Pfaltzgraff: We have structured the conference to address a series of key issues and questions. Including, briefly: first, the new and likely threats and challenges that the United States will face in the early 21st century. Second, what will be the role of military power in 20th [sic] century national security strategy? Thirdly, how will the U.S. Army, together with the other Services, all represented here today and tomorrow, be able to anticipate the essential capabilities for tomorrow? Fourthly, how will we be able to ensure successful integration or cooperation, whatever it may be, between the Services while we eliminate unnecessary redundancies? And equally important, how will we be able to achieve greater alliance cooperation? Fifthly, how do we reconcile competing demands as we undertake change in three primary areas: modernization, human resources, and readiness? And last, but not least, in light of the foregoing, how can we move most effectively to maximize the unique opportunities and to overcome the challenges that we will face in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review?

In short, what are the requirements both in joint and alliance coalition operations if the United States and its partners are to provide the force package containing the appropriate combination of capabilities across a broad spectrum encompassing peace time operations and smaller contingencies as well as major theater wars?

On behalf of each of the co-sponsors and organizations therefore, I extend a cordial and warm welcome. We look forward to productive presentations, debates, and discussions during the next two days.

I would now like to turn the podium to Major General Robert St. Onge, who is Director of Strategy, Plans, and Policy, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans. Thank you.

St. Onge: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff, the Fletcher School, and the Office of the Secretary of DefenseNet Assessment, I welcome you and all of our guest speakers, panel members, and audience participants to this 1999 Fletcher conference. Additionally, I would like to extend a special welcome to the more than 20 officers and diplomats representing our allies from across the world. This is the 29th annual conference in a series designed to promote discussions and understanding of national security objectives, strategies, and priorities. When you review the exceptional list of speakers, panel members, and this august audience, I think it's pretty certain that we'll accomplish exactly that.

It is my honor to introduce to you the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, General John M. Keane, who became the 29th Vice Chief on 22 June of this yearan infantry officer who has commanded at every level from company to corpsmost recently served as the Deputy Commander in Chief of Atlantic Command. General Keane.

Keane: Well, good morning everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, it's really a distinct pleasure for me today to introduce our opening presenter, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Senator Lieberman is a lifelong resident of the great state of Connecticut. He received his bachelor's degree in 1964 from Yale University and Senator Lieberman is a ranking Democrat on the Governmental Affairs Committee. He's also a member of the Armed Services Committee, the Environmental and Public Works Committee, and the Small Business Committee. He has served as the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council since 1995. Senator Lieberman is a man of deeply held religious convictions. He's a dedicated family man. A person who embodies American values and lives his personal and public life in accordance with those values. He has worked tirelessly to advance the cause of freedom and respect for individual rights around the world.

He led and supported bipartisan efforts regarding the use of American military power in Desert Storm and again in Bosnia and Kosovo. He is at the forefront of the move to transform our military forces for the challenges we face today and also for the 21st century. He has co-sponsored legislation with the former Senator Dan Coats on joint experimentation. And he teamed with Senators Robertson and Santorum to make the quadrennial review process a permanent part of the institution. He is a published author, having written four books, on a wide variety of topics ranging from nuclear proliferation to a history of Connecticut state politics.

He is a husband, a father, a grandfather, and, as we all know, a true great American patriot. What an honor it is to have Senator Lieberman open the Fletcher Conference. Ladies and gentlemen, please, join me in a warm welcome for Senator Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman: Thank you. Thank you so much, General Keane, for that gracious and generous introduction. Thanks to all of you for the warm welcome. I want to thank you particularly, General, for mentioning the fact that I've written four books. Because, believe it or not, I've been up late and up early trying to write a fifth one that somebody asked me to do. But I also note that you didn't mention the names of my four earlier books. One of which was a study of the efforts to control nuclear weapons after the Second World War, which was called The Scorpion and the Tarantula. Comparing the U.S. and the Soviet [Union] during the Cold War to a scorpion and a tarantula.

