Tuesday, November 2, 1999 10:15 to 11:45 a.m.
Panel 1:

Understanding the Implications of the 21st Century Challenges

Senator John Warner
Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes
Mr. Robert D. Kaplan
Dr. Richard A. Falkenrath

Pfaltzgraff: There are of course several key challenges that come immediately to mind as we think about the international security landscape of the early years and decades of the 21st century. The first would be the eventual rise of other great powers or what are termed near peer competitors. Secondly, the collapse of states and the greater incidents of intrastate conflict. Thirdly, weapons of mass destruction and their ongoing proliferation. Fourthly, the dynamics of the domestic setting in the United States, which also shapes the landscape within which we operate. And finally in this all too short list, information warfare including cyber terrorism, of course, as well as other forms of terrorism.

In order to set the stage for understanding these and other challenges and their implications, we have here an outstanding panel which has a great deal of diversity of perspective on it. Let me mention that Senator Warner has been delayed and expects to be here byOh, there he is. Senator, welcome. Then Senator Warner is with us. Wonderful. We will go in the order in which we had planned then.

First, we have Senator Warner who is Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and has served in the United States Senate since 1978. Among his many previous appointments, which I will not list here, many of them I listed in the program, I should only point out that he was Under Secretary of the Navy and subsequently Secretary of the Navy.

Next on the panel, we will hear from Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes. He is presently President of PMH Enterprises, which is a consulting firm. Previously he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1996 and 1999, and held many other important appointments as he rose through the ranks of the U.S. Army.

Thirdly, we will have a presentation by Robert A. Kaplan who is correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and is the author of seven excellent best-selling books, including Balkan Ghosts and most recently Ends of the Earth. And I might add he is about to publish another book which is called The Coming Anarchy, which is a collection of essays that he has written. Mr. Kaplan's articles have appeared in many places, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

Finally as our panel member this morning, we have Dr. Richard A. Falkenrath who is presently Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author or co-author of several books and many journal articles. His most recent book is America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack.

So with that outstanding panel, we turn first to Senator Warner for his presentation. Senator, welcome.

Warner: I'm caught between votes, as we say. First, in my lapel is a little indication I voted today in Virginia. And I left that on for this reason. To me it's symbolic of why we're here. I was able to cast that vote this morning because of successive generations of men and women of the armed forces of the United States who historically have saved this great republic of ours in its 210-year-plus existence. I never forget that. I also never forget that twice I was given the opportunity, first in the closing days of World War II at age 17 and then during the Korean War, to proudly wear the uniform of the United States.

My Service in both of those periods were very insignificant. But nevertheless, it gave me an insight into the life of the person that serves in uniform. And whatever I have done in 21 years on the Armed Services Committee and now as privileged to be the Chairman, is to try and give to this current generation and future generations of young men and women in all the uniforms the opportunities that I and others had and, indeed, where I can, either openly or surreptitiously, even more. And this year we were able to achieve the first positive incremental change in funding in 14 consecutive years of declining defense budgets. We were able to get roughly $8 billion into the overall defense budget over and above inflation.

But that didn't come by accident. Many participated. I, but one. I want to credit the Chairman and the members of the Joint Chiefs who on two occasions came before my committee. And exercising the special prerogative that we have, namely that, yes, you'll give your name, rank, and serial number and you will also give us your program and what the Secretary of Defense and the President has instructed as the policy, but you'll give us your personal opinion. And every one of those individuals, beginning in September a year ago and again in January in two successive meetings and innumerable private consultations, those chiefs boldly and bravely told me and my colleagues on the committee "we need added funds here, here, here, here," and gave us the explicit numbers.

When the administration was confronted with that, suddenly the train began to leave the station towards additional defense spending. Then I had the task as Chairman to figure out what was the engine that was going to pull that train through the perilous valleys and passes and, indeed, over the mountain to make it law. And we coupled on as the engine the pay raise. And therein we had the votes and that train did come into the station and was a very strong piece of legislation increasing the long overdue benefits, both in pay, retirement, and otherwise.

Second point I wish to make today. Again, I draw a little on my very modest association with the active military. I went down to Quantico Friday night, just three or four nights ago, to address the 50th reunion of my basic class. We had about 170 that turned up. And the theme of my remarks was the last war. Not the forgotten war into which a number of us participated in Korea, but the last war, being Kosovo. That operation, while it extended longer than we anticipated, nevertheless was casualty free in terms of combat losses.

Two airmen, brave airmen, were rescued by heroic circumstances. We did lose a number of individuals in the work-up, the training, and the preparatory action to go in. But America only remembers the last war. And now the consciousness across this country and indeed in the Congress of the United States is: if we do it again, we can expect a comparable situation. And my classmates and I sat there and were reminded of the forgotten war in Korea when over 50,000 lost their lives and there remain today seven or eight thousand unaccounted for and missing. America has forgotten that. America now thinks that with modern technology we can achieve everything.

America is basically asleep with regard to the precarious situation on the Korean peninsula where our group, most of them, went 50 years ago. And that situation could erupt on a moment's notice. And within 72 hours, it could be up to 10,000 casualties, military and civilian, right along that precarious dividing line between North and South Korea. And then I posed the question how would America react to that situation? Is there the staying power in this nation? Is there the staying power to see it through?

I spoke on the floor of the Senate this past week along with many others on behalf of my dearest friend, John Chaffee. John and I, this November, would mark the 30-year period where we have been partners. It was 30 years ago that Melvin Laird, then Secretary of Defense, put together his team. Chaffee as Secretary of the Navy, I as Undersecretary. And we went into that situation in the peak ofthat is 1969, we finally took up our duties in the Pentagonthe peak of the war in Vietnam.

I can recall, and I reviewed this with Secretary Laird as we went back and forth to the historic funeral on Saturday, some of the details of that precarious period in the spring of '69. And when one day, it was a Saturday, he called down to Chaffee and me and said, "You guys get down to the Mall, take a look, and come back and tell me what you saw." We quickly recognized that in our blue suits and ties that would not work out. We put on some old khakis, some tennis shoes, got an old vehicle, and drove to the Mall.

And there John Chaffee and I witnessed a sight we never have forgotten. Over 1 million young men and women were demonstrating, largely peacefully, but nevertheless demonstrating against what they thought was a war that was totally inequitable to their interest and to their generation. And I remember as we drove back in the car, Chaffee reminisced with me about his days on Guadalcanal as a rifleman, as the platoon leader at Okinawa, indeed a company commander in Korea. And he said in all of those instances when we kind of hit bottom, and we all did hit bottom, we thought of the folks back home and how they stood so solidly behind us in the prosecution of those conflicts and the risks we individually and collectively were taking.

We went in and we talked with Secretary of Defense Laird at great length. Laird had been in World War II as a sailor. He was wounded at Okinawa. He was an officer aboard a destroyer. So these men had seen it. These men understood our United States. And this is the thought that haunts me today: what is the staying power if, once again, we're committed where we've got to take significant casualties? And I'll close with one other observation just to throw out ideas I hope are discussed.

Last night I visited with the new General Secretary of NATO, Robertson, who did a wonderful job during the Kosovo action. He worked in very close partnership with Bill Cohen. I worked with him throughout that conflict. And on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of NATO here in Washington, the last thing they did was to introduce and sign and promulgate the new strategic concept for NATO. It's written as well, I suppose, as craftsmen can to disguise what it is they really want to do. But NATO grew up on the concept of Article V that an attack on one is an attack on all and we will be there like a band of brothers to defend whichever nation befalls that attack.

But this new concept lays the foundation to go beyond the geographic area of the 19 nations. Much like we did in Kosovo. And we've got to come back to the central question first as military people, if you've got a plan to defend your 19 nations and your strategic plans are laid out and you've got this much lift and you've got this much transport, be it ground, sea, or air, then what happens when you hold your original 19-nation strategic plan in place while you lift part of those forces and you go elsewhere?

