1999 Fletcher Conference

Tuesday, November 2, 1999 2:00 to 3:15 p.m.
Panel 2:

Perspectives on a 21st Century National Strategy
and the Role of Military Power

Senator Warren Rudman
Dr. John P. White
General Klaus Naumann
Ambassador Joseph W. Prueher
General Sir Jeremy Mackenzie

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Transcript

Pfaltzgraff: It is with very great pleasure that I turn this session to our moderator, Dr. Jacquelyn K. Davis, who is Executive Vice President of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and President of National Security Planning Associates, our affiliate. Jacqui.

Davis: Good afternoon. Today we're looking a panel designed to explore the issues of the perspectives on 21st century planning and the role of military power. Over the last several years, we have witnessed the use of military power as the ultimate instrument of foreign policy. From the Tomahawk missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan to the daily strikes against Iraq to enforce the no fly zones in the North and the South, military power has been invoked for deterrence, coercion, and war fighting purposes. Sometimes it has appeared that the use of force was evoked in the absence of creative diplomacy. Other times it has appeared that the use of force has clearly supported U.S. and alliance interests and policy objectives.

The relationship between the use of force and our national security strategy and, for example, NATO's new strategic concept, needs to be more clearly understood as we enter the new millennium. As do the limits and opportunities of military power as the operational arm of the nation's or the alliance's security policies. This panel has been established to explore the issue of the role of force in 21st century security planning and to relate the use of the military instrument to America's and NATO's values, interests, and cultures in a dynamic and unpredictable security setting.

As the air war over Kosovo sadly demonstrated, fundamental differences between the United States and its allies are apparent over the use of force as an instrument of policy. And yet, despite the differences over air power philosophies, rules of engagement, and collateral damage considerations, the alliance did hang together. But it did so, some would say, at the expense of operational coherence and perhaps even cracks in the alliance's unity of command. To address these issues, we have with us today a distinguished panel. Each member of this panel is well known to the official and strategic affairs policy communities. So I will not dwell on their credentials. You can read about each panel member in the bios that are included in the programs for this meeting.

Suffice it to note here that former Senator Rudman co-chairs a commission that is tasked to examine U.S. 21st century security requirements. Dr. White, of course, was the former Deputy Secretary of Defense and has had extensive government experience exploring these issues and now, as a professor at Harvard, is still engaged in looking at issues relating to the future planning environment. Admiral Prueher is the former CINC of PACOM and last Thursday had his hearings to be the next United States ambassador to China. Generals Naumann and Mackenzie are highly regarded military leaders in their own respective countries and both are highly respected in the United States for their tireless efforts to strengthen the trans-Atlantic partnership in NATO.

With that, I will turn the podium over to Senator Rudman, who will commence with the panel presentations. After all the presentations have been made, this panel will then entertain questions from the audience. Thank you. Senator Rudman.

Rudman: First, let me thank you for the invitation. I'm delighted to appear here in behalf of the United States Commission on National Security for the 21st century. We had hoped that logistics would allow this initial executive summary report entitled "New World Coming" to be on your tables. Somehow, that didn't happen. I would strongly recommend getting a copy for those particularly in positions of major responsibility. I'm going to talk about that today. I will leave it to others to address specifically the issue that you have put forth. But we were asked to come over here today and explain to you what we're doing.

A little background. What we're doing is actually the first comprehensive review of national security since 1947. That may surprise you, but the National Security Act of 1947, which changed the face of the American military, really was based on lessons learned from World War II. It was gathered from some of the early insights of what was to become the Cold War, and, of course to Americans, the realization for the first time that we were a premier world power and would be so for some time. As you look back from the point we're at today, many talk about this as being the American century and I suspect that it's probably an apt description.

Since that time, no one has really done what we are doing. We are looking at national security in the broadest way. Certainly military structure, military forces, what they can do is part of it. The role of diplomacy, what we need to change, what we're doing, the security of this country based on its economy and its global economic outlook, all of those things we're looking at. This panel that was put together by the President, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, truly has some remarkable people on it who bring a lot of depth to the issue. People with some enormous experience. I am honored to co-chair this commission with Gary Hart.

I want to spend about 10 minutes telling you essentially what we've done. Essentially we have three parts. The first thing we were asked to do is render a report by the 15th of September, which we did, to the President and to the Secretary, which sets forth the assumptions and the conclusions we draw from those assumptions for the 21st century. Second, we will put a report out later next year which will set forth what we believe the strategy will have to be, based on those assumptions and those conclusions. Finally, the part that many of you will be looking at with great interest will be what we believe the structure ought to be in order to fulfill that strategy.

Although this is a very thin book and there are only 22 points I'm going to cite for you, I want to tell you that I've sat in a lot of conferences trying to hash out language, I have never been through such an exhausting experience as sitting with this group.

Our staff director is General Chuck Boyd. General Boyd, four-star Air Force retired general, six years in prison in Vietnam along with my friend John McCain. He was head of the U.S. Air Force, Europe. But beyond that, he's very smart. And he's a very cerebral guy who really said let's come into the century, guns blazing.

We walked into the final meeting and we had computers in front of every position of the 16 commissioners and up on the board was the language which we had proposed. We spent roughly a day and a half fighting over that language. It didn't look anything at the end as it did at the beginning, which tells you that you've got a lot of tough consensus building here and I want to just tell you what we came up with. What we were asked to do is consider the world challenge to this country during the first 25 years of the new century. That's a pretty healthy charge. Whether we have succeeded or not, only time will tell.