I was once introduced several years ago in an event in Connecticut where the introducer was not as wise as you were. He tried to mention the names of the books and said that one of the books that I had written was called the Scorpion and the Tarantella. Very different idea. Thank you so much. It's great to be here, General Shinseki and Dr. Pfaltzgraff.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is an extraordinarily well-timed conference, but also the program is really impressive with the assortment of leaders and thinkers that you've brought togetherleaders who are also thinkers, I guess I should say to help guide us as we consider how to go about transforming the world's most powerful military force.

I want to play the part that an opening speaker should, which is the part of provocateur. I do so, I assure you, with great respect for and pride in the American military. And I do it in the spirit that runs through so much of our society today, particularly the private sector where change brought about by innovation and technology is so pervasive. And the spirit is that it is when you are at your most successful that you have to work the hardest, push the most forcefully, act with the most impatience to make sure that you remain as strong and successful as you have been.

And our military, thankfully, has been extraordinarily successful. It's not just that we're not at war today. We are, as we all in this room know, the dominant military power in the world by far. As such, I want to suggest that we have the luxury of thoroughly and thoughtfully deliberating on what the threats of tomorrow will be and what changes we need to make in military policy and practice to meet them. But those deliberations are going to be futile and potentially even fatal if we do not think critically about the status quo and the future ahead of us, if we do not challenge prevailing assumptions of today, if we do not prevail in carefully identifying the challenges of tomorrow and then working together to meet them.

This is a consequential lesson that I have come to learn over the years from my experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee with a wonderful group of colleagues of both parties as we've tried to grapple with the conflicting messages we were getting over our future security needs. And frankly, as we were kind of drawn by the day to day pressures and requirements of the authorization cycle of crises that occurred and didn't always have the opportunity, didn't have it sometimes at all, to step back and look out over the horizon. The world around then, as it is now, was changing rapidly with new threats emerging and old conceptions about warfare receding.

Yet the defense program sent to us by the Pentagon continued to be too much a statement of stasis. Looking very much as it did during the Cold War. With outside experts warning us of the serious flaws of this approach, which General Keane has been kind enough to note, Senator Coats and I, along with Senators McCain and Robb, decided to try to shake things up a little bit. We sponsored legislation tasking both the Pentagon and an outside panel of experts to separately consider the current and future challenges and recommend the military force we will need to respond to them.

As you know, the Quadrennial Defense Review was the assessment of the Pentagon. The National Defense Panel was the assessment done by the panel of outside experts who were specifically charged to be bold, to think outside the box, and to look skeptically at today's conventional wisdom. In this instance, perhaps rare in Washington, we were not seeking consensus. We hoped the results from these two assessments would in fact clash and would spark a broad debate about military transformation and help us in the Congress better do our job. Well, in so far as the clash was concerned, I'd guess I'd say mission accomplished.

These panels did in fact produce two fundamentally and constructively different evaluations. The QDR's conclusion was that, although the future military challenges will likely be different, the two-major-theater-war construct with some modifications is and will continue to be the proper standard against which to gauge our capability and our preparedness. By this standard, the QDR concluded the current forces and weapons are satisfactory and will continue to sustain our military dominance if modernized in kind.

The members of the NDP disagreed. They asserted that, and I quote, "we are at the cusp of a revolution in warfare," end quote. "And unless," and again I quote, "we are willing to pursue a new course, one different than that proposed by the QDR, then we are likely to have forces that are ill-suited to protect our security 20 years from now." Indeed, the NDP questioned the advisability of continuing to use the two-war standard and of continuing to procure some of our current core weapons, including large deck carriers, the Army's Crusader, and some short range tactical air systems.

It proposed instead that we establish an immediate strategy to develop a fundamentally different military. Funding systems that have capabilities essential for future effectiveness and terminating systems that will have decreasing value. This was the first of what I would call an official articulation of transformation. And I must say that I think that the NDP got it just about right. The dizzying pace of global change means our military will have to confront very different challenges in the future. Including large-scale urban warfare, space warfare, electronic informational warfare, and chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare.