And we saw it in this Kosovar operation where the United States supported 70 percent of the lift, 50 percent of the tactical mission, and much of the strategic guided missiles. And the other nations, seven of them that actually got into the combat with this, simply did not have in number commensurate with ours those assets. And I do not see on the horizon, as I told the Secretary General last night, the plans in place for those nations to begin to acquire the equipment to pull a load comparable, proportionate to ours should another conflict hit NATO and particularly if it should be out of area. I've taken more of my time than I should. I thank you very much.

Hughes: Good morning. My presentation is dependent on visual cues. So if you'll bring up the view graphs, please, I would appreciate it. Next view graph, please. The trends as I see them now do not fit our traditional context. Change has occurred, as you know, and you've lived through it and that certainly will continue. Next view graph. My personal view is this is one way to characterize it. No bear, but many snakes. We have a new era in front of us. I would like to refer to it as the technology information or "techno-info" era in which great uncertainty abounds.

And one of the key points I need to make to this audience today is, in my view as one of your senior intelligence officers, capability does not match the threat. In some cases, it doesn't match because there's greater than the threat requires. And in some cases, it doesn't match because it is inadequate to meet the needs of the future. Next.

What we have now, in my view, was essentially put in place in terms of its design 20 years ago and much of it was built 10 or more years ago. So my message to you today is we are behind. And not only technology and application, but if you look forward to the future, we are behind the state of the art by two technical generations at least. Next.

There's some good news and some bad news here. Our enemies are essentially in the same circumstances. Or potential enemies. The bad news is they are not standing still. And very selectively within their economic abilities and circumstantially, they are seeking technologies and capabilities which will give them some circumstantial advantage. Next.

The technology trends are listed here. It would take too long in this forum to discuss each one, but I would like to just mention the first: micro technologies or nano-technologies, which are sub-micro. And the effect of that has been, as you know, that everything that was large and heavy and slow could now be made small and light and fast. And that change alone has literally revolutionized our circumstances. If you take all of these other technology trends and add them together, they are collectively impacting not only on the United States but on the entire global condition. Next.

One example of this trend line which I think you will agree has been well publicized is the interaction between the nations on this view graph, the technology transfer that has occurred, and the resulting strategic, operational, and, indeed, tactical threats that have resulted because of that. And the Korean Peninsula, as the Senator mentioned, is one good example of that where we are now immediately vulnerable from intra-theater and tactical missiles from North Korea which could conceivably, would be tipped with weapons of mass destruction. That circumstance alone ought to send alarm bells not only through our community, but through our social order. Next.

My personal view, and this is my view, is that we have about eight to 10 years before the next wave of challenges and threatening conditions emerge which will threaten our vital national interest and our homeland. In the meantime of course, we have lesser included problems to deal with. Next.

What does this mean? Well, it means, and I know I'm speaking to the choir here, we must change and we must modernize and we must indeed adapt to the future. Next.

My personal view is the U.S. has no true peer competitor now. However, we may have one in the future. My guess is that it will probably be an alliance or an amalgamation or group which will seize the day for some reason and oppose us selectively and circumstantially in a way that will threaten us in vital terms. Next.

What's missing right now is a problem for us. Because it is very difficult to portray the future without imagining it. And we don't have the current threat we used to depend upon to posture our forces against so that every person, citizen, leader, and military professional could clearly understand. Next.

However, we need to point out to everyone that many dangerous conditions persist. And indeed, since we are the global power and since we are depended upon, once again I'll refer to Senator Warner's comments, as the country capable of projecting power against enemies, large and small, we are indeed looked to to answer the needs of the future. And major powers, indeed there are a number of them, are important, but they're not our only concern. Next.

Our future, as you know, will include involvement in many different circumstances, some of which will be because we could not ignore them or could not abide them. Next.

The future in my view is conditional and circumstantial. And this is a non-traditional answer to give for we involve ourselves. It depends. It depends a lot on politics, circumstances, and conditions. And sometimes it depends on economic determinism. For whatever reasons when we become involved, we have to meet the need. Next.

There are key reasons for conflict and these reasons, by the way, do not lend themselves to being solved by the application merely of military force alone. And that's a key point I would like to pass along to you. As important as our community is, as vital as it is to the protection of the United States and our security interests around the world, we are not in this game alone. All the elements of national power and international power have to be brought to bear to succeed. Next.

There are important ongoing problems. You know all of these very well. I will mention the last one as something that has given us difficulties in understanding and dealing with. Because criminal activities are now melding into national security concerns. Indeed in the case of the national drug problem, you can see it right before your eyes today. I think this will come to be more important in the future as criminal activities tend toward more involvement, greater impact on issues of national security. Next.

Proliferation is a significant problem of weapons of mass destruction and of conventional capabilities which are directly threatening to us. Next.

The emerging threats are the ones that I need to communicate directly to you today as something we'll have to focus on. We cannot discount the rise of alliances. Indeed history is filled with examples of individual nations, taken separately, who we did not view as a vital threat, but when they assembled together and used their collective force and power against our interest, they were indeed more than we anticipated. Next.

The emerging global security environment is extremely complex. All of it, taken together, is leading us toward a very uncertain future. And I know that's a problem, especially for the military professionals and the civilian leaders in this room to try to quantify and describe to others so that they can understand it. Suffice to say if each of these topical areas could be expanded upon and discussed among you, perhaps you might find at least the beginning of the pathway toward the future. Next.

The changing nature of warfare is also critical especially to the U.S. Army. Asynchronous and asymmetric conditions abound. There are indeed some notable exceptions. And, once again, Senator Warner touched on the issues of the Korean Peninsula which would indeed, if conflict occurred there, be very time sensitive, immediate, and would be very symmetric to the conditions on that peninsula. Small territory, relatively short time lines, large capable conventional and unconventional forces arrayed linearly and postured for immediate conflict. Next.

The U.S. is vulnerable to many conditions, but one that I want to highlight is that we are vulnerable to the idea of simultaneous occurrences causing large war effect. Indeed, some of you are literally tired because you have worked through so many of these lesser included conflicts. You have worked yourselves into near exhaustion. And I use the metaphor here being nibbled to death by ducks. And indeed, I think it's a worthy example of what can and perhaps has begun to happen to us. Next.

Should we be more like police and less like big war warriors? Not in my view. We have to keep our eye on the ball. The reason we exist is big war. But we have to somehow compose ourselves to be adaptable. Next.

This view graph is somewhat complex, but gives you the idea that we're going to move from regional competitors, in part because of changing conditions and in part from the effect of technology, toward a set of distributed global competitors which are going to be more difficult to deal with than the small regional issues have been in the past. Next.

These categories of conflict I think you know very well. I'll just say that we find ourselves often in the lower left hand corner of this view graph, in the non-traditional application of military power toward peacekeeping, nation building, operations other than war, and the kind of circumstances that we have not trained, equipped, or even conceived of doing in the past. Next.

The questions now are will these conditions persist? And my view is, yes, they will. However, the future is going to be extremely complex and we cannot lose sight of the big war possibility which is indeed our reason for existing. Next.

The future is elusive indeed. Reality is much different from what one might be able to imagine. And the key is that imagination. I would urge everyone in this audience to try to bring out of your imagination the possibilities and use those instead of what you see immediately before you. Next.

The possibilities we can't ignore are listed here and I would just point to the bottom one as perhaps the most important. We have long postured ourselves against two major theater wars or major regional contingencies. My view is there could be more and the idea of simultaneous occurrences of two or more events should be an operational concept we attend to in our planning and conceptualizing for the future. Next.