Let me tell you what our essentially view of the future was14 points. Some of them may seem obvious to you, but they really aren't terribly obvious when you look at the alternatives. We decided that one of our assumptions would have to be that an economically strong United States will remain a primary, if not the primary, political, military, and cultural force in the world for the first 25 years. Secondly, that the stability and direction of American society and American politics, which is in doubt, will shape U.S. foreign policy. That science and technology will advance and become widely available, but its benefits will be unevenly distributed.

Next, that world energy supplies will remain largely based on fossil fuels. That the disparities in income will increase and widespread poverty will persist throughout the world. An extraordinary point when you're talking about stability. That the international aspects of business and commerce will continue to expand. In other words, we believe the global economy will only accelerate. That non-governmental organizations will continue to grow in importance and the United States will work with and strengthen a variety of international organizations.

That we will remain the principal military power in the world. That weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption will proliferate. Nuclear deterrent and defenses, therefore, become essential. That adversaries from cultures different from ours will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities. And that America will find reliable alliances more difficult to establish and sustain.

Now with those assumptions, which are a mouthful to say the least, for those of you who want to look at them closely rather than take notes, we will make sure that these are available. Let me tell you about the conclusions and then let me just give you some personal views.

Number one, the American homeland will be vulnerable to attack and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. Many of you may recall about six weeks ago that Secretary Cohen wrote a piece in the Washington Post which essentially said that Americans ought to prepare for the fact that there will no doubt be blood shed on our own shores. Not from conventional warfare, but probably from terrorism. I can tell you as chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that not only do I not doubt that, but that it is almost inevitable in spite of the best intelligence apparatus in the world.

Advances in technology will create new vulnerabilities for the United States. Technology will spread at faster and faster rates. That new technologies are going to divide this world as well as draw parts of it together. That evolving global economic infrastructure will create new vulnerabilities both for us and our traditional allies. That energy will continue to have major strategic importance through the first 25 years. That all borders will be more porous. Some will bend and some will break. That the sovereignty of states will come under pressure, but will endure. That fragmentation and failure of some states will occur with rapidly destabilizing effects.

That foreign crises will continue to be replete with atrocities and terror. That space will become a critical and competitive military environment. That the essence of war will not change. That U.S. intelligence will face more adversaries that even excellent intelligence will not predict. As we look at the entire evolution of the U.S. military force which tries to respond and prepare for these kinds of assumptions, we have a strategy as to how we think that ought to be done.

I will quote to you what I think was one of the great remarks made by a military leader I've ever heard and I wasn't in the room when he said it. In fact, there were no rooms at that time. It was in Korea and General Van Fleet was the commander of Eighth Armyhad just taken the Eighth Army over from General Taylor. And Van Fleet, Ridgeway, and Taylor were all highly regarded. Van Fleet gave a speech some place which we all read about in the Stars and Stripes in which he said that he thought that the infantry fighting in Korea was more like World War I than World War II. Van Fleet, of course, was a veteran of World War I, World War II, and Korea.

Essentially what he was saying was that with all of the changes in technology and all the time that had gone by, due to the terrain and due to the nature of what was going on, due to the equipment that the soldiers had been given by their political leaders, that in all that time, you had had a regression where World War I and Korea were more alike than World War II and World War I. I thought it was a very interesting, conjecture on his part. More than conjecture, conclusion.

Let me finish up by telling you that we're trying to do something that will help give you the ability to go on a path of change that will give us, as a nation, the ability to persevere as a leader. I know that you will be looking closely at what we say. We would hope that what we do will have a major influence on the incoming administration whatever that administration might be. I want to give you some early insights without telling you what we will say because that would be presumptuous. I'm not sure what we will say. But I am pretty sure, knowing this panel, what we will not say and I want to just lay that out for you.

We will not say that the Cold War is over and we're now safe and secure. We will not say the United States should retreat diplomatically or militarily from the world scene. We will not say that high tech is the answer to all future challenges and that all 21st century challenges can be dealt with from the air. We will not say that. You know, I could get into a long discussion with you about my view about what happened at Kosovo and many of you could too. I will tell you that I think that the United States Air Force did an extraordinary job. I mean, they deserve high praise. But in a way, that kind of spoils you. Because that's not apt to happen very often.

You know, being an old, and I mean that literally, former infantry officer, I've got to believe that in most places somebody is going to go in on the ground and dig somebody out. I just believe that. I don't think that's going to change, I don't think the commission thinks it's going to change.

We are not going to say that big wars and heavy combat are gone forever. They may be, but we can't take that risk. We cannot say that boots on the ground are a thing of the past. What we will say, I'm sure, is that we must remain a world leader. That our security, safety, and prosperity should not be taken for granted. That what happens somewhere else will in some way affect us. That our range of challenges and contingencies are wide and varied. That we will need agility and flexibility and imagination to deal with all of them. We'll have to be able to figure out how to be more proactive and more sustained.

But the use of the military should not replace effective use and tools of other forms of power. What we need is a serious in-depth debate in this country to make the concerns of today and tomorrow understood by all Americans. It is a great disappointment to me that in the 1996 presidential election and, to some extent, in the 1992 presidential election, the issue of military preparedness was not discussed. In a world such as the one we live in today, it must be discussed and some of us in this campaign are trying to make sure that it will be discussed.

Finally, I guess what we say that sums it all up is that the world remains a dangerous place full of authoritarian regimes and criminal interests, and I would add terrorist interests, whose combined influence extends the envelope of human suffering by creating "haves" and "have nots." They foster an environment for extremism and the drive to acquire asymmetric capabilities and weapons of mass destruction.

Norm Augustine, who's a member of our panel, concluded our hearing before the House committee with a wonderful quote from Darwin. And I'm always glad to steal other people's quotes. Here is the quote. "It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent. The survivor is the species most adaptable to change." And we hope to give you some tools to help you effect that change, which is your major responsibility in the coming century. Thank you very much.