But of course this new world also brings with it great opportunities and we are best positioned to take advantage of them if we will. The eye popping, mind boggling advances in technology we are engineering today are paving a path not just to a revolution in military affairs, but to a complete paradigm change in the way of war. A shift that will make us stronger and I think safer in the new century ahead. But let me now elaborate a bit.

Dramatic strides in a wide range of scientific disciplines combined with the exponential growth in the capacity of communication or in information systems make military capabilities that seemed fantastic, literally, just a few years ago, not only possible, but I'd say even probable in the years ahead. Probable, in fact, with the increasing speed and range of precision munitions and with our growing ability to make strategic operationally and tactical decisions based on unerring near real-time information.

It's not science fiction anymore to expect to protect ourselves from missile attacks, for instance. To project power with unprecedented speed over vast distances. To destroy a large, but technologically inferior, forcenot even in days to weeks, but perhaps within hours. Beginning only minutes after the decision to do so. With advances in nuclear power, hydrolysis, and hydrogen storage enabling us to create virtually unlimited sources of on-site power, our forces may soon be capable of indefinitely and independently operating without long supply lines and vulnerable support bases.

With advances in robotics and miniaturization, our forces on the ground may soon be capable of fighting with far fewer people and therefore running the risk of far fewer casualties. All of which is to say that, in time, the traditional land, sea, and air battles that have determined our current force structure and that drive current systems procurement may well occupy a much smaller part of our military
operations. If that is true, as I believe it is, it is certainly in our best interests to work together to plan accordingly for it.

Now the good news is, and I think the intellectual battle here has been won, the defense establishment has made it clear that it accepts transformation as a fundamental policy goal. And that's evident from a growing number of important official speeches and documents, including one made recently by General Shinseki. The Secretary of Defense has said that our defense policy is transformation and that the strategy to implement it is to "shape, respond, and prepare now." The QDR states, and I quote, "We must meet our requirements to shape and respond in the near term. While at the same time, we must transform U.S. combat capabilities and support structures to be able to shape and respond effectively in the face of future challenges," end quote.

And transformation as a goal is clearly at the core of Joint Vision 2010, which was declared during General Shalikashvili's time as Chairman and has certainly been carried on under the leadership of General Shelton. The bad news is that our actions and resourcing are not keeping pace with the intellectual conclusions and rhetorical pronouncements. While Pentagon civilian officials and Service chiefs all see their future forces as being fundamentally different than those of today, they urge that change be cautious and deliberate.

So we continue to place the highest priority on current readiness, keeping our organizations and weapons prepared to deal with the threats they were designed to deal with while trusting that incremental and evolutionary improvements will allow them to adapt to deal with different threats as they emerge. Consequently, our resource allocation is still too much like it was during the Cold War. Each of our Services currently spends 60 to 80 percent of its funds on the readinessoperations and maintenanceof current forces, and 20 to 40 percent of its funds on modernization tasks for improvements, often incremental improvements, procurement, testing, and evaluation.

The budget for science and technology, notably, which is the military of the future, is less than 2 percent of the overall military budget. Under currently proposed future year budgets in fact, that number will drop to 1 percent. That's not transformation. Transformation is change on a scale sufficient to effect a revolution in both thought and deed. And rapid enough to out pace our rivals who may act, as General Shali[kashvili] said, asymmetrically and at least maintain and, ideally, widen our future military superiority. What we are doing now, if you'll allow me to say, is talking the transformational talk, but we're not walking the revolutionary walk.

And all of this, as so much in life, comes down to choices and priorities. And the hard reality we have to face is that it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to go ahead with this cautious evolutionary approach and achieve the ends that we all share. Either in terms of the fiscal cost today or the risk that such an incremental approach poses to our security tomorrow.

Let me consider briefly the formerthe affordability of the current force. While they have described the problem differently"death spiral," in the words of Under Secretary Gansler"train wreck" in the words of a recent CSIS studythe situation described and the likely outcome is the same no matter how you slice it.

