50 years
when in fat ground forces have supported air forces. If you look
at the Marine campaigns of World War II, the islands of Saipan,
Tinian and Iwo Jima were seized precisely because the air forces
needed them. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, one of the reasons the
Israelis had to cross the canal was to get the SAMs that were
keeping their own air planes from operating. We do need to move
away from the idea of the Air Force as a supporting arm. You
don't need to go perhaps as far as General McPeak's division of
air space that was kicked around a couple of years ago. But you
have to be extremely open to the fact that in any form of
maneuver warfare, you must determine your main thrust.
Sometimes the main thrust will be air. Sometimes the main
thrust will be ground. Sometimes it will be a combination.
Sometimes you'll start a war and have to shift halfway through.
You don't know. You can't have that doctrinal rigidity regarding
who supports whom anymore. In point of fact it hasn't been that
way for 50 years, except on paper.
Col. Warden
One quick thought. Maybe we need to change our vocabulary
around here because we all, and I have certainly said it a
number of times, too, say that if we are going to conduct war
operations you have got to have decisive power, overwhelming
force and so on. But maybe that is not correct anymore. What you
want to have are decisive results and decisive force,
overwhelming power is a means to an end, it is not an end in
itself. The end that you are really looking for is a decisive
result,where the other fellow is put in an impossible position,
if it is a negative, it is a war operation, or is put in a very
nice position if it is a disaster relief or something of that
sort. Then the question is, how do I go about creating decisive
results that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with
numbers? And, in fact, in today's world, in the world of
fill-in-the-microcosm and so forth, probably numbers are close
to irrelevant when you get right down to it.
Dr. Gold
One element beyond the irrelevancy of numbers that we have to
look at is that in many ways in the 21st century, high tech is
going to favor the "weak" and how do we deal with
that?
Mr. Lacombe
Can you explain that idea?
Dr. Gold
We can build these trillion dollar systems and somebody can
buy from the Chinese or the Germans or the Russians or the
French a nice little package to start a cascade. It is not easy
to bring down systems, but it is not impossible, either. The
cost of bringing them down can be far less than the cost of
building them. It is the old kid with the computer can hack away
at the NASA web page or get at the CIA or whatever.
The stuff, once it becomes commercially available, is
available to all comers. It costs a whole lot less to buy it or
steal it than it does to develop it. You have countries out
there now who are putting together packages, something from this
country, something from that country that you can sell for
countermeasures or counter-countermeasures, whatever you want.
We may be witnessing, in terms of high technologies, something
equivalent to the shift from the aristocratic knight to the
democratic cannon ball or the democratic bullet. Colonel Warden
is absolutely right in that numbers no longer automatically
favor any particular side. Technology might not either.
Mr. Myers
I would also suggest that decisiveness is measured by
objectives. You are decisive to the degree that you attain the
objectives that you are assigned by the NCA, by the CINC, by the
JFC and so forth. Everything is situational. In attaining
objectives, be they limited or major war, the global capability
of air and space power, aerospace power, air, space and
information power is probably going to make a greater
contribution in the future than it has in the past. Speaking of
the past, those who say that air power has not been decisive
anywhere, need to look at places like the Battle o Britain,
Berlin Airlift -- not a warfighting situation, but it was
certainly decisive in attaining objectives. Itwas also true for
the Bakaa Valley in Lebanon, and we can argue that it was also
decisive in both Desert Storm and Bosnia.
Gen. Dugan
If decisive means unconditional surrender, it is hard to
conceive of that by air. If decisiveness means achieving
political objectives that are important to the nation, then you
get an entirely different construct.
Mr. Lacombe
Today, we have a joint structure deployed around the world
and air power is a part of that structure. My question to you
is, I've heard it said that joint warfare is not equal
opportunity warfare. Many of us, reading the papers and watching
the debate, feel like that is really what we are seeing. Can air
power come into its full capability in this arena?
Gen. Dugan
I'd argue that since it was formed, the Air Force has been
invested and committed to joint warfare and supporting the
regional commander, the CINC, and to taking his view and trying
to apply that to the region where the fight was going on.
Indeed, this caused some friction and some difficulty in many
areas because -- let's just take the most recent warfighting
example where we had joint forces present and that is Desert
Storm -- the perspective and the interest of the front line
ground commanders is with the very first enemy soldier standing
in line. It is not with whatever is in reserve, it is not with
whatever is in the strategic reserve, it is not with the supply
system behind them. The perspective of the ground fighter is,
you deal with the first one in line, then you deal with the
second one in line, then you deal with the third one in line and
you fight from the front back.
In many cases, the joint force commander has a different
problem. He certainly has a different perspective and a
different requirement and he is obliged to look at his overall
theater and in many cases make something happen that doesn't
happen right there on the front and there are other things that
are more important to him. This causes friction between air
forces and ground forces, between air component commanders and
ground component commanders and particularly those who are at
the front lines on either side.
The Air Force is prepared to achieve, in many cases,
operational results or strategic results. What are strategic?
Every once in a while our vocabulary gets in our way. Strategic
activities are not those that involve bombers. Strategic
activities are not those that involve nuclear weapons. Strategic
activities are those that involve the core of the issue you are
dealing with, that deal with the enterprise as a whole, that
attempt to go to the heart of the issue and turn around the
decision making on the enemy's part in whatever area of
responsibility you have. It is different if you are a national
commander than if you are a theater commander or if you are a
local commander.
But the Air Force component commander is obliged to follow
his CINC's guidance, take his needs and translate those needs
into operational effects that change the circumstances for the
CINC, for the other forces in the area, to make them more
efficient, and indeed over the long haul to change the
circumstances in which airmen operate. I think the Air Force has
been very joint over the 40 years that I have been personally
interested. The debate makes it sound like they are not joint
because, in fact, they have followed what the CINC required and
not necessarily what their individual component compatriots
required.