White: Good afternoon. I want to thank the Secretary of the Army and the Chief for holding this important conference. I think it's really an impressive turnout and you are to be congratulated for that. I was struck in the QDR and have been ever since at the problems we face in terms of all of the uncertainty around us. We have now been living in an era for some 10 years for which we don't have a name. We don't know quite where we are and we certainly don't know really where we are going. We don't know what the future is going to hold.

There's a nice little story about Justice Holmes being on a train a hundred years ago and losing his ticket. And the conductor recognized him and said, "Oh, don't worry about it, Mr. Justice. I'm sure when you get home you'll find your ticket and you can mail it into us." And he said, "Young man, the problem isn't where's my ticket, the problem is where am I going?" And that's our problem. And I would submit to you that we don't know where we're going and the world will unfold and we will be faced with a great many surprises.

The one thing I do know with high confidence is that if we extrapolate the present into the future, we will be wrong. That will not be where we are going. And to try to go there would be a very big mistake. The second point I would make in that regard is that the changes around us, I think, are more fundamental and are accumulating at a faster rate than has been the case in recent history. And I want to talk a little bit about at least two of those changes and what they imply for us in terms of the U.S. military and the issues we're addressing here today.

The first of those changes is globalism. By which I mean a networking and interconnectedness and interdependency across continents. Globalism is growing, as we look at it across the world today in economic terms, in social terms, in environmental terms, technologically, and of course militarily. All of these changes, which we call globalism or globalization, introduce a dynamic that will make the use of military capabilities, particularly for the U.S., more, not less, difficult in the future.

These dynamics change the role of the various actors in the process. Governments, sovereign governments, will, I think it's clear, have less flexibility and control over their destinies than has been true in the past. At the same time, non-governmental organizations have grown substantially in terms of their influence on affairs in which we have concerns. International businesses, which are getting beyond the borders of their original homelands and operating as international businesses, also have more autonomy.

For the Department of Defense and its military forces, that means more constraints, it means more complexity, and it means less opportunity to act unilaterally. It means the world is going to be more difficult and execution of military operations is going to be more complicated.

The second point I would like to hit on is commercialization. And by commercialization, I mean the vast transformation that has taken place in American and international business in the last 20 years. Today's economy is creating virtual companies where people focus on their core competencies. Where they outsource wherever possible, wherever it makes sense. Where they put heavy emphasis on innovation and technological change. And where they cooperate with companies one day and compete with them the next day. This is a world in which organizations are changing rapidly, the way people are being treated and managed and incentivized are changing rapidly. And of course there's a great deal of new technology.

The DoD has to adjust to that new world as an institution. If we do not adjust to that new world, we will be isolated, we will be left behind. Because it is now our responsibility in terms of that world to deal with it on its terms. We've made a fundamental set of choices in this department that say that we will not rely on captive industry or other captive systems for providing us with our capabilities. Quite the reverse. We will buy effectively everything we need from people through technologies to equipment in a commercial environment and a commercial marketplace. That is a fundamental change from where we were obviously during the Cold War.

The result of that change is that we have to learn how to adapt and adopt these technologies which are really created largely for commercial purposes. We have to find ways to first capture the attention of their providers and then find ways to develop them in terms of our uses because they will not come tailor made to us as has been true in the past. And again, the issue is one of making sure we're not isolated by responding to this commercialization in ways which are adaptive for us and make our institutions adapt.

And that brings me to my third point which is the need for DoD to adapt. I can't specify for you adapt to what. I would submit that many people in this room can't specify for you what this organization ought to look like in the future. But I can tell you, I think, the kinds of attributes that it ought to have in the future. It ought to be more responsive, it ought to be more flexible, it ought to have a higher degree of both cooperation and competition inside it. It ought to value innovation and it ought to value efficiency. This is not a prescription for a particular form in terms of the organization and how we describe it. It is a set of attributes of how this organization ought to grow and change over time.

Now let me make a few comments in terms of the vehicles that we need to use and are using in order to make these kinds of changes. First of all with respect to what we collectively call the Revolution in Military Affairs. We have to provide the devices by which we encompass inside RMA, the way we choose to deal with asymmetric threats. Conceptually, organizationally, and operationally, we cannot leave asymmetric threats outside our vision of RMA. To do so is to make these requirements, many of which will be the most important ones in my judgement in the future, orphans. To put them outside our institutional solutions would be a very big mistake. And so we have to expand the definition of what it is we are trying to do with RMA.

Secondly, RMA cannot ignore the capabilities and limitations of our allies and likely coalition partners. I hope that some of the other members of the panel will speak to this issue. It is not enough for us as the United States to continually expand our technological and related capabilities while ignoring the capabilities and limitations of people who we know are our friends and with whom we're going to have to operate both militarily and in terms of larger issues in this world. To do so will not increase our capabilities even on the battlefield, but rather will reduce our ability and effectiveness over time. I think we have to step back and recognize that there are ways that we have to adjust what we're doing to the world around us.

The third comment I would make on RMA is that it has to be done in conjunction with the revolution in business affairs. When we worked on the Revolution in Business Affairs in the QDR, we focused on the cost savings. I think in retrospect we focused too much on the cost savings. That in point of fact, RBA is in large measure a response to this commercialization that I talked about before. And that makes RMA and RBA companions in terms of this organizational revolution that the DoD is going through and must go through if we're going to be successful.

Two other points that I want to make have to go with Goldwater-Nichols. The first one has to do with the theme of this conference, which is so well set up here and on the coffee mugs and so on, and that is jointness. We in the future will have to be more joint. The secretary talked about this earlier. It is a fundamental requirement that we have as we evolve in terms of our capabilities.