Our current force is large and the major systems are aging. As they continue to age, they cost more to operate, obviously. Newer versions of today's weapons systems are more and more expensive to procure. Making it impossible to recapitalize the existing force at its current size. Thus ensuring the overall force keeps getting older and even more expensive to operate.

At the same time, the cost of attracting and keeping people is rising dramatically. The estimates of how much it will take to pull out of this spiral are daunting and sobering. For example, CSIS estimates that by 2020, it could cost almost $700 billion a year in FY99 dollars to fully support the QDR force. And the likelihood of getting that I don't have to tell you is small. Now some urge us to solve this dilemma by increasing the defense budget. Committing 4 percent of GDP is often mentioned as a goal. I thoroughly agree that we need to spend more and I have worked very hard with other members of the SASC and Congress to reverse the decline in defense spending that began in 1986.

But the truth of the matter is, and I can tell you as a veteran of these particular conflicts, that there simply and sadly is not a large enough defense advocacy group in Congress, at a time of peace, to secure the kind of substantial increases needed to meet all these demands. Nor is there frankly strong enough public support to change that dynamic on Capitol Hill. National polls that ask what to do with any surplus money left over after balancing the budget find very few Americans who say we should spend it on national defense.

And so I think it's almost inevitable that our forces will become smaller as well as less modern unless we act now to reformulate our spending priorities and then, if you will, walk the transformation walk in a revolutionary way. Which is to say at this point, I think it's much more important to focus on how we invest our defense budget than on how much there isunderstanding that I and others in Congress will continue to argue that we need more. We must now adopt bold change as our defense policy and move with a greater sense of urgency to secure those elements that are necessary to achieve it. I want to talk about just a few of those elements that I think are particularly central.

The first is achieving a shared vision of the future and dealing in a way that is decisive with what we want our military to be able to do.

Next is acting quickly and authoritatively to decide which weapons, organizations, and concepts will advance our military effectiveness and then adopting policies that incentivize innovation and processes and research priorities that facilitate change.

And finally, increasing the priority of R&Dresearch and developmentand overhauling the R&D process to build a better foundation for future capability.

It's critical that we reach a consensus on our expectations for our military. After all, as the great Yogi Berra once said (and I do this for General Keane because I know he's a fellow Northeasterner anyway), if you don't know where you're going, you may end up somewhere else. Our military is optimized still too much for Cold War missions and our concepts for using military force reflect our past experiences, understandably, and our traditional mission focus. We don't know where or when we may commit our military in the future, but we do know that we will ask it to do very different things under very different conditions than we have in the past.

We know this because of the obvious changes in the strategic and operational challenges we already face in the new geo-politics of today and in the new capabilities that will enable both our forces and our opponents to do things different. Take, for example, our primary security missionwhich is to defend our homeland against attack. During the Cold War, that meant fighting conventionally outside of the U.S. while deterring strikes against our own territory. And that was sensible. We couldn't defend directly against nuclear attack.

Today, the range of potential attacks against our territory is growing, but so is our ability, remarkably, to directly defend against those threats. In the future, we'll probably ask our military to project power not just to defend national interests, but as we have seen again in recent years, also to promote American principles. That means acting not just to defeat an opposing military force, but also to prevent or reverse, for instance, humanitarian catastrophes. And that has implications that need thorough exploration.

Two come quickly to mind. The first concerns our doctrine for applying force. The current doctrine of overwhelming force is not desirable politically nor necessary militarily in all these cases. While we've got to be prepared to act alone, we will also want to and tend to act with our allies. And their views about force and its application may be different from ours in these circumstances. As we've seen recently. Accordingly, we may have to focus less on achieving maximum possible force and more on achieving what my senate colleague Carl Levin has termed "maximum achievable force." In other words, not just achieving maximum possible force, but maximum achievable force.

By this, I think he means that a variety of constraints will likely exist that will determine what means we can use and where we could use them. However, since we can never allow maximum achievable force to fall below the level of necessary force, we need to utilize the rapid advances in technology to increase lethality and to know better our opponents' vulnerability so we can achieve devastating effect through the selective and graduated application of force.