The Air Force does bring some special capabilities. They can
fight from the back forward. The other forces can't. If the CINC
has that capability, he ought to bring all those things to bear
that he can to meet those needs. It is interesting to see some
of the symbols of how joint force participation is recorded and
remembered. If you enter the Pentagon from the river entance, on
the right hand side is the office of the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. On the left hand side, just after you get in
the door, there is an entryway to the Joint Staff area. And
proudly displayed next to the office of the chairman is a very
handsome painting. The painting is of Desert Sword. That was the
name given to the land operation and the land element of Desert
Storm and so, the symbol outside the door of the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most joint and the senior military
individual in the U.S. Armed Forces, the symbol of joint
operations resulting from Desert Storm, is the land operation.
Let me give you another one, now that I am on a roll. I
enjoyed serving in USAFE a number of years ago. I was commander
there for a lot longer than I was chief of staff [laughter]. Six
months or so after I arrived, the new chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff came on a visit around the European area. Again,
symbols are important to military men and women. Look at their
uniforms. The flag is important to military men and women. There
are a lot of people in here that have symbols they carry around
because it says something to them and transmits a message that
they want to give to people they meet. The chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff arrived and got off the airplane, it was a U.S.
Air Force airplane. It was a U.S. Air Force crew of about 5
people plus a flight surgeon. The other 17 people that got off
the air plane, with the exception of Mrs. Powell, all got off in
green uniforms. This was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Mr. Myers
I'd like to follow up what the general said. In my world
today, I work in the doctrine world, which can be somewhat
arcane and on occasion downright stimulating when you do
interservice, joint warfare on paper, or in the ether. You find
that quite often, when we do our joint doctrine, we are stuck
with the lexicon of surface warfare. For example, you see in
joint manuals discussions of the decisive phase of war. Well,
that is nothing more than a puzzle, it is nothing more than a
substitute for inserting land forces. We are stuck in many ways
in a box, in a theoretical paradigm that we have an action, we
repel, we halt an invasion, we build up forces, we
counterattack.
If you look at the secretary of Defense's Report to Congress,
you will see that construct. We are stuck in time 40 years ago.
I would suggest there are more ways to stop an invasion than
plinking tanks, than attrition. I would suggest that once you
have stopped that invasion, there are far more ways to attain
national objectives than launching three to five divisions
across somebody's border. Not to say that at times this will not
be required. They may be. But we need to think out of the box.
As far as our air service is concerned, the Air Force, and to a
certain degree the air arms of the other services, we have the
capability to go deep now.
Obviously, we have the capability to fulfill a promise that
the U.S. Air Force has been making for an awfully long time --
to be decisive by going to the enemy's heartland. We have this
idea of parallel war, where we can fight at the strategic,
operational and tactical level simultaneously. We can apply
asymmetrical force against ground forces, we don't just have to
fight the air battle. We apply asymmetrical force, but our
improved command and control system, especially through space,
our improved precision, our stealth capabilities give us the
capability to conduct warfare at several different levels at the
same time according to the objective we have been assigned. One
of the great strengths of air and space power is this capability
to finally, after nearly a hundred years, accomplish this theory
of parallel warfare. We've talked about it; we tried it; and
we've done it to a limited degree in various wars. But we can do
it now. And that is probably the greatest contribution at this
point.
Mr. Lacombe
The theory of parallelwarfare is more than a theory, but it
has been around awhile. The Aerospace Education Foundation had
the privilege of publishing a paper on that subject by Col. Dave
Deptula. What is the reaction to that? Are you seeing that paper
accepted? Are colleagues in the other services reacting
positively as this is a new concept that the joint world can
grab and use to great effect or not?
Mr. Myers
In my limited exposure, I would say it is certainly accepted
within the majority of the Air Force, understood may be by Naval
air, not terribly accepted for parochial reasons by some of the
other services.
Mr. Lacombe
Col. Warden, while you were at the Air Command and Staff
College, you undoubtedly got to hear some of the other services'
perspective on that, certainly from the students and the faculty
members. Could you comment on that? How is it playing?
Col. Warden
One of the things I saw at the Air Command and Staff College
and also see typically in working with non-
defense related businesses, is that everybody brings to a
higher level the perspective they learned at a lower level. So
you have a tendency for people, as an example, who have been
fighter pilots to think that the solution to a war is fighter
pilot operations, air to air or whatever, if they happened to
grow up in that. If somebody has become the president of a
company and they came from being a great salesman, they tend to
think they can run the company as somebody who is really
magnificent at making presentations. For the most part, that
simply is not the case.
The problem this creates is that when people come into an
environment like the Command and Staff College, an Army officer,
a fighter pilot, a captain of a ship or a ship officer hasnt
seen these ideas of parallel warfare, paralysis, center of
gravity. They only know the bayonet in the belly, the bullet
between the eyes, the 6-G turn inside the other fellow. If we
are not talking about these things, then we are not talking
about war. We have a significant intellectual challenge within
the military that you begin to address in a place like Command
and Staff College, although you worry that perhaps that is a
little bit too late in that people are trying to apply their
tactical ideas and translate that into war.
It simply isn't there. I have some concern that, in fact, the
sort of ideas that you all have been talking about -- parallel
war, which unfortunately has two definitions which are
complementary, but nevertheless, different, have not gotten
anywhere near as much currency as they should have, simply
because we haven't presented them very well and because before
they can be accepted, you've got to overcome the tactical
predilections of the people to whom you are speaking.
Gen. Dugan
Generals always fight the last war. They were majors when the
last war took place. But that is what they have seen and that is
what they think war is.
Along the same line, I would tell you, the air power hero of
the Gulf War is named Norman Schwarzkopf. It is not John Warden.