The future course indeed is different. There has been a blurring of distinctions. The general can talk to the private through automation and telecommunications. And even worse, the private can talk to the general and the general may answer the private. And this has radically changed our condition. Next.

This means we have to take a different approach. Indeed, in part it's a mechanism of the application of force and in part the mere administration of our Army and our military. Next.

The future force cannot completely overcome the need for physical power merely by information dominance. We have to find the right balance. Next.

And the issue of finding that balance is right sizing somehow. My view is that that should be an adaptable, modular course which I believe the Chief of Staff and the Vice Chief of Staff and their team have put forward now and that's what they're about and working on. And I think they're on the right track. Next.

A way to approach this is to try to decide on function what it is you expect the Army and the American military to do and then, and only then, devise the form. Next.

Imagining and conceptualizing the threat is what this is all about. And a place to start is to imagine the consequences of a variety of events that we can all postulate. Next.

Indeed, consequence management in my view is perhaps the critical task of the future. To somehow come to grips with the emerging potential for conflict, deter it, prevent it, solve it, intercept it, interdict it, and, if we have to, fight and win it quickly. Next.

The threats in my view are conditional and circumstantial as I told you. Everything is very unclear. Next.

I believe that most of the conflicts we're likely to be involved in will be short, relatively, and will be relatively small. Peacekeeping is an example of the alternative. It will be along and, on occasion or collectively, our peacekeeping forces will be broad in scope and mission. Next.

Weapons of mass destruction, in my view, must be anticipated not because, that's such a blinding flash of the obvious, but because they exist and there are people who will use them. Next.

The impending changes forged by technology in these new circumstances are going to affect everything. In fact, they already have. I hope some of them will be positive and there will be less war. Next.

These critical uncertainties, however, are facing us now and some of them are very difficult to deal with like shifts in regional power and unconventional warfare trends. Next.

The critical uncertainties also include these things that we cannot control. In some cases, acts of men. In some cases, acts of God. Next.

I do think there are many positive trends and the main one is we have a community of nations that does seem to work together. Some would wish that it were more successful at times, but you cannot deny that it's there. Next.

New technology is changing things and will continue to change everything. Much of that change can indeed be positive. But I need to point out that dual use circumstances for the very best, the most noble purpose, can indeed be used as a weapon against not only people, but against the social institutions that bind the fabric of our global condition together. Next.

My conclusions are: we've got a lot of competitors out there and more will arise. The world community is going to continue to struggle with the problems you see on this view graph and you know so well. Next.

The bottom lines are I see general instability on the horizon, but I see every good reason to believe we can control most of it. However, we must start now to prepare for that eight to 10 year out emergence of some kind of alliance or coalition which will present a true threat to our vital national interest. Next.

The dangers remain. The Army's very important because the Army brings with it the infrastructure to produce staying power and it is the sustaining combat force on the land. Next.

I like this quote. As an intelligence officer serving in the Army and in the joint community for many years, I was always hoping to deliver certainty. I never could. Thank you very much.

Kaplan: Thank you very much, General Hughes. Good morning. If I was standing before you a hundred years ago and trying to talk about the threats of the 20th century coming out of the 19th century, it would be very difficult for me to do so because three words did not exist in any dictionary a hundred years ago: totalitarianism, fascism, and inflation. The point is, the problems and evils of the next century may not even have names yet. Nevertheless, the only respectable futurology is the study of history. So we've got to try to look at the past to try to get some sort of a model about what's going to happen so we will be somewhat less surprised.

And I think the best concept on this was written by Arnold Toynbee in his study of history in the early part of the 20th century. Toynbee defined then that the basic problems, the basic political and military instability of the 20th century came from the way that mass movements or democratization in Europe or Japan chain reacted with the Industrial Revolution to form fascism in Italy, the Nazi movement in Germany, militarism in Japan. Because remember, Hitler, Mussolini, the Nazi party, the fascist party in Italy, these started out as democratic workers' movements on a street level. It was impossible to predict how exactly they would evolve. And yet none of these leaders, Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini, could have become what they were without the Industrial Revolution as a backdrop. Railroads, telegraphs, ships, tanks, aircraft carriers.

So using that as an example, I would say that the biggest challenge we face is the way that mass democratization in one form or another, not through Europe, but throughout the world now, will chain react with the post-Industrial Revolution to produce new kinds of evils and new forms of instabilities.

Now let me talk first about the problems of democracy and then about the differences between the Industrial Revolution and the post-Industrial Revolution because that is key because the problems that we're going to face in the next decade or so are going to be different than the ones we faced in the 20th century.

The problem is that democracy and technology are both value neutral. They don't necessarily make a country or a society better or worse. It depends upon the circumstances in which they evolve and are applied. And the problem with democracy is that it tends to work best when it's instituted last. When you already have a society in which you have a sizable middle class that pays its income taxes, when you have workable institutions manned by bureaucrats whose families have been literate for two or three generations, when the big problems and issues of a society have already been agreed upon, like where the borders are, what ethnic group, if any, controls what territory. When these things are agreed upon and in place, then you could afford to have weak new democratic governments with minority parties in control in the parliament who can argue about things that are considered by the media as primary issues, but in fact are secondary issues. Like the budget and things like that. But the problem is that throughout the world now, societies are democratizing where none of these prerequisites are in place. And just some examples.

A few decades from now, somebody's going to write the history of the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the 1990s. And one of the concepts that that historian is going to say is they were a consequence of democratization. The breakdown of an authoritarian system in which elections in each republic, either brought to power or legitimized in power, politicians who pursued an ethnically based policy of one sort or another.

Rwanda was a case where the democratization of the society with the formation of a cabinet and political parties fast-forwarded the movement towards genocide. And that is because in societies, and see them throughout the world, where 94 percent or 98 percent of the population are peasants, people have no way to divide up their vote by class or economic interest like we have. So they can only divide up their vote by ethnicity or territory. So that political parties in all of these places merely harden already existent ethnic tensions.

Algeria, another example. Exploded into civil war after an election. Tunisia. A place that has been quiescent, where our fleet can land, because the only elections that are held there are fixed elections. Armenia and Azerbaijan. Two societies who brought democratic leaders to power and promptly got their countries into a major war in the early 1990s. Venezuela. A country that has been democratic since 1959 and has almost nothing to show for it. Gate communities, private security police everywhere, and an elite that has all of its money in Miami bank accounts.

On the other extreme is Chile. A country which had a very lethal military dictatorship in the 1970s but is now the most developed economy in Latin American. In other words, it's not that democracy is bad or not desirable, it's that it's not going to make societies and, therefore, the world more stable. And probably the best example is China and Russia.

Russia is the way it is directly because it went cold turkey from a totalitarian system to a democratic system. It became a perfect petri dish for the manipulation by disease germs like organized crime groups. Had Russia had the advantage of having several more years of Gorbachev's capitalist trending authoritarianism, it would probably be a much more stable and prosperous place right now.

China is the way it is. A country that in the last 17 years has seen a more dramatic improvement in economic and personal freedoms for more people than ever before in recorded history precisely because it has remained an autocracy. Had China gone democratic with only 10 percent of its population middle class and with ethnic disputes throughout the western and southwestern part of the country, China would probably be much less stable now, much more dangerous now, and the average Chinese would not have all the personal freedoms that they have.

All right, here's the real problem with the world we're facing. Societies are not more stable because they hold elections or they don't. Societies are more stable when they have a sizeable middle class. But 90 percent of the world's births are in the poorest countries or in the poorest sectors of society in wealthier countries. So why middle classes are increasing in absolute numbers around the world, in relative terms, they are getting thinner and thinner and thinner.