But there is another point about Goldwater-Nichols that I want to make as well and that is that we need to expand the concept of Goldwater-Nichols, what its goals are, the devices that it uses, from which we've learned we can be very effective, to other agencies inside this government other than the Department of Defense, and to other non-military capabilities and non-military functions. Functions that are now traditionally performed by the domestic agencies need to be performed overseas. The domestic agencies must export these capabilities to meet similar needs in contingencies overseas. Functions such as public health, public safety, consequence management, and so on and so forth are all desperately needed.

Not to supply them is to leave by default these requirements to be dealt with by the U.S. military. Something for which we are not trained and for which become a distraction to us in terms of our fundamental mission and our operational capabilities and over time will degrade our military effectiveness. I think we have a major challenge to convince others in the government that the requirement out there is substantially larger in this context, in this new world, and we're going to have to evolve a much more complicated response to it through the support of the domestic agencies.

In conclusion, all these changes will require, in my judgement, a continuous, rolling, fundamental set of changes to the military institutions. Those institutions of course are principally the uniformed services. It is the uniformed services in our system that are the engines of change. And while, yes, you need the leadership of the Secretary of Defense and other senior civilian officials in order to make things happen, fundamentally change will have to come from the uniformed services. That's where the mission is, that's where the people and the institutions are, those are the institutions that have to be changed and molded for this new future. And therefore, the senior leadership in the uniformed services have to carry this obligation to effect change.

It will not be easy. It is a major challenge. But only through such leadership will we be able to adjust to this ever-changing world that we face going forward. Thank you very much.

Naumann: It's a true privilege to be here and I appreciate very much that at least General Mackenzie and myself can offer some European views to this discussion. And of course it's a pleasure to be on the podium with old friends from former days.

To answer the question what the role of the military will be in the future is only possible if you have a clear cut picture of what the first decades of the new millennium will bring to all of us. I have to confess, despite the fact that I agree with the assessment provided this morning so splendidly by General Hughes, I do not know exactly what will happen in the next 25 years and my crystal ball is slightly blurred. But I could offer three points which I believe will be true.

First, I believe that some 50 percent of the weaponry we may use in the year 2025 are not yet invented today. Secondly, the United States will probably still be the only superpower with unmatched military capabilities, able to act more or less at any place and at relatively short notice. But it could well be that you would be a superpower vulnerable to attacks by non-state actors using military means, including weapons of mass destruction.

Third, the United States will need allies to act militarily and politically. You may have the military capabilities to do it alone, but I think you would make a mistake if you acted politically alone. And you need these alliances in order not to over stretch your commitments. You need allies who are willing to share the risk and burdens of military intervention. Since, and that is my belief, most, if not all, future interventions will be coalition efforts. And I think this needs to be taken into account when we will shape tomorrow's forces.

Most of the deficiencies of coalition warfare, which we saw recently during the operation in Kosovo, can and will be overcome. But coalition operations conducted by democracies will not allow us to use overwhelming force. And one other deficiency will remain as well as an inherent weakness of coalition operations conducted by democratic nations. Namely, the ability to act in time. That is, preferably, preventatively. And I think this ability of democratic nations will remain marginal.

I believe we will continue to see conflicts like we have seen them after the end of the Cold War. I think they will continue to haunt us. And in all these conflicts, the natural ally of the United States will remain Europe. Which, after all, is the only group of nations which share with you the same values. If you look at all your other alliances, you will not find a single alliance where all members share the same values. And these nations, by the way, carry at the moment some 80 percent of the burden of the deployment to Bosnia as well as to Kosovo.

We have to deepen and to widen the cooperation and we have to strengthen the European capabilities as part of NATO's capabilities. As long as these efforts by the Europeans are undertaken, there should be no reason on your side to be concerned if the Europeans talk about European Security and Defense Identity. After all, it was our big success in 1996 that we persuaded all Europeans to do this within NATO. And I would really urge you not to bash the Europeans for embarking on ESDI, but to encourage them to carry on. Since if you bash them, they will believe, okay, the big dog doesn't want us to do more so we lean back. Don't do this.

This renewed Atlantic alliance will have to cope with two giants, I believe. One which will primarily be the United States' taskto cope with China. And the other one, we have to address together. That is, to deal with an ailing and psychologically wounded giant, Russia, whose future nobody can predict at this point in time. But it seems that the relationship between the West and these two so different giants will be one for which there is little risk of a real military conflict.

There is a lot of evidence that these two big countries will have to solve so many domestic problems that they will not pose a real military risk to the United States or to NATO. There is little evidence that they will be able to field forces which the United States and its European together could not defeat. Hence, we should seek cooperation with these two countries in order to reduce the risk of a confrontational relationship. But no one can rule out that new alliances may emerge from the simultaneous renaissance of nationalism and religion we are confronted with if you look in our world of today.

The security problems we will have to cope with will be caused by the following reasons. First, the ever-widening gap of welfare between the rich, but over-aged nations of the industrialized world and the poor, but young nations in the developing world. The presumably unabated growth of population in the poor countries and the concomitant lack of potable water and other vital resources. The inclination of the poor to pursue policies which may include the use of force, to strive for weapons of mass destruction, and the temptation to believe that the rich can be defeated by "anathematical" threats such as terrorism.

We will see the continuing desire of many poor nations to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And we will see the phenomenon that we will see the parallel and simultaneous existence of three different stages of societal development and their associated forms of conflict. We will see simultaneously the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern societies. And we will see the wars which these societies fought in the past.