It is not Dave Deptula. It is not Chuck Horner. It is not the
brave men and women who went off and did what we asked them to
do. The individual who asked for what was indeed the unthinkable
and indeed went to a source that was given the rules of how
joint forces are supposed to work and what joint commanders have
authority to do, went to the Air Force and asked the Air Force
to help him develop a quick reaction plan because his staff in
Tampa was busy with mobilization and deployment. His staff, and
General Horner's staff, which was CENTCOM Forward in the theater
were busy with reception and redeployment and the evolving and
changing defense plan as new forces showed up, they were
completely tied up. Rather than contracting this out to Rand or
some place that CINCs typically go for analytical support, he
said, well, you know, if we need an airplane, why don't we go
ask the Air Force if they could find soebody? The Air Force did.
There was some pushing and shoving to get it done and there are
some interesting books out on that, a couple of years old. The
Air Force presented the plan to General Schwarzkopf and he said,
this is just what I need! He said, if the President wants early
options and the President doesn't want to wait, I won't have
sufficient ground power available to do anything of U.S.
initiative until December. If the President wants to pursue
early options, the only thing available is air. Can you help me?
I said, "We can help." In not very many minutes, John
Warden produced the plan. It was a very useful plan, but the
individual who was shrewd enough to ask for the plan; and shrewd
enough to keep it on the front burner; who argued with the joint
staff and the chairman while the plan was in execution and who
subsequently said that it was not played out as we are not at 50
percent because I don't want to go out and waste good
infantrymen on an early and premature attack, was named Norman
Schwarzkopf. While he didn't understand the mechanics, he didn't
need to understand the mechanics of it. He knew he had a team
that was loyal. He knew he had a team that was following his
objectives. He knew he had a team in place that could do the job
and that made him the most famous military man since MacArthur.
There are evidences of joint activity out there. There are
people who have gone out and seized what was available.
Mr. Lacombe
What is it that Schwarzkopf saw?
Gen. Dugan
He saw dead infantrymen in Vietnam and that made a very
personal and psychological impact on him and he determined that
whenever he got in charge, he was going to take whatever steps
he could to avoid wasting good infantrymen. He had confidence in
his air component commander. He had exercised with airmen, he
had been in operational positions with the U.S. Army at division
command level, at corps level, as a CINC, and he had been
exposed to what airmen said they could do and he decided he'd
give them a chance. Now, what has not been done is
institutionalize that. As far as I know, the Joint Chiefs have
never asked for, never encouraged, never approved anybody to
develop a plan that works on a diligent air campaign to start an
operation. There is this effort about that we're going to halt,
then we are going to build up, then we are going to have a
counter-offensive. I don't know what you call the halt phase if
it is not a counter offensive to begin with. And when you get
through with the halt phase, what you do is you halt the air
operation so the enemy can build up their defense, I mean, this
is like, I can't recall the buzzwords from Vietnam, but we are
going to halt an effective operation if it in fact achieves a
halt and then we are going to wait for the rest of the team to
show up. This is like being a coach for Pop Warner little league
where every kid is going to play in the game. [laughter].
Mr. Lacombe
What do we have to do to institutionalize that we are not
doing? We can't just say, well, you know, it is the joint arena.
This just isn't going to happen. There must be some
responsibility, particularly, I would think, for the Air Force,
to do that. Are we missing something? Is there something else we
have to do?
Mr. Myers
Do you mean, strategically, doctrinally, or all of the above?
This may be a self serving statement I guess, but certainly one
step is the forming of the Eaker Institute because nothing in
the world is like it. There is no outside spokesman for
aerospace power independent of people in uniform. That is
useful.
I firmly believe that because there are cases that can be
made independently that cannot be made as forcefully within the
bureaucracy and I think that is very important. Beyond that,
I've already discussed it so I'll just tap on it very briefly.
The services, all of them, need to decide what it is that they
are all about. They cannot continue trying to be all things and
there is a downside t that. Joint force commanders feel awfully
reassured when there is more than one service that can provide a
particular thing. Because there is redundancy, because everybody
is not exactly where they should be at exactly the right time,
and that is worrisome to a joint force commander, and it is
worrisome to anybody in a situation where bullets are going to
start flying any minute.
It is nice to have that carrier off the coast and three air
wings sitting there and a brigade of Army air sitting in the
theater. I am here to tell you, unfortunately, that is probably
not going to happen in the future. They are not going to be
available as I read the tea leaves.
Therefore, I think it becomes imperative that each service
decide deep down in its own collective heart what it is it
provides to the services and, as hard as this is to say, from
that joint force perspective, we may have to dump something
else. Because, if you find yourself continually trying to do
everything, you'll find that you can't do anything properly.
That is unfortunate. Then you've got to make damn good and sure
that you can guarantee that you can provide what you say you are
going to, because now it really is up to you. It is up to you to
provide that capability to go deep, to provide the strategic
effects directly against the enemy's centers of gravity. Because
nobody else is going to do it anymore. It is up to the Army to
provide the close battle, the deep security, those kinds of
functions at their core, and stop trying to do everything. That
is going to make some joint force commanders nervous. But I fear
it is inevitable.
Mr. Lacombe
It seems to me that inherent in what you are saying here is
not just getting to know our role better, but advocating our
role better. I wonder if you might answer something a little bit
different for me. If we accept that the role of air power has
increased fairly dramatically, and we accept that targeting
effects-based warfare can accomplish a lot, then I'd like to
turn it around and ask you for your view on another area, all
four of you. That is, tell me how the role of the Army has
changed. What is the role of land power in this world where air
power is so dominant?
Dr. Gold
First of all, we have been out of the business of trying to
conquer and hold enemy territory since the Chaison Reservoir.
Our doctrine since then has been to recapture, to absorb,
stabilize the front, whether it was in NATO or the Persian Gulf.