So what we will see, I believe, in the next decade or so is the continued emergence of what I call hybrid regimes. Mixed regimes that go by the name of democracy and all of our elected officials go along with the lie for diplomatic reasons, but behind the scenes they're governed by military, security, and oligarchic business elites. Peru is an example of that. Jordan, Turkey, in one form or another, Bulgaria and South Africa increasingly. And I was going to say Pakistan until a few weeks ago where democracy had a mercy killing.

Let me say a word about Pakistan. I've been to Pakistan 11 times. What happened two weeks ago was actually the best possible outcome. Because had the system gone on longer than it did, you probably would have seen a coup by the Jihad Islamic. A very ruthless religious group which has huge support throughout the country. Or you would have seen a less able lower level officer take power. As it happens, the person who took power, though the media didn't report this, he's a Turkophile. He speaks fluent Turkish, Pervez Musharraf and his role model is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And given Pakistan's situation, Atatürk is a much more useable and practical role model than Thomas Jefferson, for example.

You define a system not by what it calls itselfall these places are going to call themselves democraciesbut by the way the power relationships actually work behind the scenes.

A word about the Middle East. The peace process is meaningless in terms of thinking about the next 20 years. There has been a de facto independent Palestinian state existing on the ground since December 1987 when the Intifada started and groups of Israelis felt unsafe and insecure traveling through the West Bank and Gaza. They'll go trekking in Nepal, but they won't go to Ram Allah. The peace process tells us what we already know. It's not going to change anything on the ground.

What is really going to change in the Middle East is that for the last five decades, you've seen great social and economic changeurbanization, development of middle classes, etc. But you've seen very little political change. You still have more or less the same one man "thugocracies" in power from Morocco to Iraq as you had in the 1950s. Eventually though, as this generation of dictators pass from the scene, political change is going to accompany economic change.

And what you're going to see across the swath of the Middle East are many messy Mexico style scenarios. Where instead of one autocrat to deal with in terms of getting a peace settlement or dealing with terrorists, you're going to have 40 or 50 lower level officers, corrupt politicians, all that are going to be convinced. Because you will have some messy, disease variant form of democratization in all of these places. And that will only make the Middle East more unstable, more dangerous to deal with.

All right. So you can see the problems with democratization. It's a concept we like in the abstract, but in reality, it will only make more problems for the American security establishment and for many peoples around the world.

Now about technology. As the previous speaker alluded to, the Industrial Revolution was about bigness. It was about big aircraft carriers, big tanks, railroads, big this, big that. You needed to own geographical space in order to take advantage of the things that the Industrial Revolution offered. So it was perfectly conducive to great centralization of power. And because there will always be a small minority of states that will have bad or evil leaders, it allowed evil leaders to have a concentration of power never before seen in history. So you had phenomena like Hitler and Stalin.

But the post-Industrial Revolution is about the defeat of matter, it's about smallness. It's people who do not own geographical space who have been the losers in various fights for territory, can also take advantage of what the post-Industrial Revolution has to offer.

And because of the spread of computers and the Internet, we're seeing this spread and diffusion of knowledge. And whenever knowledge spreads, you also get the vulgarization of knowledge. Meaning knowledge, technical ability, all sorts of facts and useable information is put into the hands of millions of badly educated people. And if we've learned anything from history, it's that well educated people don't cause disasters, uneducated people don't cause disasters. It's badly educated people. Half-formed men and women. Like Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia or Hitler and Stalin, others. People who have had some smattering of an education and then get big ideas into their heads. We should be trembling at the information that's going into the hands of people who can't handle it.

People say the computer's going to bring us all together, it's going to liberate the world. People said this after Gutenberg's Bible. And Gutenberg's Bible, moveable print, led directly to the religious wars. So again, all of this chain reacting with democratization, you can see how this can make for a world of more subtle evils, crime groups, terror groups. And I think more kidnapping is going to be a growth industry, I believe.

In terms of the military, we've heard a lot in the media about "spies are now passe." That after the Cold War we don't need intelligent agencies. I think the greatest spies are just being born now. I think the 21st century will constitute the golden age of intelligence. And that is for several reasons. Technology is going to make vast amounts of information that people in security services will have to analyze. It will provide all new avenues for spying and for counter intelligence, too.

And as I just said, because of the way democracy is going to chain react with technology, you're going to have breakdown in a lot of places where we're going to need to know intention, human intention. What these guys are going to do with these weapons. What's in their minds? And there will be no substitute for human intelligence for that. We're going to see as we've heard this morning

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Kaplan: . . . effectively by Western corporations than by exporting elections. And a perfect example of this is the former Eastern Europe. Places like Rumania, Bulgaria. Where there has been no drop in corruption in politics in the last few years. But it is Western companies in Bucharest, in Sofia, who are exporting to their employees new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things along a Western model. I think the political organizing principal of this new emerging world is going to be the city-state. I think we've always had great cities throughout human history, but nations are more or less a phenomenon of only two or three hundred years.

I think if you look at a map of China, you could easily see it subtly dividing up according to a number of vast urban regions. In such a world, what can be foreseen is only what changes gradually or not at all. So we're going to increasingly use things like climate, resource, space, culture, and historical patterns to provide some sort of framework, to be less surprised about what's likely to come up.

Let me use the quick example of China. China's environment. 66 percent of the Chinese population lives in flood zones. China only has one-fifth as much water per person per capita as the average person in other countries. China has built more dams to control floods, but these dams are poorly maintained. And 70 percent of the industrial output are currently in flood zones protected by dams. So increasingly, China's leaders are going to have a wider and wider margin for error and a narrower and narrower margin of success. It's going to be harder and harder to be a leader in a developing country in future years.

Two last things. One is that the U.N. is not going to grow in power. The U.N. is only important and powerful in the poorest countries in the world. In countries that basically have no power. The biggest increasing influence on most developing countries is going to be corporations and financial markets. And that's for a specific reason. Because if you're Nelson Mandela, if you're Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, you have only one thing to think about ultimately. That is how do I make my geographical space conducive so that outsiders will come in, invest in the country, build factories, soak up some of that high 30 percent youth unemployment which is what makes my country so unstable and so poor to begin with. So increasingly, leaders throughout the developing world are going to have their domestic policies driven by what global corporations want.

And finally, one last thing before I use up my time. That is the only way to avoid tragedy is to cultivate a sense of it. Only if you constantly think in tragic terms is it possible to avoid these things. That was the problem with World War I. You had political leaders in England, France, and elsewhere who had just come off several decades of prosperity, of rising economic growth rates, 5, 6 percent a year in many countries, of peace for several decades. Remember, in 19th century Europe, except for the Franco-Prussian War which lasted only nine months, between Napoleon's fall and the outbreak of World War I, there was no real major conflagration.

So leaders in England, America, France, elsewhere, lost their sense of the tragic and that is why they blundered into World War I.

Thank you very much.

Falkenrath: Good morning. I'm honored to be among you. First of all, we have such a broad scope in this panel that I had to make a decision to narrow it down somehow. So I'm going to focus on just one aspect of the issues raised in the previous two speakers and that's weapons of mass destruction. First slide, please.

I'm going to start by giving you a very brief overview of the problem. It's familiar to many of you, so I'll move quickly. Second, even though everyone agrees weapons of mass destruction rank among the foremost threats to U.S. national security interests, I still think it's useful to review why that's so. We sometimes forget and internalize it, that we don't forget on the reasons we care. But I'll be brief. I will though spend a little bit more time focusing on what I think are the two most important reasons why we care about weapons of mass destruction and that's power projection and the homeland. Those are of course related. Now given the scope of this panel and that we have the whole conference in front of us, I'm only going to talk about threat. I'm not going to get into issues of response although perhaps that will come up in the discussion. Next slide, please.