We shouldn't be too concerned about the pre-modern and the modern society type of war, but I think we have to think through what war means in a post-modern society. And I could imagine that we will see non-state actors using military means fighting each other on national territories or attacking national territories in a non-state actor effort. So the answers we have to find I think are not so difficult with respect to the pre-modern society. Although for us military, it will mean that we have to fight the very trivial, let's say tribal, warrior at the lower end of the spectrum. In the modern world, it is war we are used to. And in the post-modern world, it may be the non-state actor.

Consequently, the role of the military and the military power will change to some extent. It is not only for us to protect our nations against the traditional military threat. We have in addition to protect our nations against the weapons of mass destruction. And there I think we, the Europeans and the Americans, have to work together since that is the only possibility to address, for instance, the threat posed to all of us by the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Only in a trans-Atlantic approach we can find the solution for that.

For the Europeans, this will mean that we have to seek cooperative solutions. We will presumably embark increasingly in Europe on multinational defense approaches since the more expensive parts of the ticket can no longer be paid by individual nations. And this of course is a difficult political decision since it means to some extent to be prepared to transfer sovereignty to an international body. And in NATO, this means that we have to harmonize these two different approaches: the multinational approach of the Europeans and the national approach of the United States of America. Not an easy task for politicians, but why should we envy them for what they want to do?

The non-state actor will presumably pose the biggest problems because they are hard to detect, hard to identify, and very difficult to deter. In many cases, these risks will blur the line between military and police. It will be most advisable to seek solutions which would allow common responses and which might see closest cooperation between police and military forces. I believe this is a new area in which the military may play a role, but it is also an area where traditional military forces can hardly be applied.

Secondly, strategy should continue to consist of a combination of preventive defense, selective engagements, and cooperative security. The latter being pursued primarily through projection of stability efforts such as Partnership for Peace is one. Third, such a strategy requires forces which are capable to conduct joint operations primarily in coalition or alliance operations. They need to be flexible, ready to deploy at very short notice. They need to be lean and agile. Able to fight under austere conditions far away from their bases back home. And they should never forget the need to sustain those operations.

The use of force will not be a favorite decision taken by our politicians, but it will be unavoidable. We, the military, should insist, should politicians intend to go for the use of force, first on the clarity of political objectives and, secondly, on the preparedness on the side of the politicians to see it through as soon as they enter the route of military operations. If you take these two points and look back at the recent experience in Kosovo, you will see that we did get it right entirely and particularly in these two points.

The problem for the use of forces will remain that we will probably not be in a position to apply two principals of war which are dear to all of us. At least we learned them as young lieutenants in our respective war academies. First, to achieve strategic surprise. And secondly, to apply overwhelming force. This will not be possible in coalition operations. And there's another unpleasant reality. No technology will ever guarantee us a war free of casualties or fatalities. And there's little evidence that we will succeed to enforce our will against an opponent who has accepted war by fighting him from a distance. We have seen this in Kosovo, by the way, as well. And that's a point where I disagree with what Senator Lieberman said this morning. Whatever technology you will have, it will not be possible to bomb someone into surrender who is determined to accept war.

At the end of a conflict, there is always a need for boots on the ground. And I'm not saying this since I am in an Army-dominated environment at this point in time. Your allies harbor no illusions in this respect. It may be time consuming to get them to act, but when they are determined to act together with you, you can rely on them. That they will stay on course even if they have to take casualties. And I'm saying this as perhaps the youngest nation joining these out of area operations. But I had no doubt during the Kosovo war that Germany would stay on course even if some of our pilots had been shot down.

We have to do all this in coalition operations, but we should have no doubt and should harbor no illusions. We, the military, will not really shape the events of the future. The events of the future will be shaped by international business which will increasingly reduce the traditional role of the national state which we know. Military deployment will remain the last resort of politics. Applied on a case by case basis and probably always in coalitions.

It will be a challenge for all of us to be ready and to be trained in these three different forms of wars which I alluded to earlier: the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern war. And I don't envy those of you who are in active service to train the forces to be ready at short notice for this wider range of military missions. But on the other hand, I am convinced as I always was, as long as we stay together, one team, one mission, we will succeed. Thank you.

Prueher: I would like to add my pleasure at being a part of this panel with people some of whom I've known a long time and respect a great deal. And also I'll probably speak for all of us that we're glad to be here and trying to do a little bit to maybe skew our nation's Army and support our friend, Rich Shinseki, who is both the leader and the steward of this Army through this period. It's great to be here with you.

I need to give a little disclaimer. Jacqui gave some of it. For those of you who are familiar with our vibrant democracy and our processes, I am between a Senate confirmation hearing and a vote today. So if I'm a little mealy mouthed on some of my answers or some of the things I say . . . I've completely amended my remarks today, but please forgive me and understand that a little bit.

The one other point I'd like to make is just I was thinking a little bit as Klaus was talking about the discussion of NATO expansion. And in the Pacific a year or so ago, we had the first ever CHOD's conference, the Chiefs of Defense Conference, which we modeled after what NATO had done. And we had this meeting and a couple of the chiefs of defense asked me what's going on with NATO expansion. And I said, well, just last month, General Naumann was out here because he looks at Hawaii as the western most part of NATO. And I had to explain to them a little bit that he was only expressing his sense of humor about this.

But so today I'd like to make five points and fairly short ones and ones that have been made already before in various ways, but maybe we can take one more look at it. For those that study history, history, as John White pointed out, doesn't go in a straight line. And for those of you that are engineers and look at systems, it goes basically in a sine curve and it may be damped or it be an undamped sine curve. And so what we are seeing right now is a time on the sine curve where our nation enjoys quite a bit of transcendence both economically and militarily. I think the fact that history does go in sine curves helps give us a little sense of humility about the articulation of hubris that occurs in the nation and in the world today. So that's something where I think that humility will stand us in good stead.