The second concerns what forces we will need. Deciding what systems we must build and how to organize our forces of course flows from the decisions we make about the first point and on the growing potential for new capability through technology, different organizations, and imaginative ways of using them. The Services today are, to their great credit, beginning to take steps, serious steps to transform themselves.

I noted the recent comments of General Shinseki. On October 12, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army announced his intention to begin to transform the Army from a heavy force, as it was generally configured during the Cold War, to one that will be more effective against the threats that now seem most likely and most dangerous. His goal is clearly to make the Army more strategically relevant by making it lighter, more deployable, more lethal, and more sustainable. And I thank and congratulate him for that. The U.S. Air Force has begun to reorganize its units into air expeditionary forces to be more responsive to the need for air power by the war fighting commanders.

These are very positive and encouraging steps. However, I remain concerned that they are not coming fast enough or going far enough. Fundamental change is very difficult to effect anywhere. Especially in organizations like the Department of Defense that are not only large, but are successful. That's the hardest time to bring about change. But in this time, it is necessary. While each Service is moving to reorganize and, in some cases, to consider new weapons and potentially new ways of operating, they still seem to be acting mostly alone with relatively little coordination or even, if I can put it this way, exchange of observers.

This is a problem. Because to successfully transform our military will require that we move to the next level of jointness. And that clearly is the focus of this conference. I'm struck, perhaps this will merit a footnote in some future military history, that the notion of strategic responsiveness and jointness has made it onto the mug that is on the table in front of you. Save it.

By now, virtually every respectable thinker believes that future operations will be increasingly joint, interagency, and combined. And that while competition among the Services can assist in determining how best to exploit new capabilities or solve emerging challenges, there just has to be greater collaboration. Colonel Robert Killibrew, a former Deputy Director of the "Army After Next" project, stated this very well when he wrote, and I quote, "The next stage of jointness will be interdependent force structures. Technology is less of a hurdle than cross-fertilization of Service programs. Increasingly, new ground, maritime, and aerospace systems must be developed jointly." End of quote.

In order to do this, I think we've got to make two reforms a high priority. First, we should refine Joint Vision 2010 and accelerate its implementation. It's a strong working document. We have a critical need to reach a joint consensus on the key strategic and operational tasks that our future forces must execute and the type and level of opposition to plan for in executing those tasks. Right now Joint Vision 2010 gives planners general directions to pursue, but it does not specify to the Services what [are] their key tasks or the priority of those tasks.

Second, we should modify our process for developing military requirements. From the stream of hearing testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, I must tell you that I don't see a real process, a real joint process that does tradeoff analysis and makes decisions among major service weapons that perform identical or overlapping combat functions nor one that does not consistently subordinate joint priorities to Service priorities. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which many hoped would do this, has not fully done so. It needs to be strengthened.

And that leads me to a more difficult question which in this age of rapid change and uncertainty is an important one. And that is how are we to know what a very different military should look like? How will we know when we're making the right kind of progress in transforming ourselves? It's not an easy question. Secretary Cohen and General Shelton, encouraged and supported by legislation Congress passed last year, established a very promising process to answer that question.

On October 1 of 1998, they charged the Commander in Chief of the United States Atlantic Command, Admiral Harold Gehman and his deputy then, General Keane, to put in place a joint experimentation process to objectively determine which new technologies, organizations, and concepts of operation would be most likely to lead to future military superiority. In the time since, Admiral Gehman has done a superb job of implementing this process. And just a month ago, I was very pleased to note the Secretary and the Chairman reiterated the importance of joint experimentation by re-designating the United States Atlantic Command as the United States Joint Forces Command.

I thank and applaud Secretary Cohen and General Shelton for this commitment to transformation of the U.S. military and for their courage in making some of the tough choices needed to get it done. It's a very good beginning. But I must add that Joint Forces Command has not yet conducted its first major experiment and it has not yet made its first recommendation that threatens a core service weapon or role. We cannot judge its effectiveness until it has done so and until we see if there's an impact on resourcing decisions.