Obviously, there's three kinds of weapons that we worry about: nuclear, biological, and chemical. Next slide, please. We also worry about ballistic missiles. A few basic points about these. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. But first, that these are technologies. They are a permanent fixture of the international system. They cannot be done away with by diplomacy. They're also growing increasingly accessible. There's no question that there is an accelerating diffusion of destructive power. And that relates to the dissemination of these technologies and also, importantly, to progress. To the fact that people are smarter. The information systems are more efficient. People are richer.

So despite all of our non-proliferation efforts, which I support, we essentially have an inexorable trend towards increasing accessibility of mass destruction technologies. Now of these, I think the single greatest threat variable and the greatest long-term danger comes from biological weapons. Which are, perhaps, the least understood. Our military and domestic preparedness for biological weapons use is quite poor and we've got an ongoing, accelerating biological sciences and technology revolution. It started with the identification of the double helix in 1954 and now is a booming sector of the economy.

To make a few points about biological weapons. Just pause to think about that part of the problem. First is we've got very little experience with the real destructive power of biological weapons because they've essentially never been used. There's basically one incident where a biological weapons' aerosol was released against a civilian population. And that happened in the Soviet Union in 1979, the Soviet city of Sverdlosk. And the lessons of that are instructive. Sixty-nine people died out a cone of about four kilometers in length. And then livestock continued to die out for another 40 kilometers. But the amount released in that accident was somewhere between a few milligrams and a gram. So an extremely small amount of anthrax bacteria accidentally released, not trying to kill someone, had that sort of effect. And think in your minds what happens if you're talking about not a few milligrams, but a few grams or even a kilogram and you multiply that out and you add intent. You're talking about an extremely destructive weapon. Biological weapons are diseases. They're disease-causing pathogens that are invisible, odorless, and tasteless when suspended in the air and their effects are delayed. This combination of factors makes them the ideal terrorist weapon.

Now from history, we know the incredible destructive power of biological weapons. They occur naturally. This is plague, these are diseases. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed 20 million people. Twenty million people in a few months. The single biggest demographic event in human history. The discovery of the New World and the introduction of Old World diseases into the New World killed off some 60 to 90 percent of the Native American population over a course of a few centuries. So we've obviously got a huge problem here. It's a huge vulnerability here. Put it that way.

Now I ask you to reflect on a very simple question. Why has biological weapons use been so rare in history? Can you think of any other technology that has not been put to offensive military purpose soon after it's introduction? Think of steel, think of internal combustion engine, think of the aircraft, think of guns, TNT. What's different about biological weapons that make them so rare? What is it that makes their use so infrequent and what's stopping people from using them? Because it's clear they have not been stopped by their inability to cause these acts. The technology is relatively simple and is clearly within the ambit of most states. So I ask you to reflect on that.

And also, I wish to make note of something Senator Lieberman said when he talked about our diminishing R&D budgets. I would say in no area is it more serious than in the biosciences. So this is a simple but disturbing idea. Which it's possible that our greatest vulnerability as a society comes not from our military vulnerability, but from our epidemiological or immunological vulnerability. All right, next slide. I apologize for the poor resolution.

This just shows you who's got these weapons right now. At least who we think has them. And as you can see, they're quite widely held. They're all over the world. And importantly, they're held by most of the countries that we think it's likely we will get into some conflict with. Now this estimate is based on unclassified estimates. What a program means varies a lot. So the Russian biological weapons program is not clearly the same as the North Korean biological weapons program. But nonetheless, this gives you a picture. This is a real problem. This is not fiction. It's not a fantasy. And it's something that we need to take very seriously.

This chart does not talk about non-state actors, terrorist groups. And we now know that this is part of the problem that we have to worry about very seriously. There's been one incident where nerve gas was used in the Tokyo subway and another incident where we suspect Usama Bin Ladin was seeking to acquire chemical weapons. So we cannot rule out the non-state threat. And I think Mr. Kaplan's points on this, on power no longer being based solely on the possession of geographic space is exactly right. Now, next slide.

As I said, virtually everyone agrees weapons of mass destruction rank among our top threats to our most vital interests. Let me just review why. The first is power projection. Given our great military power, the United States, I'm talking about here WMD, the most likely means by which an adversary could disrupt our military operations. I'll return to this issue.

Second, the homeland. Given our geography, which is incredibly fortunate historical circumstances, essentially weapons of mass destruction are the only means, I think, by which an adversary could cause significant destruction in the American homeland. Which of course is our most vital interest. And here we're talking about ballistic missile threats and we're talking about covert delivery of terrorism.

Third, the problem states. Virtually every state in the international system that we have a problem with, we also have a problem with their weapons of mass destruction programs. This issue suffuses our diplomacy and our foreign policy with every other nation we've got issues with. Consider China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria. Not only are the weapons of mass destruction capabilities of these states part of the threat these nations pose to us, they also complicate our ability to achieve other objectives. And for those of you who haven't seen it, I urge you to look at the report by Bill Harry on North Korea, which makes this absolutely clear.

Finally, regional instability and the destructiveness of war. Even if another nation's weapons of mass destruction do not directly threaten us, perhaps on the Indian subcontinent, for example, we still need to worry about the possibility of regional instability and of war because we are a nation with global responsibilities. We cannot think solely in terms of direct threats to us. We must also think in terms of regional stability. So I would just suggest to you this is why we care about weapons of mass destruction and I think it's useful to be reminded. Now let me spend a little bit more time on two aspects of this; power projection and the homeland. Next slide.

Power projection is the raison d'être of our military forces. This is clear. We don't have very serious overt or conventional military problems on the American continent. All of our potential adversaries now and, I think, in the foreseeable future are WMD capable. I think, as I said before, weapons of mass destruction are the most likely and most effective asymmetric strategy. This was the fundamental lesson of the Gulf War. Now it didn't materialize in the Gulf War fortunately, but it was a wake up call for us. Much has been written and said about asymmetric warfare in the past decade and I think for good reason.

But as I look to the 21st century, I really don't see much change in this basic calculus. In fact, I think it's going to get worse. And it stems essentially from the fact that we are very powerful in the conventional military sense and we've got global commitments and responsibilities that other states and occasionally non-state actors choose to oppose. And as those states think through how could they possibly oppose us, it's clear that the conventional or symmetric response will fail. So what are we left with?

Now I think the threat, the specific threat to U.S. power projection manifests in several ways. Obviously, it can raise the cost in human and financial terms of executing our mission. But more importantly, I think it can deter our allies from participating. And for those of you familiar with NATO, I think you'll be aware that our NATO allies at least are not where we are in terms of the appreciation of this problem. I think even more likely it can deter host nations whose territory is essential for the conduct of our missions.

In many ways, these states are the soft underbelly of U.S. power projection. We need the territory of Saudi Arabia, we need the territory of South Korea, and, to a lesser extent, Japan to project power into those regions. And if they're deterred, we're deterred.

Finally, and this is the most disturbing, is we, ourselves, might be deterred from pursuing our interests in a regional contingency. Something short of total warfare, something short of a threat that clearly challenges our most vital interests. And the interest is not that the U.S. will not take casualties as I think is sometimes alleged and incorrectly in the public debate. The issue is really more that sometimes the interests that we're pursuing in a regional conflict are less than vital. It's not like World War II. It's not even like Korea. Where because the stakes for the U.S. are not as strong as they were when we face existential threats.

The ability of an adversary to deter us by raising the potential cost is real and we need to grapple with that and we need to face it full on. That preventing ourselves from being deterred is part of our strategic task in the future. And this is an odd turn of logic since we're usually thinking of deterring other people.