Coming into Iraq was the purpose of liberating Kuwait, not
conquering Iraq. I am in kind of an odd position here because my
own background is Marine Corps, hanging out in an artillery
battalion, and I find it odd to be up here defending air power.
Obviously, the duty of air power in relation to the Army is, as
you said, minimize casualties. Do you want to take that hill
now, Lieutenant, or do you want to wait for the B-52s? In terms
of parallel warfare, it is very difficult to put into doctrine a
doctrine that says, it all depends, because you don't know ahead
of time what you are going to do, you can't write that down. To
get at the question of what should the role of air power be
versus the role of land power and get away from the well,
"you've got to have boots on the ground," which
sometimes you do, but how many boots, what kind of feet should
be in them? Who knows? It all depends.
Let's look at what seem to be emerging as the positions of
the services in the Quadrennial Defense Review if what is
becoming public is true. The Army is saying, in effect, we want
to keep force structure, even if it means sacrificing readiness.
The Navy is saying, we want to keep readiness, even if it means
sacrificing force structure. The Air Force is saying, we wan to
modernize, even if it means sacrificing force structure and
readiness. And the Marines are quite happy to stay the way they
are. What you end up having is four very differently balanced
services that each have holes.
The Army could very well turn out to be as hollow as it was
in the mid-1970s or at best, partially modernized and not very
interoperable. The Navy, as you said, just might not be there
and can't get there from here. What is the role of the Air Force
in a period where the other services are having this enormous
struggle, a hollow Army and a shrunken Navy? The Air Force might
very well be, not only the strategic force, but the one who goes
deep and does all the other stuff, it may very well have to be a
gap filler. It may have to do what the Navy might have done if
it had the carriers or the arsenal ships or whatever, what the
Army would have done if it had those extra two divisions, what
the Marines would have done, if, if, if. The problem with the
Air Force is, the consequences to the Air Force of guessing
wrong on what you need are much greater than the other services,
because you are dealing with a very small number of extremely
expensive systems. How does the Air Force relate to land power
in terms of what it might have to do if the land power doesn't
exist? That is the fundamental question right now. I have no
idea and I don't think anybody really does.
Mr. Myers
I would suggest that as far as land power, the idea that the
Air Force can accomplish all the functions of a land service is
ludicrous, obviously. However, the decisiveness of land power,
just as the decisiveness of air power, is defined by the mission
that is assigned to it, is assigned to the joint force. Land
forces need to understand that they are the supported function,
the supported service, the supported component and in that case
they are truly the decisive element when they are injected. At
other times, they are supporting and they may not be the
decisive force. Once again, times are coming when they will not
be able to be everywhere because they are spread too thin. Just
like the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, just like everybody
else. The Army has a continuing decisive role to play,
especially, and this is anathema to some of my friends in the
other services, especially in the area of MOOTW, military
operations other than war. That is critical because, let's face
it, our national leader considers it critical and it will be an
objective of national policy. I realize in some ways I am
mucking around with the primal forces of nature here. That is
how I see it anyhow. That does not mean their combat role is
gone. Of course not. Because any service and we need not forget
this, any service's primary function is to fight the nation's
wars. I don't care who you are. You need to be trained for that
and you need to be capable at it. That is your first priority.
That is your first training objective. Then you proceed from
there.
Mr. Lacombe
Trained to fight the nation's wars? Let me ask you a
question. Based on our experience in the Gulf and since then,
when we talk about fighting the nation's wars and recalling the
wisdom of General Dugan that generals fight the last war, the
war they fought when they were majors, what is that new war? Are
we seeing the evolution of a new concept for warfare? A new
theory? A new idea? Is that what the notion of parallel warfare
represents?
Mr. Myers
I think so. And, along with the Dr. Golds comment about it,
it may be terrorist warfare, to a large extent. It is still
warfare. It is war. It is conflict. It is bloody. You see what
happened in Oklahoma City, you see what happens in the Middle
East weekly, monthly. You see even what happes in London. It is
bloody, and going after those folks could be a very dangerous
proposition. That is warfare.
We may call it military operations other than war in some
classical definitions, however, for the guy on the ground with
the rifle or the guy in the air with the bomb and folks shooting
at him, that is war. That is conflict. His butt is on the line.
Don't discount the possibility that we may have a future MRC
with Iraq, with North Korea, or with some unknown, and I worry
about coalitions more than I do single nations now, personally.
One nation by itself would not be a match for the United States,
but all of a sudden you see a coalition pop up of two or three
nations that have particular specialities and now you've got an
adversary. To say that this can't happen in the future is
ridiculous, too. Warfare will continue, probably more varied
than it ever has been and you will see it across the entire
spectrum, including, as much as I hate to say it, we had better
be ready for it, weapons of mass destruction. It is inevitable.
Col. Warden
I think we have a lot of trouble thinking about major changes
in intense competition in part because we've got some real
vocabulary problems. The word war itself conjures up something
that instantly is a bunch of guys on horses or tanks or
airplanes and masses of people fighting battles that we think of
as being important to war. They do it with a lot of bloodshed, a
lot of killing, a lot of attrition. That is our 5 to 10 thousand
years of human history embodying all of these sets of ideas.
When we start thinking about what war or competition is going to
be, maybe we even need a different name for it, in the future.
It is not at all clear, for example, that the term
"battle" has a whole lot of relevance. A battle is
where people come together and they beat on each other and it is
a means to an end, presumably, but we make it an end in itself
and we talk about battle space, dominating the battle area and
all the rest of this which, probably, is utterly irrelevant.