But first, let's think about security in general. A lot of us have used the quotation that Joe Nye gave us about security being like oxygen. That as long as you have it, you don't think about it. When you don't have it, for those of you that have tried to swim underwater or been held underwater or something like that, when you don't have it, it's the only thing you can think about. Our nation and a lot of other nations in our world these days have grown up with a general sense of security throughout the lifetime of most of the voting populous for those that have voters. For the last 40 or 50 years, we've had general security.

A lot of you have spent time in the Balkans, a lot of you have spent time on the Levant and the Mediterranean where some of our friends don't think in terms of 30-year mortgages because they just don't have the opportunity to do that. But we have the security, we enjoy it, we tend to take it for granted. And the military security undergirds this overall sense of comprehensive security that we have economically and politically.

And this brings up my second point where I think it's important for us as we go into the next century to think in terms of comprehensive security. Security for a nation, if you go back to Civics 101, embodies all the elements of national power. Tom Friedman wrote a pretty book, I think, about The Lexus and the Olive Tree where he listed six parts, but let me get down to three where we just talk about the military, the economic, and the political dimensions of security.

In these days, where we don't have a transcendent threat in the world, we need to look at security in various pockets of the world as the intersection of political, economic, and military. And we have to have the right combination of those in order to provide security in a part of the world. And this is pointed out. John White made this point a little bit, talking about the economics. Klaus made the point as well as that the commercial interests in economics are tending to dominate this and diminish somewhat the role of the military. They never drive that role to zero and, when they do, we will be in peril, I think.

The next point that I think we need to look about, and this is pandering a little bit to Bill Perry and John White and Ash Carter who came up with the term of "preventive defense." In fact, wrote a book about it which can be at Harvard and various places and your local bookstore. But I'm not trying to sell the book today. But the notion of preventive defense is one of foresight. Of trying to do things in advance that head off having to come to actual physical conflict. Now this is sort of a complex notion because, in our world today, there are a lot of tough customers and if they think preventive defense is trying to avoid conflict, it is more likely to happen.

You have to be prepared for conflict and prepared and seem to be willing to engage in conflict. But if you are foresighted, you can head off conflict and work in a sense of preventive defense. And I think this is where a lot of our effort should be devoted. As I sort of transition careers, I think about that more and more. But as you know, foresight doesn't always work and so we have to hedge our bets and we hedge our bets with the military.

So the role of the U.S. military through this period I see as one of a balancer, a fly wheel. We can show up in various places. Particularly where I've been in the last little while in Asia and the Korean Peninsula, with Japan, with the issues in Northeast Asia, with the issues in Southeast Asia which have been so challenging the last little bit. And also Australia is doing such a great job in leading that effort.

But our military has been discussed fairly in a complex way of the various qualities that we'll need. But I'd like to get, again, not trying to pander to General Joulwan here, but a football analogy, is our military needs to be linebackers. We need to be the ones that can run with the fast and yet hit with the heavy. And we need to be multi-faceted and we need to play across a large spectrum of warfare. Modern, post-modern, and pre-modern warfare as Klaus talked about. These are the issues that we have to get at. We need to think in terms of the flywheel and creating stability.

And finally, a point that is a little off this theme but one that I think gets at the intersection of the political-military decision making in our plans, is to never forget that the use of military force must be a proxy for our national will. Sometimes there is a tendency if parts of the military are easy to use and we've got to do something, that we end up using military force when it may not, in fact, be a genuine proxy for the will of our nation. And this is something with which we must take great care. And we must take care with this at our political-military interface and this is something that our senior leaders have to deal with as we look at the use of the military.

And this is even true at low levels. It's especially true at higher levels of force. And I think if we keep this notion in mind, it's something that will be of great utility to us as we move forward into the next century. Thank you.

Mackenzie: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I always seem to be the chap who gets that moment when there are about 12 minutes left. I have a presentation to give and you also want some questions. So Jacqui, when she introduced or talked to me outside, she said, well, that's why we put you last because at least you're speaking your mother tongue and you can get on with it.

I come to you as a European, a Britain, and a Scot. Not necessarily in that order. But to bring perhaps a slight damp, typically British cloud over this gathering here. Because however responsive you are,and I like the word responsive, but I much prefer the word effectiveI think it's effectiveness that we're looking at. And in terms of operations, you are almost certain to be operating with others and then the whole business of effectiveness becomes an altogether different challenge.

What I'd like to do in the few minutes I have here is just give you some of my experience as the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility to General Joulwan here, to the chairman of the Military Committee, Klaus Naumann, to your Chief of the Army Staff down there, who was in fact a subordinate of ours at the time. How do you work an operation like this in this difficult multinational environment?

Europe has changed enormously. That's been said several times, but unless you've had the privilege of going and visiting all 27 countries of the partnership program, you just can't begin to imagine where they're coming from. You are starting from a high point. They are starting from an incredibly low point. But this doesn't make them poor allies. But if and when you have to do business with them, it will make them very uncomfortable bedfellows. And I'd like to explain really why.

I think it comes as a basic rule of thumb that the more multi-national an operation is, the less effective it is militarily, but the more acceptable it is politically and the absolute reverse is true. You will be dealing in an organization which is not as effective militarily as you would like it to be and as you train and prepare and organize yourself to be from here, 3,000, perhaps 4,000 miles away.

I look at it in two parts. First of all, structure and then pick up my key word, effectiveness, again. In terms of structure, you will be dealing with a headquarters which is not a national one. You may well be providing the nucleus of the national headquarters, but you will find bolted onto it a contribution from all the nations who have contributed the contributing forces. And you have to work out how to handle them. General Rick Shinseki knows that better than anybody serving here. Thirty-two nations present a serious challenge when all of them want officers on your headquarters.