Now the homeland. Last slide. This has got a huge amount of attention in the last couple of years. You're all aware of it. We spend a lot of money on it. Four and a half billion on various forms of missile defense, $10 billion a year to counter terrorism, of which $1.4 billion on just WMD terrorism preparedness. As I said, the threat is both missiles and covert delivery. This is an issue that the media is obsessed with. Huge number of academics have worked on books on it, myself included. Large numbers of commissions have looked at it. The homeland defense is I think one of the key issues of the late 1990s.

In my judgement, this will be an enduring occupation of our national security establishment into the 21st century. And it comes from two facts. There is no more vital interest than our homeland. This is clear. And the second is destructive power is diffusing at an accelerating rate around the international system. And you combine those facts and you cannot but be very concerned with issues of homeland defense. We are not in this era in the 20th century and the 21st century, we cannot rely on our oceans to isolate us from all potential threats. This is obvious.

So I suggest to you this is not a fad, it's not something that will pass, and it's not something that any particular branch of our national security community, be it intelligence or the armed forces or whatever, can exclude itself from worrying about.

Now although I think it's a serious issue, I think we need to understand that this threat is a low probability, high consequence threat. And this is the key metric I think that you need to bear in mind. There's really no doubt that the consequences of a WMD attack on an American city would be severe. Well beyond anything any of our public leaders ever want to have on their conscience or their political record. But there is grave doubt about how likely this is. And there's a huge debate. And it's really on this issue on likelihood or intentions that the debate turns and that your own threat assessment of this particular problem should turn.

In my judgement, we have to conclude that it is a low probability threat because it's been so rare over time. There are very, very few attacks like this. Terrorists by and large do not choose to kill up to their technological potential. Our state adversaries are strongly deterred by our retaliatory capabilities. So we have to recognize there is a serious motivational barrier to carrying out mass destruction attacks against the U.S. homeland. So in my judgement we have to conclude that this is low probability. I do not believe it's inevitable. But I also think we have to conclude that the likelihood is rising and that, given the severity of the potential consequences and the importance of the issues, it's likely enough to take it pretty seriously.

I'm going to leave you with one final thoughta more general challenge of the 21st century and it's not specific to weapons of mass destruction. And it has to do with strategic surprise. The military professionals in the room will readily appreciate the importance of surprise and the advantage that taking initiative incurs for the adversary. Surprise is a function both of lack of warning, but more often our scholarship tells us, the failure to respond to warning when given.

And here's the dilemma we face. Our strategic nuclear retaliatory capability and our enormous conventional capabilities give us good reason to believe that our ability to deter most adversaries out there, be they state or non-state, is quite strong. Deterrence of most threats that we have to worry about is very strong. This leads most of us to have a fairly low expectation that deterrence will fail. That in fact our deterrence, the prevention, the first line of defense, really will fail. That's why most people go through their daily lives and do not expect conflict to break out and do not expect a sudden attack or terrorist incident or whatever.

I would suggest to you that this low expectation of deterrence failure in fact increases the probability that we will be surprised when it happens and that surprise will greatly aggravate the consequences we suffer. And the reason it increases the probability of surprise is effectively adversaries who want to take us on need to surprise us to succeed and we tend to disbelieve that our enormous deterrent capabilities could fail. British legend has it that a 50-year civil servant retired in the late '40s, early '50s and at his going away party he bragged to his colleagues that for 50 years he'd been warning, advising foreign secretaries and prime ministers that there would be no major European war. And he was wrong only twice.

And it's part of the problem. Which is batting .960 is not good enough when you're dealing with threats of this magnitude to the national security. So I leave you with that. I think weapons of mass destruction are a key aspect of the challenges we will face in the 21st century and we also, at the same time, have to grapple with our exaggerated expectations of our own security. Thank you.

Pfaltzgraff: Well, we have had a vast array of issues that we have had put before us now. I might mention that Senator Warner had to go back to vote on the Senate floor. So had to leave us shortly after he arrived, after he made his remarks. We now have the opportunity though for discussion and questions to the remaining panel members. Who would like to begin? Let's take a question hopefully from on this side of the room. Then we'll take one from this side of the room. Now wait till the microphone arrives and that you're on camera. Please identify yourself.

Gorka: Thank you, Professor Falkenrath. Sebastian Gorka from the Rand Corporation. I have one question for Dr. Falkenrath. I'm not sure whether I got the message, the overt message of your presentation clearly because you spent a lot of time taking the biological threat very seriously and at the end you mentioned the key question of intent and the power of retaliation that the U.S. has against even non-state actors. So if you could clarify for me exactly where you stand when it comes to biological weapons overall, I'd appreciate that.

And just three technical questions which I'd also appreciate a comment on. Recent workers have done quite a lot to lessen what we think the danger of biological weapons are in three areas. Firstly, dispersion. It really is not enough to throw a bag of volatile agent off the back of a Cessna airplane flying over New York. It doesn't work that easily. Secondly, persistence of biological agents. As you pointed out, these are living organisms. And therefore, their persistence especially sunlight and in normal environmental conditions is very limited in comparison to chemical weapons. And lastly, the immense lethality to the user. If you looked at just Aum Shinrikyo, the people deploying the weapons there were petrified of being killed themselves. And for very good reason. These are very dangerous to the end user, not just to the people they're targeted against. Thank you.

Falkenrath: I'll take the technical questions first. I didn't mean to give the impression that this was easy to do or that anyone out there could do it. The research we've got actually shows that Aum Shinrikyo failed at the biological weapons it attempted very dramatically. The two points you make are correct. It is hard to disperse these things, that's obviously the most important technical barrier, and the persistence of the agent is a serious problem although it can be dealt with if the attack is carried out at night.

The point here is these feed into the low likelihood of this problem. It's part of the reason. The technological difficulty of carrying out the attack reinforces the motivational barriers as I would put it. But it's not impossible. It is really not impossible. It is something that we figured out to do in the '40s, using 1940s science and much more primitive biological understandings at the time. We declassified large numbers of our weapon systems. They're available. You can go get them in Widener Library. So I don't mean to diminish by any means or exaggerate the ease by which this can be done.

But it is incorrect, I think, to assume that just because there are some technological hurdles to be accounted for that we don't need to worry about the problem. This is what I mean by low probability, high consequence. Lots of different factors, you noted some, I noted others, feed into the low probability of this. But if it happens, the consequences will be so severe that we will regret very much that we have not done more.

Pfaltzgraff: Please, over here, on this side.

Audience member: This is a question for Mr. Kaplan. You mentioned the switch into the post-industrial age. And my question is there are a lot of countries right not that you are talking about. Sort of so-called third world countries or emerging countries that haven't gone through the industrial age yet. Do you think that age can be skipped? Because I'm unclear that that can happen.

Kaplan: My experience in developing countries is that, to a certain extent, to an important extent it can be skipped. And the best example of that is not computers, which require hard wire systems for batteries, etc., it's through the whole cell phone revolution that is really starting to change. It's already changed dramatically life in the Balkans. It's changed dramatically life throughout the Caucasus. In Georgia, in Armenia, in Azerbaijan, in Pakistan, in Romania, in other places that in many ways are basically unstable, undeveloped countries to a greater or a lesser extent, incredible numbers of people have cell phones. They've totally been able to skip that whole problem of collapsing hard infrastructure. And this is increasingly true throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. So I think it will be a mixed bag. In some aspects, they'll be able to go right to post-industrial. And particularly in the aspects that spread knowledge, that diffuse knowledge that I was speaking about.

Pfaltzgraff: By the way, if other members of the panel would like to comment on answers, please feel free to do so. Let's turn, however, to another question from whomever. Who would like to be the next to pose question? Please, back here.