With enough time we can all sit here and outline a fair
definition of what we thought future conflict was going to be
like, but it seems to me that the overwhelming principle one has
to think about is that we have some technologies which are not a
little bit better than what we used to have, but, for example,
with precision, that are four orders of magnitude better than we
previously had. That is 10 thousand times better than what we
previously had. If we can't figure out some entirely new
concepts of operation for these extraordinary technologies, we
are simply not doing our job. And yet, everything we do in the
government, the Bottom Up Review, the QDR, all of the rest of
these are driving us toward making marginal extrapolations of
what we did in the past as opposed to looking at the problem
from a top-down perspective and figuring out ways to use that
technology so we don't have to have battles, so that perhaps we
don't even have to have a person flying over a target, let alone
a fellow on the ground with a bayonet. That would be my thought
about future war, future being five months, five years, 20
years. If we don't make it completely different from what it is
today, we have made a major error and we are guilty of criminal
negligence and moral turpitude in any event.
Dr. Gold
I think it is going to become increasingly obvious that the
most likely uses of violence will be at the very low end of the
scale or the very high end of the scale. Whether it is
individual terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, we not only
do not address this properly militarily or bureaucratically, we
don't even think about it. For example, if something is shot at
the United States, it is a military problem. If it is smuggled
into the United States, turn it over to the FBI. This is like
the old story of the highway patrol. You can't touch me, I'm on
the shoulder. The blurring between law enforcement and war is
going to go on. Beyon that, when we talk about MRCs, we are
looking at, of course, Korea, which is as though there was no
Korean army there. Those guys are not exactly wimps. And an
invasion from Iraq, as opposed to something coming down from
Iran, which has spent almost all of its money for modernization
over the last few years on naval forces. But in the long term,
perhaps the biggest problem is going to be violent, expansionist
Islamic fundamentalism. We look at Iraq right now, we look at
Iran right now. What happens if and when Algeria goes under?
What happens if and when Turkey goes into civil war? What
happens if and when Egypt succumbs? We look at the poor Israelis
arguing over a few thousand houses in Jerusalem and they are
making peace when they are about to be surrounded as they have
never been surrounded before. What do we do if litterally the
entire Mediterranean on the southern side becomes Islamic
fundamentalist all the way to the Persian Gulf and it starts
getting into the southern areas, as it already has, of the
former USSR? That is coalition plus. That is not just the
coalition. That is the kind of thing we haven't seen in 12 or 15
hundred years. How do we address this militarily?
Gen. Dugan
We've been discussing the sort of assumptions underlying our
discussion, I'll let John Warden think about our previous
experience, what I call, Type A war. Type A war is what you know
about. It is sort of like, what's new technology? New technology
is anything that came along after you were seven. There are a
whole set of Type B wars. We don't know what they look like.
They are entirely different. If I were a state-run entity that
had interests and objectives inimical to the United States, I
would certainly not take you on in this day or in this decade.
It doesn't mean I would give up my objectives. It doesn't mean
that I would give up irritating you, but I would certainly not
do it blatantly. I wouldn't do it in a straightforward manner. I
would pursue an indirect strategy.
We've watched terrorism for some time. When we can pin down
state-sponsored terrorism, there are some things we can do. I'd
say, Type A war is state-sponsored warfare. We have means and we
have demonstrated means, notwithstanding recent presentations by
my good friend General Lee Butler about nuclear warfare, we have
national leaders in the United States, who have said, on a
number of occasions, with great effect, " if you continue
to do that, we will take all necessary means to bring the full
force of the United States on your head." I would say that
not only did the United States use nuclear weapons two times in
anger, we are the only nation that has and everybody knows that.
But there is some credibility that goes along with the fact that
people know we are predictable. When some national policy maker
in the United States says, "do not do that, this is
important," people listen. There are ways of dealing with
rational state-sponsored activities.
Now the question for the future Type "B" war is, is
it going to be rational? Is it going to be state-sponsored? Will
someone be able to find out early enough to do something about
it? When the Soviet Union went down, we lost a great, reliable
enemy. It was a predictable enemy. It was a conservative enemy.
We lost something of great value. We gained something of great
value, too. But indeed having changed that strategic
circumstance in the world, we are now benefiting from all of the
consequences of that, and the consequences of that are great
fragmentation, not being able to identify state-sponsored
terrorism. When we identified state-sponsored terrorism nine
years ago, an effective air power, joint operation took place
and there hasn't been a bombing on the European continent
sponsored by Libya since. There are going to be Type B
circumstances and we have not yet conceived them. That is
probably our real strategic problem. The extent that air power
will have impact on those depends on what they are. We've got
alot more studying to do before we can answer, this is the right
kind of force. We know how to handle the last war. We are all
majors.
Mr. Myers
The problem when you have an infinite variety of
possibilities is really to design a force that will cover them
all. For all practical purposes, that is what we are doing, that
is what we are trying to do. People keep on asking us, what is
the threat? Well, is it just Korea? Is it just Iraq? No, I don't
think so. What will it be 10 years from now? 20 years from now?
Let's face it, this is 1997, people keep asking us what is the
threat going to be in 2010? I would suggest to you in 1929,
nobody predicted World War II. Nobody saw Germany rising.
Mr. Lacombe
You don't get off that easy. We have sized our force
structure for years based on an understanding and appreciation
of the threat and the size of the threat. So what replaces it?
How do we measure risk today when we no longer can say, here is
the threat minus our capabilities, the rest is risk?
Mr. Myers
It is a tough nut to crack. You build forces with as much
flexibility as you can. You build multi-purpose forces. You
don't build a weapon system that is just good for one thing if
you can avoid it. You provide training to your people that is as
varied as you can make it. As far as force structure sizing, if
you are asking me how big it should be...
Mr. Lacombe
I am asking you, why? If we have built a construct in which
we define military force and military requirements based on
threat and the level of risk we are willing to accept and you
are telling me that there isn't, you can't do that now. Do we
just rely on the budget and just divide it up into four pieces
and everybody just go out and buy something?
Mr. Myers
I didn't say that we are not willing to accept some risk. We
have got to. I have to back out to a certain extent. I don't
have the answer. I did want to point out, as you pointed out, I
want to emphasize, that we have almost an infinite number of
possibilities. Sizing, budgeting, strategizing a military force
to cope with them is infinitely difficult.