That's when the rubber will really meet the road. We all will watch that closely and inevitably with some impatience. And when that moment of challenge comes, I hope we in the Congress, you in the Pentagon, and those outside who care about and follow our military policy will be supportive of the work of the Joint Forces Command.

Finally, I want to raise a concern that I think could actually stop our transformation in its tracks. No matter how well all the rest I've talked about is going, we could hand our opponents the advantage in the area of greatest strength, which is technology. And what I'm talking about here is what I alluded to before briefly and that is declining defense R&D spending. Especially for fundamental science, which has been the wellspring of our national military and commercial prowess.

In the past half century, the Department of Defense has funded the bulk of basic science. Including, remarkably, 58 percent of this country's Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry and 43 percent of America's Nobel laureates in physics. Recently, however, in the post Cold War downsizing, DoD has been drawn into focusing more and more of its attention on the urgent needs of the present. Consequently, it has not been able to nurture the sources of its longer-term technological strength. And so DoD sponsored research and development has actually declined 30 percent over the last six years. And it's projected to decline again next year.

The government's civilian research portfolio is simultaneously losing its vigor. Current projections are that it will drop another 15 percent in value over the next five years. Such declines are alarming and they are consequential. With a 30 percent drop in military R&D behind us, another 6.6 percent decrease slated for next year, and steady project cuts in federally funded civilian R&D in all areas except health research ahead of us, we've got to ask ourselves: where's our technological and, therefore, our military superiority going to come from? Private sector R&D, I'm afraid, will offer very little help.

Industry obtains its new ideas from the same pool of government funded research as everyone else. Seventy-three percent of the papers cited in industrial patents are from government funded research. And as you know, a lot of it has been DoD funded research. Industry of course does conduct its own R&D, but it is overwhelmingly and increasingly concentrated on the final stages of product development. When the military leverages its R&D efforts off of industry, it is leveraging only or primarily this final stage. Both rely on government sponsored research for the intellectual groundwork up to that point. So we've got to reverse this unfortunate course and quickly or we will not have the technology that we assume we will have over the next 20 to 30 years.

Increasing funding for science in and of itself will not solve the problem. R&D does not advance military innovation unless it is a connected process with each stage integrated and networked to further maximize technology advantages. DoD innovation remains organized around an older, disconnected R&D model. And now that each stage is under-funded, the Pentagon's innovation engine, once truly the envy of the world, is, I'm afraid, slowing. The defense innovation legislation that Senators Roberts, Santorum, and Bingham and I worked on during this past session, this current session, is designed to reverse that deceleration and develop a fully integrated approach and we're optimistic that it will help in doing so.

So in summation. In the process of military transformation, there will be winners and losers. We will need to disinvest in programs that have great bureaucratic and political power in the Pentagon and in Congress. And we will have to change beliefs that lie at the core of great organizations that have been successful and that will therefore be resisted. Naturally it's not going to be easy, but it is important. And I think as we approach these challenges, we can take some comfort from the historic fact that this is not the first revolution in military affairs. Others have successfully managed similar challenges in the past and I am confident we will, too, working together in our own time.

It is our turn now and our responsibility to go forward and meet the future. As Sir Francis Bacon said centuries ago in words that are still relevant today as we begin a new millennium, "He who will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils." Thank you very much. Have a wonderful conference.

Pfaltzgraff: Senator Lieberman will take a few questions from the audience. In posing your question, let me make a logistical comment. There will be a microphone that has to be given to you or located adjacent to you, that we have people who will do that, but also the camera. Because this is being beamed into the Pentagon auditorium and therefore we want to make sure that we have audio and visual capabilities. So who would be the first questioner for Senator Lieberman? Yes. Please identify yourself and wait till the microphone comes over and the camera. The camera's coming.

Rosen: Hello, Mark Rosen of Booz, Allen, and Hamilton. First, I applaud the need for increased speed and extent of transformation. One concern. The concern is you can infer from your speech, Senator, that we need to pit readiness today versus transformation for tomorrow. And you could infer that it's two major theater wars (MTWs) or something else. But I would argue that's a false choice perhaps because you could even have three or four MTWs, three or four war capability. Not a force sizing mechanism, but capability. And that maybe the problem is how we measure and define readiness. Maybe we can continue to maintain readiness, that's the price of being a superpower, and still do the tough transformation.