Hill: Lieutenant Colonel James Hill. Both Senator Warner, and a number of times in public forums lately, there's been a lot of pressure to move a lot of the military responsibility for things happening around the world to our allies. General Hughes, you commented that you thought that our future threat would be a coalition. At what point 10 or 20 years down the road, are we thenis this pressure arming potential adversaries?

Hughes: My view is the conditions are ongoing now or about to occur. But on the friendly side of things, we obviously conduct the business of the U.S. military most often as part of a coalition or alliance. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. The wags among us and the cynics might tell you that's primarily for political reasons. To give legitimacy in a broader nation state context to what we do than if we did it alone. My personal view is that that might be part of the issue, but there's a much larger circumstance at work here and that is that our allies and our partners bring real capability which we cannot fully duplicate and therefore it's a very good thing for us to be part of that alliance or coalition for real practical circumstances.

You can look out in the future and imagine a coalition of alliance forming against us and I think that exactly the same thing is true. That association will bring strength, it will bring greater capability, it will bring clearer opportunity for those who might wish to oppose us now and in the future. And that's my view.

Pfaltzgraff: Next question? Please.

Mann: Hi, I'm Paul Mann from Aviation Week. A question for each of you. In view of all the strategic and threat assessments we've heard this morning, is it your tactic assumption that strategic arms control as we've known it in the 20th century under START I and START II and the ABM Treaty and so on has become passé? That in the 21st century, strategic arms control is obsolete?

Hughes: Well, I'll begin. My personal view is that arms control is something we ought to devote a lot of time and energy to. It is not passé and it is still possible to do it. However, technology control is a more difficult problem. And if a nation state wishes to build arms and to use them beyond building them out of some form of control we can depend upon, then we have a rogue state or a threat. I think that we ought to accept the fact that that's going to occur. It probably doesn't have much to do with the idea of trying in advance of that eventuality to control as much as we can of true weapons of mass destruction and true threats to the human condition.

Pfaltzgraff: I think that other members of the panel will want to comment on this very interesting question. And I would suggest that in commenting they might reflect upon the likelihood, in keeping with their own presentations, that the actors of the future are increasingly going to be non-state actors for whom arms control agreements have never been designed. I don't want to go out of my role as chairman here or moderator, but perhaps that would be an area for reflection. And maybe beginning with Bob Kaplan and then Richard.

Kaplan: Both E.H. Carr, who was a political philosopher in the early 20th century, and Raymond Errond, a French political philosopher in the mid-20th century, both emphasized that international agreements are only useful when they reflect actual power relationships on the ground. Otherwise, they are just a fancy, a chimera. An intention and motivation will always be much more important than any signed piece of paper. That doesn't mean agreements are bad or they make the situation worse. They may make the situations better. But ultimately if somebody has the motivation to do something and it will increase his or her or his or her group's power to do so, then they will do soarms agreements or no arms agreements.

Also, because increasingly we will have more non-state actors, we'll be dealing with groups who have lost out in the conventional power struggle to begin with, and will therefore have any less respect for what the great powers come up. Historically, great powers have always tried to limit weapons development of other people. When we say we want to put a stop to the growth of nuclear weapons, we think we are being altruistic. And we may be. But we're also acting like great powers have always acted throughout history. To keep our advantage where we have our advantage.

Falkenrath: I think the unusual circumstance was how important strategic arms control was during the Cold War. I mean, that was really an exceptional period. Because of détente, because the bipolar system had settled out, strategic arms control, SALT and that, became central, high political issues between the super powers. Today, as a much more normal circumstance, it's become less important. But it still has a role. For one thing, both we and the Russia have a lot more nuclear weapons than they really need. I think it's very hard to justify the current size of the U.S. strategic arsenal. And certainly we can't justify or we don't want the Russians to have a strategic arsenal of their size.

Now I'm actually not in favor of abolition, although many serious people, including many in this town, are. I'm not. But I think we can go smaller safely. That's really not the key issue though. The key issue is, first, proliferation of non-state actors; second, further proliferation of states that don't currently have nuclear weapons; and third, the increasing arsenals of those that do. India, Pakistan, and China being the most important cases. We very clearly do not want China, Israel, India, or Pakistan to grow their nuclear arsenals. And so one of the questions we face is how useful are our own weapons reductions done in the context of strategic arms control or future agreements to achieving those goals?

And that's the intellectual debate that's going on right now. There's profound disagreement within this town and in the security studies community as to how important our own reductions are to achieving those objectives. But clearly, as we think about the balance of the problem today, it is in further proliferation, increasing arsenals of states that already have nuclear weapons capability, and, I think, last note, the diffusion of Russia's nuclear technologies and materials which are enormous and very poorly secured.

Pfaltzgraff: General Hughes would like to add a comment.

Hughes: Just something brought up. The non-state actor issue. I think it's important to note that we have had examples of non-state actors using chemical and biological weapons. No examples as far as I know of a nuclear occurrence. But to carry the thought of strategic threat a little further, the idea of information warfare and a challenge through our information dissemination control systems is certainly in the sub-national category. I appreciate very much the moderator mentioning this and it's clearly an issue.

I know of no approach right now to try to reach real agreements to control all of this in technology terms. But when it comes to the development and use of weapons, I personally would like to see such agreements continue to be at least attempted. And I have some modicum of faith, despite what Mr. Kaplan says here, that some of them might work.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay, we have time for one or two more questions. Who would like to be next. Yes, right here. And then we'll go over to the questioner on this side.

Happer: I'm Paige Happer. I'm Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. One could say that one of the effects of the end of the Cold War has been a great increase in globalization and in particular an increase in the freedom of trade, of information flows, and of capital flows. I know Dr. Falkenrath is an economist and all of us are amateur economists. But how might for good or ill those increasingly free flows affect both the development of adversaries and the development of threats?

Falkenrath: And I think other members will also want to take on that question. It's a good and very hard question. First, I think globalization doesn't have as much to do with the end of the Cold War as it does with technology and particularly the emergence of a global information infrastructure. And that's a separate issue. I think by and large globalization helps us. Because what it does, I think,and I'm sure Bob's going to disagree with thisbut I think what it really does is accelerate the rate and also the efficiency with which the successful model of a liberal democracy can be disseminated.

And I think it becomes pretty clear that when you've got free flows of information, it's much harder for tyrannies to preserve tyranny. Now this is not to say this will immediately lead to a more peaceful world. It's absolutely clear, as Mr. Kaplan has pointed out and also quite a bit of scholarship, that the process of democratization produces instability. This is clear.

But what's hoped for and what there's some evidence to believe, is that once you get there, once you have a democratic system and a reasonably large middle class and enough people to hold liberal ideals that in fact states like that are less likely to go to war with one another. This is a very long-term process and I understand the scope of this panel is a century, so I feel that I'm permitted to talk in these broad terms. But basically I think the transition of globalization as a sort of enabling factor, the transition to more democratic systems and more liberal systems will be destabilizing. But once you get there, hopefully interstate conflict at least will be less likely.

Pfaltzgraff: Would other members like to comment? Bob?

Kaplan: Yeah, let me comment on this in two kind of different ways. One is that globalization is a word, a kind of synonym, for a very soft, weak form of an American imperium. In other words, that the countries in the world that are able to use globalization are countries that are good business investments in one sort or another. That they are somewhat stable, they may have natural resources. They're not run by awful dictators. They've got something there which allows for the free flow of capital.

In other words, our model after the Cold War in this grand area is kind of the reigning model. But it's such a weak form of imperialism that it doesn't even go by the name Americanization. It goes by the name of globalization. And the countries that are left out do not have a competing model. They're just in a strong or in some intermediary form of dissolution or weakness or chaos or something. And we know what these places are. Much of Sub-Saharan African, the Caucasus, and other areas. And this kind of American, this grand American area that Dean Acheson wrote about can be expanded to some extent and it could also contract, depending upon the decisions we make.