Mr. Lacombe
Let's leave that question on the table because I'd like to
hear some other perspectives. How do we do this now?
Gen. Dugan
I am not going to answer that first, but let me help you
understand the threat. We articulated the threat for the past 20
and perhaps 40 years so elegantly that we've dug ourselves a big
hole. We presumed that we knew which guard tank army battalion
was going to come over which rise at which hour and in what
sequence. Having given this presentation in public and having
given this presentation in Congress for years, we have created
the idea of what a threat looks like. If you don't have one of
those, you don't have a threat.
First of all, it was a wonderful story of showmanship. But
wars don't go that way and it was never going to happen that
way, but it was a nicely put together piece for television. We
are now in a mode where we can't do that. That doesn't mean that
the threat has gone away. It means that we don't know what the
threat is. I can tell you that in many places of the world, and
this is very valuable to you and to the American people, the
threat is us. There are all kinds of circumstances in the world
where others are restrained from picking on their neighbors,
from picking on their region, from doing things with and against
U.S. interests around the world.
I do think that we have infinite possibilities of looking for
things and conceiving threats, whatever the mind can behold, but
we don't have an infinite set of interests. They are not in an
infinite set of geographical locations. It takes a different
construct. But there is a way to get out and say, these are our
continuing and enduring vital interests, these are the kinds of
areas in which they are located, this is the kind of
transportation infrastructure to get here if we choose to, this
is the kind of force that you'd use in a mix of those. And then
those forces need to be very flexible because to the extent that
you are really prepared and to the extent that the world knows
you have the capability and the will to do something here,
you're going to have a lot of peace there and you are going to
have Type B warfare and Type B influences someplace else. We
really need to figure out how to define those Type B influences
and then to come to a conclusion or come to grips with to what
extent are those military problems?
There are a lot of issues on the table today that are of
importance to the long-term peace and stability of the country
and they've been defined as national security interests. Some of
it has to do with immigration. Some of it has to do with drugs.
Some of it has to do with peace keeping and humanitarian
affairs. They have all been lumped together because Department
of Defense has resources and because those resources are already
"paid for" those are free goods. Some of those
military resources have something to add if they can do it for
free, but military men and women are very expensive. They are
considerably more expensive than all kinds of out-sourcing
activities that we could do. In general, it takes two military
men or women to do any one job. That is because of the rotation,
new faces coming in, four-year enlistments and relatively brief
periods for officers. You have the master mechanic and then you
have the journeyman who is coming along who is being trained. Or
you have the neophyte. To the extent that there are some of
these things that could be handled by other than military men
and women, in the interest of the nation and in the interest of
the economic difficulties the services are paying, we need to
find things that military forces ought not to be doing and to
unload those on the table.
Col. Warden
To continue a little bit on that kind of an idea. A lot of
our threat sizing General Dugan suggests has been pretty good
for television show. I recall my first tour on the air staff in
the mid-70s working on a group of joint documents and I have
forgotten what the terminology was at the time, it seems to me
there was an objective force and a planning force and a real
force and so on. The question came up, what do you need in order
to fight the Soviet Union. The realistic answer was probably 150
to 200 divisions, 100 wings, 20 or 30 aircraft carriers. This is
what we need, right? No, no, no! We can't do that because we
can't afford it. So what we are doing is creating force
structure that is heavily influenced by what we anticipate is
going to be available. The answer was, sure, because we are
realistic. If we go out and say we need 200 divisions, we'll
never get anything. So we are going to say, well, we really need
40 divisions or 20 or something else that will be affordable.
We have always toyed with this whole force sizing business.
Maybe it is time to start thinking about the force sizing and
the budget, not so much as a response to a threat, on the one
hand, but as buying insurance of some sort. We are all willing
to spend, everyone of us in here spends one percent, two percent
or five percent of our income on insurance, medical things,
security. Maybe we start thinking about it that way. Then maybe
also we start thinking about the creation of forces not as a
reaction to what are threats out there, because in fact there
are probably an infinite number of them, which by definition
means they are utterly unpredictable, nothing you can do about
it. So we start thinking in terms of defining capabilities that
we want in the future and those are probably really pretty
straight forward. You need to go some place and do soething.
You've got to deliver some form of energy. You've got to do it
effectively. You've got to do it inexpensively in terms of human
lives.
When you start thinking about what the core competencies of
the United States are, which is what our major interest is, it
would seem that one, you would want to maintain the relative
military power that we have vis-a-vis the rest of the world,
two, that you want to do it by exploiting technologies as
rapidly as possible; and three, that you do it in such a way
that it becomes very difficult for anybody to create defenses
against what you have created simply because you are putting so
much out on the board so quickly that you have dominated the
cycle time of the offense/defense and to some extent you
eliminate the old offense/defense/offense cycle that we have
lived with for a number of years. I don't think anybody has
ever, in the past, had that kind of capability. We have that
opportunity today, but we've got to come at the problem from a
top-down perspective, exploitation of technology, doing things
that are productive in terms of what an individual human being
can do because of the fact that they are expensive, we've got to
understand that in fact the budget is going to be one and a half
percent of GDP. We've got to figure out the way to get the
absolute most that will keep everybody else off balance from the
standpoint of trying to create some defenses against what we are
doing. Then we are probably going to cover 99 percent of the
probabilities. There are one percent out there that may simply
be unthinkable, but at least we'll have the overwhelming part of
them covered in one way or another.
Dr. Gold
I don't know if generals fight the wars they fought as majors
because major was a size I never got. I remember 1980 during the
Iranian hostage crisis. I was with the old 1st Marine Amphibious
Force doing planning for the original 1001 plan to invade Iran
to protect them from the Russians. I went out to Camp Pendleton.