Secondly, which posts do they have? Believe you me for the IFOR, the arguments were labyrinthine in trying to establish who would have what post. And most countries want at least one star above that which they justify. You can end up with enormous headquarters filled with starred officers. I could have manned the IFOR headquarters with two star generals easily. I couldn't find any privates.

Within that headquarters, you will tumble over the issue of intelligence sharing. Intelligence in an international environment is cartels within cartels. I can speak to him, but not to him. In the Ace Rapid Reaction Corps, which I commanded, I could share intelligence with my American colleagues and got it from a very high level from the United States, but I couldn't with my Italian deputy or indeed with my German. Cartels within cartels and how do you handle that?

Communications, capability, data sharing, digitization of the battlefield. All these are grand ideas here, but please remember us. The key players in Europe will be keeping up with you, but there will be many, many who are not and you need to just cast an eye on them and consider them when you work out how to do business, how to operate with these countries.

Then how do you organize your force? What states of command are you going to have? States of command are basically Old World speak in NATO. OPCON, TACOM. Understood to us, but, believe you me, when you need to use them for real, droves of lawyers are involved to interpret precisely who has what over whom. In fact, the standing joke in NATO at the moment is it's not OPCON, TACOM and so on. It's UPCAN, UPCAN'T, UPWON'T, and for those of them who don't share our love of British beef, UPNON.

So if that's the structure which you're going to have to think through when you build this modern force to operate in an international environment, how do you make it more effective now? Well, I like to think that we shouldn't be using the word joint now, we should be using the word integrated. We should consider the implications of total integration of, a fusion of political, economic, diplomatic, humanitarian, civil, and military. An approach, any operation we do, fusing all those elements together. Because my experience is that most of the time they fight each other.

And then on the ground, you need to work out how the military commander hands over to a civil administrator. How he becomes a supremo on hand and hands over to another. And unless you differentiate clearly the levels of command between strategic, operational, and tactical, you'll get in a muddle. And I think probably some of the muddle of Mike Jackson and the language and the difficulties he had with the Russian incident were probably because he was operating at the tactical and the strategic at the same time.

Another aspect of effectiveness is getting there. It was Lord Carver in our Army, a very distinguished soldier indeed, who I recall at the staff college when I was the commandant there saying sixty percent of war is getting there. It is the challenge for us. As the force generated for NATO, we had millions of troops, we had hundreds of tanks, we had thousands of aeroplanes, but getting them there at the right moment, to bring them to bear at the right time, was extraordinarily difficult. We talk about rapid reaction, immediate reaction, we talk about 96 hours or 120 hours. Doing it, believe you me, is a problem. And as I look across all the countries of the alliance, they're too heavy, too slow, and far too procedural. We need to think through how we sharpen up that process.

Time in theater has to be, in terms of training and preparation, kept to the absolute minimum. It's no good moving like light and then spend six months getting yourself effective. You'll also be short of specialists. If that's one message I like to leave as an ex-D-SACEUR, consider the role of specialists. You run them out and you run out of them extraordinarily quickly.

Force protection runs counter to all this. In the United Kingdom, for example, we were very happy with an infantry fighting vehicle called the Warrior. Well-protected, we faced the Russian, the might of the Soviet Union at the time, with this vehicle and perfectly happy to use it to fight the Russian. To send it to Bosnia, we up-armored it immediately with a foot of armor on each side. This was force protection because of our fear of casualties. A factor I'll come back to.

But if you can generate light forces which pack a punch and can sustain themselves and can be backed up by heavier forces in that sequence, then you're almost certainly on track and there are very few countries in the alliance and around that can do that properly.

Logistics is another theme. Do you know, amazingly in Bosnia when we started, eight out of 10 of everybody there was a logistician. The tooth to tail ratio was appalling. But it had to be. These sorts of operations, we rolled over our logistic base first. We laid it out first and then rolled the tanks and everything over it as a secondary operation. The understanding of that, the working out of how to make that lighter, how to avoid within the national responsibility this tremendous desire for everybody to bring the same things.

We had, I don't know how many medical chains10 or 12. There's absolutely no reason why a British soldier couldn't be treated in a German field hospital and an American one and a French one at all. But casualties, responsibility, and the desire to have our own medical meant that we all went with them. That's changed, but it was a cultural change which took time and it was driven by a shortage of medical personnel more than anything. But logistics, you need to think light. And it's extraordinarily difficult to do, believe you me. It is the heaviest part of the operation and I would suggest very firmly that in your consideration of how to be rapid and reactive, the consideration for logistics should loom very large in your thinking.

And then the whole question of interoperability about which we've heard today. I'm entirely of the view that interoperability is not really just about equipment. It's actually about people. It's about an attitude of mind. I well recall an intractable problem we had in the Ace Rapid Reaction Corps trying to fuse together two different communication systems; a French one and a British one. They just couldn't and hadn't been able to speak to each other for 10 years. When we put them together in the Ace Rapid Reaction Corps, a sergeant from each Army fixed the problem overnight. They fixed it. They had spent millions trying to sort it out in our own countries.

People can fix a lot of this. It is about attitudes, it's about training, it's about understanding. And recognizing that you'll never get everybody with the same equipment. It is a fact in the alliance today that there is not a single item of equipment shared from north of Norway to eastern Turkey by everybody. With the exception of diesel and that was changed by the Americans because you changed your type of diesel.

And my final point, just to reemphasize very much what has been said by others concerning casualties. It links to force protection. It is the curse of today for us military commanders. We have to live with it. But it was very much brought to my mind how very long a way we have come when I spoke to Staff Major Alexander in my own organization in London, the Chelsea Pensioners. Wonderful old soldiers from the Great War. And he reminded me of the Somme that had 20,000 killed before breakfast. Now we never want to do that again, but we may have it happen to us for some other completely different reason and we need to educate that war can be bloody and we need to make every effort to avoid it.