Maybe the real bill-payers out there are in modernization versus modernization. And look at some of the big-ticket items out there and the relevance of those and not pick readiness today versus readiness tomorrow. I just am concerned about a false choice. It's the essential nature of a superpower to maintain readiness. We can do that and still make the tough choices for transformation.

Lieberman: Well, as I said at the outset, an opening speaker has to impose some false choice or tough choice or provoke. I understand that on the ground or in the office it's harder choices. I must say though that I do feel that, because of our strength, if we are forcedand these are not singular choices. They occur in thousands of different ways, some large, some smallthat I think we have to be prepared, because of our strength, to take acceptable risks in the current time in order to guarantee our security in the future.

So I guess the way to state it is not that the choices were false, but I may have posed them more absolutely than is real. There will always be a spectrum and Congress will never be willing to get us to a point where we're not ready for current threats. My own sense is that we're tipped too much toward the current readiness now and not enough in the future.

But you make another good point and this is being wrestled through in the congressional authorization and appropriation processes, which is that the other choice is about what kinds of modernization. And that's part of what I was trying to say. And again, it's not easy because it involves a lot of large, successful interests. But sometimes those choices will be, for instance, between modernizing existing systems or doing less and going to bold transformation or modernization. Sometimes it will be because technology changes so rapidly. To modernize, but not actually build, if you will, in enormous numbers because of the extent to which the budget is constrained and we expect technology to change. And of course part of what we're learning and we've got to continue is to build platformswe've done this better and better, I thinkto build platforms that have parts that are effectively removable and replaceable by more modern parts as they develop. So a good point, but I guess I don't want to leave you with the impression, another impression that I meant to give, which is that we're strong now. And my fear is that unless we implement a transformational strategy, we're not going to be that strong in the future.

Krauss: Yes, hi. I'm Dr. Michael Krauss. I'm a member of the Army Science Board, Senator Lieberman. I worked for Amazon.com for about a year and I'd like to make the point about logistical transformation within the military. The thought process here is to use the web as quickly as we can in its relationship to supplying and sustaining our forces. That is a transformation that is ongoing in commercial industry globally. It eliminates one of the timed requirements that we have in deploying our forces. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on transforming the logistic structure of the DoD and wondering how commercial industry may be able to help.

Lieberman: I think that the question makes the statement and I don't have much to add to it. Any of you and a lot of you are not only consumers of modern transformational Services in the commercial sector, but have experienced them and been involved in offering them as you have, Doctor. And I just think we have a lot to learn. Things are changing so rapidly. I was at a program in Connecticut yesterday morning about the new economy and about what we are in our state could do together to take advantage of the new economy and to sustain economic growth. And, you know, the life cycle of products is, let alone delivery systems, is incredibly short.

And, well, as you know from history, so many developments that occur in science or in the commercial sector work their way naturally into the military. And I think, therefore, we have a lot to learn at every stage, it's not a totalyou can't just automatically transfer everything from Amazon.com to the U.S. Army, but we have a lot to learn from everything happening out there and we have to accept a mandate to try to change as rapidly as the world around is changing. Again, because if we don't, certainly in pursuit of asymmetrical advantage, our opponents will.

And as you know, we've already begun to see that in some of the engagements we've been involved in in recent years. You see it on a relatively primitive level, but it's logical and it's, for our opponents, it's essentially irresistible. So it's going to happen and we've got to be ready for it.

Pfaltzgraff: Perhaps that is the note on which we should thank you, Senator Lieberman, for this outstanding opening presentation which really sets the stage for what we plan to do in the remaining day and a half.

Lieberman: I'm sorry I have to go to the Hill. I think it's going to be much more interesting here.

Pfaltzgraff: But we do want to make sure that you take with you one of those strategic responsiveness mugs to which you referred. So thank you very much, Senator Lieberman.

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