They told me, go into the vault and read the plan. I came out an
hour later, saying there is a mistake, somebody sent you the
joke issue. The gap between what we said we were going to do and
what we were actually capable of doing was just humongous. It
has been that way since World War II when we originally planned
to raise 180 divisions, ended up with 90 and barely did that.
To try to get at what our problem is in terms of threat, I
think an historical analogy might be useful. In a certain sense,
we are Rome after Carthage. The big enemy is gone, filling out
the borders. What Rome had in the century or so after the end of
the Punic Wars, and what ultimately led to its demise, was an
outer and an inner border. The outer boarder of Rome trailed
off. It sort of went down into the jungles of Africa, went into
the deserts in the Arabian Peninsula, sort of went into a wall
in the north and trailed off into the swamps somewhere else. It
brought them into contact with a lot of people who didn't like
them very much, constant low-level friction, people trying to
get in, people trying to do a great many other things. The outer
border was not the problem until the very end. The inner border
was the problem. In Rome's case, it was the Mediterranean. Who
ever controlled the Mediterranean controlled Rome.
We have an inner border, too. It is our own society. It is
the vulnerability to terrorism, it is the drugs, it is all the
other things. In this age where you can no longer draw a clear
definition between military and law enforcement or operations
short of war, we have to recognize this inner border for what it
is. This is where we are most vulnerable, not out there, in
here. When we say, build and use multi-purpose weapons, this is
no new concept in the military. Fighter bombers are a perfect
example. You always want a system that can do more than one
thing. You are willing to take some trade-offs to get that
capability. We have to start looking at systems that are muli-use
in the sense of both that outer border and that inner border.
Can you build a theater missile defense system that can also be
used to defend the United States? Can you park an Aegis
cruiser/destroyer off the coast of New Jersey as you can off the
coast of Saudi Arabia.
We do not need and we have never had a kind of
put-a-man-on-the-moon commitment to homeland defense. We
probably couldn't afford it. Star Wars is over. That is from a
different era. But to the extent that we can build tactical and
theater level systems to have some homeland use, we are also
buying insurance. John is absolutely right. What we are talking
about now is capabilities-based insurance. Being able to do
things, being able to explore technologies, in the hope that
they will have some relevance on that outer border and some
relevance on that inner border.
Mr. Lacombe
In both cases, the both of you just addressed the role of
technology. We've talked about it before. Maintaining that
tremendous technological capability that becomes so evident in
looking at the Gulf War, that underpins the winning of the Cold
War, that is rudimentary to the Air Force, the high-tech force.
Given the inability to describe a high-tech adversary or peer or
competitor, the nature of the competition for dollars today, I
have a general question for you, which is, can we afford to
maintain that investment in modernization? How important is it?
Is it so important that we are willing to give up force
structure? And, particularly, Colonel Warden, how do we get to
that quantum leap in capability that you are talking about, the
order of magnitude increase that you say is available in the
current environment?
Col. Warden
I am not certain that there is a requirement to give up
readiness in return for force structure. It is all a matter of
how you look at it. It is also a matter of how you think about
future force structure, whether you can really afford it. It
costs 20 years and $70 billion to build what was planned to be a
fleet 140 or so B-2s. It cost something in the vicinity, if I
recall correctly, of $2.5 billion to build a fleet of 40 F-117s,
actually 60 117s. The F-117 simply changed the world because
they were something that nobody else could deal with and
although the airplanes cost $50 or $60 million each, which was a
lot more than an F-16, when you measured in terms of the
results, they ended up being cheap. Combined with the precision
weapons, which in some cases cost $100,000 per bomb, were by far
the cheapest weapons that have ever been bought when you measure
against results. If you measure against results, then you start
realizing that what you are paying for technology is really
affordable. A quick example historically. A lot of you know this
at least in general terms. World War II, General Dugan was
talking about in the past the inaccuracy of bombs. If we wanted
to put one bomb in this room, 90 percent probability, we had to
drop over 9,000 from B-17s, which meant 1,000 airplanes which
meant putting 10,000 men over the target. Ten thousand men! In
the Gulf War, if we wanted 90 percent probability of putting a
bomb on that table, we'd send one 117, one guy and he dropped
one bomb. That is a four order of magnitude increase in
productivity. I don't care how much you paid for the 117, it is
a heck of a lot cheaper than maintaining ten thousand guys and
trying to organize and fly a thousand B-17s. It simply is dirt
cheap. We need to look for those other kinds of advantages. Why
should not weapon system development be basically following the
things that Phil's friend George Gilder has talked about so
much, the whole law of the microcosm? Moore's law. Why can't we
find those extraordinary gains in producivity on a daily basis?
I think we can, as long as we get out of this old Cold War idea
that you've got to build a thousand of something or whatever.
Hey, we got 40 F-117s; that was great. We probably didn't need a
hundred. But there sure ought to be 40 F-118s and F-119s on the
drawing board and they ought to be coming out about every three
years. If we think in terms of a program that produces results
instead of buying for numbers that are primarily based on an old
Newtonian concept of war that simply is irrelevant, I think we
can get there. I don't think it is even difficult to do.
Mr. Myers
I don't think there is a choice. If you are going to maintain
a global presence and you are going to influence the global
community and you are going to continue to take reductions in
funding, the cheapness of the technology is something you have
to keep up. There just isn't any other choice. You can't put a
division everywhere. You can't put an air wing everywhere. You
can put a flight that can put a bomb on that table if it needs
toand can achieve strategic, tactical and operational effects.
But in absence of the massive forces, however we've got to do
it, we've got to. There is no other option.
Mr. Lacombe
How do you answer the people who simply say you can't afford
it? What are you going to give up?