But it mustn't be a curse. We mustn't develop timid armies. There are many around that are muscular and filled with equipment and filled with brilliant people, but they're timid. And that to me is the curse of today.

If I could just finish then perhaps by, as everyone else has a quote, the one I particularly like about our allies is, in the dark days of the war in 1940 when the Axis had in fact taken the whole of the European mainland from northern Norway right down to the Mediterranean and Churchill was told this news he said, "So we are alone. Thank God."

Davis: Now unfortunately because Senator Rudman and Dr. White have to leave promptly at 3:15, we have time for only a few questions. Who would like to start? Yes, over here. Please identify yourself.

Audience Member: The commander of TRANSCOM during the Gulf War stated that 90 percent of the equipment and dry cargo moved by ship. Since that time, three major American shipping lines have been bought by foreign interests: APL, Sealand, and Lights [sic]. And also a large number of ships around the world are owned by Asian interests. I think about 80 percent of the dry cargo ships. And also 218 ships had to be chartered from foreign flags for use during the Gulf War. The Panama Canal is now controlled by a Hong Kong company. Is the United States absolutely equipped to deal with all eventualities in the effect of an extended ground war at a distant place?

Davis: Who would like to take David's question? Admiral Prueher, you seem to be the only former CINC, the U.S. CINC on the panel. Would you like to?

Panel Member: I don't think you ought to say anything, Admiral.

Prueher: I don't either. I was going to beg off in that same manner.

Panel Member: I think the simple answer to the question is I think that is a totally overly stated case about the Panama Canal being controlled by Chinese companies. True, they have bought various port facilities and apparently control them, but I could assure you it would take this government the speed of light to do whatever it had to do to maintain sea lanes and, frankly, to get cargo ships if faced with a crisis. We have plenty of tools to do that with.

Davis: Any other questions? Time for two short questions. We have a question here? Yes, please.

Audience Member: But to follow up for the rest of the panel, the two issues of burden sharing and, conversely, the military technological convergence that we're seeing, is there a balance? What is it?

Davis: General Naumann, would you like to start since we're talking about that infamous technology gap?

Naumann: First of all, there is indeed a gap. In my view, this is a gap that consists of three sub-gaps. First, we have a technological gap between the United States and the European allies, primarily in the field, what you call C4I. We can close this, but this will require some preparedness on your side as well to transfer technology. Otherwise, we will not have a problem. And in the United States, you would have a problem if you approached parliamentarians by asking to buy European. They react angrily if you told them to buy American. So we have to find a solution, but I think it's feasible.

Secondly, we have, I should say, a capability gap that is the result of lack of political will. The Europeans could easily muster forces which are capable to have position guided munitions, things like this. That's not a technological miracle and a hurdle for the Europeans, it's a lack of political will. And this has to be addressed. I think Kosovo was our wake-up call, at least for some Europeans. And I think they will take action slowly, but they will do it.

And then you have a gap in between the European allies where you have a first league and you have a second league and perhaps even a third league. I don't know. We have to arrange for a solution that will close this gap as well. I think these are the gap challenges that are ahead of us. But I think we can find solutions if there is the political will to provide the necessary funds to do it and, secondly, if there is some preparedness on your side to go for some technology transfer.

Which on the other side, we offer advantages to you as well. There are areas where the Europeans still have some possibilities to offerthings which you would like to have as well and which they have in their forces right now. Just to mention the famous example of the Howitzer.

Davis: Of course General Naumann knows that it's a virtual victory to have gotten funding for the MEADS program in the United States to sustain a collaborative effort. But Dr. White, I think you wanted to . . .

White: I just wanted to build on what General Naumann said. As I mentioned in my remarks, I think we get too fixated on the American solution and too fixated on technological solutions. It's part of our culture. But in point of fact, the challenge before us as everyone has said on this panel today is how are we going to fight and win effectively. And we're going to fight and win effectively, as General Mackenzie said, and be effective only if we do it together. We don't do it together, we may in some sense win the battle, but lose the war.

So it's not enough to simply say we're going to go pell-mell forward with our technological advantages. There is a bigger challenge here. It has to do with how we organize forces, how we cooperate with our allies both in terms of military capability and the larger issues on which we have common objectives. And those have to be built into this change which we're going through and have to be an explicit part of the change.

Davis: Yes, General Naumann.

Naumann: One sentence to what John White just said. I would really argue we should not continue for too long a time with this burden sharing debate since otherwise we will end up with a bean counting exercise of unforeseen dimensions. The Europeans will tell you we are providing 80 percent of the forces in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Of course you provided 85 percent of the air campaign. The Europeans will start to tell you that we are doing most of the stabilizing efforts with the East Europeans and with the Russians and they will start with all these wonderful statistics what they have given in terms of money to the Russians to no one's avail. You don't know it, but anyway, they did.

But I would really argue let's find a solution like John White just said it. To work together to make this alliance once again an entity which thinks together, which fights together, and which succeeds together.

Davis: General Mackenzie, would you like the final remark?

Mackenzie: Just one final remark if I may. There is an aspect of burden sharing which is in procurement. Some countries in the alliance in particular say, all right, we have tanks and you have tanks, but you buy the tank transporters and we, therefore, because we're close allies, don't bother. Please don't do that. We need the United States and Europe to be large. We tremble slightly at the thought of the U.S. becoming small and sharp and clever. We need a large hammer somewhere. And so as a European, don't think too small.

Davis: It remains for us to thank our distinguished panel.