So that's one way to look at globalization. Another way to look at globalization is it's really strengthening at perhaps the speed that we haven't seen before the power of corporations. Now corporations have always been powerful. America started as a corporationthe Jamestown colony. These were corporations first. But we've never really seen corporations have so much technological and power in terms of their ability to influence governments as we've seen now.

Now this is a very long-range trend. In the feudal age, nobody could imagine a modern state because it hadn't happened yet. So it could be that corporations are in a very early process of transforming themselves over a hundred or a few hundred years into a new form of political community. That is very hard to imagine now because it hasn't happened yet. And the third thing I would say about globalization, yeah, it does increase some basic agreed upon values that all good people can agree upon. Some basic values. Protection of minority rights, human rights, like that. But it also increases the general instability that we spoke of, too.

Hughes: I'd like to offer a moderating observation. I agree generally with the comments that have been made here. I've spent a lot of time in the past few years traveling in countries that are having difficult circumstance and challenge and in some countries which enjoy nouveau wealth. And I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the differences between those who have and those who have not are as stark and as distinct as I, personally, have seen in my lifetime. And I'm not sure that globalization is changing that much. People who can take advantage of the circumstance, are. People who can't, aren't able to.

Pfaltzgraff: Richard?

Falkenrath: General Hughes is exactly right. Globalization is increasing inequality. There's no question that this is one of its effects on all of the societies it impacts. It's probably making, on aggregate, everyone richer, but it's increasing inequality. I wanted to say though to Mr. Kaplan, I'm not comfortable with the characterization of globalization as a weak American imperium. And in fact, I think except for the most remote, rural parts of the world, there is no escaping it. There is no place, no economy anywhere that's engaged in any sort of commerce or information exchange beyond barter or very simple subsistence agriculture that can escape it.

I was in Saudi Arabia a month ago and this is a country that grapples with the problem of wanting to preserve a very old, traditional culture, and yet realizes that to compete internationally it must come to grips with the rapid change in the international system. Both in terms of the permissiveness of its own societies, the role of women, and the effectiveness of its companies. It is inescapable what's going on. And I think it's both too generous and ungenerous to the American government. We couldn't have thought this up, as it were, if that were an option.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay. Bob, you have the final word on this. Then we have two more questions before we break.

Kaplan: One fact to kind of emphasize. That for every $65 earned in rich countries, one dollar is earned in poor countries. And what I meant by like a globalized area and an unglobalized area, I was making distinctions. Because you have to make distinctions to have a discussion. And so these are the two extremes. I would also say that most successful imperialisms in history emerge more than they are thought up.

Pfaltzgraff: We are going to run out of time soon. However, let me adopt a somewhat different technique for these questions. What I'm going to do is to ask, I believe there are three of you now who would like to ask questions, to ask your questions, briefly hopefully, and then to give the panel an opportunity to respond as the final comment from the panel to these questions. So we had a questioner over here, as I recall. Would you please stand up and identify yourself? Here comes the microphone.

Bean: Thank you. Lieutenant Colonel Bean. Question I had was initially for General Hughes. In the opening comments, Senator Lieberman mentioned that future forces would require us moving to the next level of jointness and more collaboration at combined and interagency levels. You mentioned in your remarks that the emerging threats can not be solved by military force alone. I would be interested in your observations on what that next level of jointness might be.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay. Keep that in mind. Now we'll come to the next questioner. And please, the microphone should be brought over to you in a moment. It will get there in a short time and you'll be on camera.

Rothrock: Thanks. I'm John Rothrock, colonel Air Force retired and with the Institute for Defense Analyses. My question has to do with the increasing class identification, narrowing class identification of the all-volunteer armed force. What sort of, if any, strategic vulnerability do you think that that constitutes for the U.S. in terms of pursuing an activist globalist policy around the world? Thank you.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay, very good. Next question right here. Right up here, please, Lisa. The microphone is on the way.

Apgar: Thank you. I am Sandy Apgar, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment. We have an enormous infrastructure, probably the largest organized real estate portfolio in the world. It's both fixed in location characteristics and illiquid financially, but appears to be worth about twice our entire equipment stock. To what extent is strategic responsiveness either helped or hindered by this infrastructure?

Pfaltzgraff: Now are there any other questions around that someone? Is there someone else who would like to ask a question? Please. Yes.

Eden: Rick Eden, Rand Corporation. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the words strategic responsiveness are very large right in front of you. And I'd like each of you to specifically address what that means over the course of a century and whether our notion of when we respond and how we respond, is it going to be predominantly military or, perhaps this also picks up the question from the opposite side of the room about jointness? I just think the words strategic responsiveness might be a 20th century term that may not last for a hundred years. I'd like each of you to address that.

Pfaltzgraff: Well, that's certainly a challenging question for you. With that series of questions, I think we have enough time to keep you occupied till well after lunch and yet we don't have time for that at all. So let's begin with maybe three-minute answers, if we can. Four or five minutes at most.

Kaplan: I think the importance of intelligence gathering and intelligence assessment groups in our government is going to increase dramatically and be part of that strategic response. Last thing, don't assume that democracy is the last word in human political development. Remember, in the fourth and 5th century B.C. around the Mediterranean world and North Africa, which then constituted the settled part of the globe, we had a different form of globalization. It was called Christianity. And it started out as one idea being interpreted one way that had a better worldview, a more humane worldview than the pagan system which it transplanted. But as Christianity spread its roots and its ideas into different soils and different geographies and different cultures around the Mediterranean littoral, it divided up into rights and sects and heresies and the 5th and 6th centuries were even more violent than the 4th and 5th. So don't assume that globalization will lead to an agreement around the world on universal principals.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay. General Hughes.

Hughes: My view on the jointness issue is that we're on the right track and, indeed, I think we're making progress at about the right rate. I believe strongly in the imperatives of the military departments. And, indeed, where are we going to get soldiers if not from the Army? And Marines if not from the Marine Corps? But I do think at some point military units and the application of military power must be administered by a joint activity, a joint control to use all of the elements of military energy and civil power together.

So I'm in favor of the trend towards jointness as it is now practiced in the U.S. military and I believe there is an application that can be made to our social fabric where the economic, political, cultural, and other facets of national power along with the military can be applied in a coherent fashion. I think we ought to try to move toward that. With regard to the vulnerability that might be created by an all-volunteer force, I came into the Army during a period of conscription and the draft. I think it had the great strength and good reasons for me to believe that Army then was more connected to a social order than our Army today.

I personally believe in a form of universal military and social service that is justly and honestly administered and that will connect the young people of our society to the foundations, the principals, and the institutions that are necessary for our society to continue. So some form of service. One option of which could be U.S. military service in the active or the reserve forces would be a good thing as far as I'm concerned. The infrastructure that you mentioned, sir, is very difficult to come to grips with. Some of it is necessary to retain. It gives us the advantage of having a home base in an environment and an area in which, without it, we would be hamstrung and it would be very difficult for us to act.

So I believe that the basing issue, especially overseas, and the determination of which bases to keep under what conditions is a vital problem for the future. Tough to solve, I know, but I think we have to have a physical presence overseas.

And the last issue, strategic responsiveness. My personal view is that we will respond to threats on different levels for different reasons perceived by political authority to be good enough to send our military forces to meet whatever it is that's threatening or challenging us. It's very simple. It is indeed now, and will be in the future, a political decision.

Pfaltzgraff: I think that you will all agree that this has been an outstanding opening panel for our conference. The members have in many ways supplemented and complemented each other in their various expertise and understanding. We have all been greatly enriched by this discussion this morning. So I would on our collective behalf thank each of you for the contributions that you have made to this conference.

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