Dr. Gold
I don't see any way that we can avoid going down to about a
million active duty strength. I don't see any way that can not
mostly come out of the Army. The Army is going to need an
enormous amount of help to modernize. A smaller Army is not
necessarily a weaker Army. As John has said, you can have a much
stronger Army if you stop thinking in terms of divisions and
start thinking in terms of other structures and other forms of
weaponry. The biggest problem in terms of affording it is going
to be, not only developing core competencies, but as this plays
out in real life and you see that the Army is going hollow or at
best it needs 10 years to modernize and figure out what it is
doing as the Navy shrinks, is air power, not just Air Force, but
air power going to be called upon in this transition period
because some of the other stuff isn't there? That is one of the
major questions facing the Air Force and it is one of the
reasons why air power has to come first during this period
because it is so inherently flexible, because properly used, it
saves an awful lot of body bags. So, as a rule again, if it can
be done from the air for the foreseeable future, it should be
done from the air. It is going to become more and more important
as the other services go through their own travails. In other
words, we can't not afford it.
Mr. Myers
I am going to beat the already badly beaten horse one more
time. One way you afford it is that you decide the core
competencies of what you think is important and every service
stops trying to fund everything. You will find some economies
there and you apply this technology when you measure against
effects that it accomplishes against those specialties and those
competencies and all the services do that. You'll find some
economies there which will allow you to do that with smaller
forces.
Mr. Lacombe
General Dugan, you've had a good deal of experience in the
joint arena. We've just heard the solution. How are you going to
sell that to this chairman who wears a green suit?
Gen. Dugan
That is the hard part. The four orders of magnitude
improvement in activities is not the hard part. Four orders of
magnitude improvement in deliverables is the military industrial
complex at its very best. One of the fundamental problems is we
determine, because of long-standing policy, who is in charge of
events, who is in chrge of forces, who is in charge of decision
making by counting noses. One reason that mass of troops is very
important in our services, rather than mass effects, is because
the political decision making in the forces has to do with what
is called propensity of force. It is number of faces available
and what color uniform he or she has on. This is just as
fundamental to the American way of going to war as anything else
that we've talked about. In fact, it is a political question. It
is very difficult to fix internally. It needs external
intervention if someone is going to take that on. It takes an
appreciation for what men and manpower are really all about. In
fact, they are the most expensive part of the equation. They
should be valued very highly. They should be costed out very
highly.
The ability to bring on the 15 or 17-year officer or
noncommissioned officer in any one of the services and have
somebody who is a competent supervisor who knows about his or
her service, about his or her unit, about what kind of activity
they bring to the fight or the operation, is an important and
very expensive investment. Those items that have 10 thousand or
four orders of magnitude in improvement don't function unless
you have an individual who is very highly skilled can bring them
to the right place at the right time and employ them very
accurately and that applies to all the services. The ability to
focus on output as opposed to focus on input is a very difficult
problem and it is not going to be solved within the Pentagon.
Mr. Lacombe
Is there a strategy that helps us get there? I mentioned
earlier the two MRC strategy, and Dr. Gold was very quick to
correct me, he says it is not much of a strategy. We are getting
toward the end of our time, I do need to ask you, from your
perspective, what is the strategy? What is the strategy that we
should be espousing and where does the Air Force fit in that?
Col. Warden
Strategy always has time involved with it. This current MRC
approach doesn't have any time involved. In today's world, where
success goes to whomever exploits information, exploits the
situation faster than anybody else, how quickly we resolve an
issue has extraordinary consequences and has extraordinary
importance. We have got to have within our national strategy, it
seems to me, a time element, which, in a very simple sense, may
well be put in terms of having the ability to impose our will,
which means either to impose paralysis or energizing or whatever
it may happen to be on any sort of a reasonable opponent, which
really is anybody out there within a short period of time. The
shorter that period of time is the better off you are.
Twenty-four hours is probably a reasonable goal to work toward.
An hour, a minute, would be a heck of a lot better. It doesn't
mean that you've got to go out and shoot a million people in the
other fellow's army; it means you've got to make the other guy's
country, army, air force, simply stop functioning at the levels
required for the other guy to do something with it. Or
terrorists, or whatever Type Bs, Type Cs whatever they may
happen to be. When you start thinking in those terms, results,
or paralysis over time, then it seems some of the force
structuring ideas begin to be much simpler to deal with.
Dr. Gold
If we are going to participate in the age of the wars of
terror and identity, we have to remember we have an outer and an
inner border and both have to be defended. The Romans were able
to do it for centuries with an incredibly small number of forces
because everybody knew that if you offended the Romans, there
would be consequences. Maybe not this year; maybe not next year,
but the legion would show up. The British were able to practice
gunboat diplomacy because everybody knew if you did something
bad to the gunboat, a battleship would be there.
Maybe not next week; maybe not next month, but the battleship
would show up. Today, we have to do it quickly as John just
pointed out, with very limited forces, our responses have to be
fast. They have to be effective. We have to demonstrate that
when we have to, we can. The Romans had the luxury of time; we
don't. We need to have a capability-based force that can defend
the outer and the inner borders and act extremely quickly using
the advantages of technology.
Mr. Myers
I would agree with everything that has been said. I get
nervous when we start talking about two MRCs like it is the end
all and be all of our strategic thinking. Because there are
infinite possibilities. Think back to what we did in Europe and
how we faced the Soviet Union back in the old days and we came
up with something called flexible response based on our
capability to do a spectrum of things. We apply our technology
to maybe a new global, flexible response capability that is
based on the other side knowing damn well that we can see you if
you do something. Our space-based surveillance, our
communications, our decision making capability is getting so far
advanced, that while we are not going to be able to see one
individual or maybe a squad or even a company moving, if you
make a threat that is significant, if you move a military force
that is significant, we are going to see you. We need to develop
the capability to respond. And, to my mind, the cutting edge of
that response is through the air and space in a new global,
flexible response kind of capability.
Gen. Dugan
I'm glad you mentioned space because we have given it
