1999 Fletcher - Panel 5

1999 Fletcher Conference

Wednesday, November 3, 1999 10:45 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Panel 5:

Redefining Defense: Preparing U.S. Forces for the Future

Ambassador Richard L. Armitage
Congressman Mac Thornberry
Dr. Michael O'Hanlon
Dr. Edward L. Warner

Transcript

Chilcoat: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Dick Chilcoat. I am your humble and loyal President of the National Defense University. Welcome to panel five, "Redefining Defense: Preparing U.S. Forces for the Future." I like to tell our War College students that they have picked a wonderful time to come to our university. As one of our speakers said yesterday, we are in the midst of a great strategic transformation, the last one was perhaps 50 years ago or so, and our students will have a chance to think, research, and write about this transformation during their year of study. And to build some intellectual strategic capital and prepare for their time on watch.

And I am quick to tell them, too, that their time will come sooner than they think and they must be ready. And having seen some 12 or 13 war college classes over the last five or six years, I am very confident that they'll follow well in our footsteps.

Our panel's charter says that strategic responsiveness is at the heart of redefining defense and that transformation requires change in three primary ways: modernization, human resources, and readiness. And hard choices between present capabilities and future needs will be required. The dialogue of this conference clearly indicates that. Yesterday we heard voices that called for the initiation of change. Some called for an acceleration of the transformation process currently underway. And still others called for proper balance and prudent risk management.

This morning we heard the senior representatives from our Services discuss their visions for the future and the development of shared joint vision. Our panel will continue the strategic dialogue. And we are fortunate to have four discussants who possess great experience in national security affairs and they are strategic thinkers. Their perspectives are diverse and include those of the Congress, the public, and private sectors, those of the analysts, the scholar, and the strategic practitioner. And I'm delighted to introduce them at this time. Their detailed bios are in your program, but let me provide highlights on each.

Ambassador Rich Armitage is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. He completed three combat tours in Vietnam and came to Washington in 1975 and has served in a wide array of public and private capacity since that time. He was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and he's filled many key diplomatic and negotiating posts along the way. He's served on the past National Defense Panel and I'm delighted to say that he's the chairman of the National Defense University Board of Visitors.

Mr. Mac Thornberry represents the 13th District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has an undergraduate degree from Texas Tech and is a graduate from the University of Texas Law School. He has extensive private sector experience as well as Washington legislative experience. Mr. Thornberry was reelected to a third term in November 1998, and serves on the Armed Services Committee, the House Budget Committee, and the Committee on Resources.

Dr. Michael O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, specializing in U.S. defense strategy and budgets, military technology, Northeast Asian security, and humanitarian intervention. He received his undergraduate degree in physics and his Ph.D. in public policy, both from Princeton. Prior to assuming his current position at Brookings, Dr. O'Hanlon worked with the Congressional Budget Office for five years. He is an author of numerous books, articles, and op-ed pieces concerning national security issues.

And Dr. Ted Warner is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy and also holds an MA and Ph.D. from Princeton. Dr. Warner retired from the Air Force after 20 years of service and was a senior defense analyst with the Rand Corporation. He returned to government service and assumed his present position in June of 1993. He's the principal adviser to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and to the Secretary of Defense on national security and defense strategy.

Gentlemen, we are delighted to have you here this morning. Each will take eight to 10 minutes for opening remarks. We'll go from our left to our right. Excuse me. We'll go from our right to our left. And then we'll look forward to your questions. Mr. Ambassador, if you will please, please open the session for us.

Armitage: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I may say that for me it's a special honor to be with Congressman Thornberry who, along with a few in the U.S. Senate, has really been at the heart of what you all are discussing and what we are discussing as a nation. The Congressman, along with Senator Lieberman who was with you yesterday, Senator Santorum, Senator Roberts, and former Senator Coates have been the ones who have been the prime movers in this transformation of which we're on the cusp. So I'm delighted to be with you, sir.

Why are we here today? Why are all these people here, Dick? Well, they're probably here because we all agree, unfortunately, with Plato that only the dead have seen the end of war. That's why we're here. And I'm going to tell you why I'm here, personally. I'm here because I'm looking to be part of the solution that comes up with a war fighting organization which has joint C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Which allows junior officers and NCOs to act reliably independently within the commander's intent. And I think, to boil it all down, that's what we're really talking about today.

You have set the task of discussing modernization, human resources, readiness, and I'll touch on each very briefly, General. I want to start by saying that Charles Darwin holds some thoughts that might be useful to remind ourselves. He said that it is not the strongest of the species who survives nor is it the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change. And if we're going to survive, we've got to be most adaptable to change.

I'd like to borrow from U.S infantry lore for a moment if I can. For those of you who remember what the mission of the infantry is: to close with and destroy the enemy. And the important words there are not to destroy the enemy. The important words are to "close with the enemy." Anybody can destroy the enemy. The Air Force can destroy the enemy. Navy ships with gunfire can destroy the enemy. It's the Army, it's land forces that have to close with the enemy. There's absolutely in my view no substitute for rapid, deployable land power which represents a tangible commitment which no enemy can ignore. It is armies and land power which changes governments and it is land forces which will be separating the good from the bad in the future.

So onto modernization, General Chilcoat. Two years ago, the National Defense Panel, of which I was honored to be a member, urged the Army, this is a quote, "to restructure the division into small operational units with greater lethality and to become more expeditionary with fast, shock exploiting troops." Well, two years ago, we were yelling into the wind. It sounds to me like maybe a little less so these days. There's a general recognition I think that our U.S. Army right now is too heavy and will arrive to the fight too late to effect a difference.

A great football coach from Texas A&M and later from the University of Alabama, Bear Bryant, used to say he wanted his athletes to be mobile, hostile, and agile. And as far as I'm concerned, if you add lethal to that, that's what we ought to want for our service, for our land force. Mobile, hostile, agile, and lethal.

I want to mention, if I may, an unpleasant subject. I want to mention Task Force Hawk for a moment because it is my view that for those of us who really care about the future of land power, this was a very, very signal moment.

The failure to rapidly deploy and to become operational, operationally effective shortly after arrival shows in my view almost every shortcoming of our present day Army structure. And you can go through the list. No joint C4ISR, tiered readiness. Centralized, division-led organizational structure, etc., etc. But there are some questions that surprisingly haven't been wrestled with, at least publicly yet, in Washington surrounding this failure.

And I think it was a big failure. Questions of the readiness of the unit abound. I would be very interested to know if the Secretary of Defense or Deputy Secretary had asked to see the unit readiness report for Task Force Hawk for the six months or so leading up to that deployment. And whatever happened to leadership that looked around corners? Kosovo was not a secret. It was developing for months and months. It seemed to me that our most forward deployed forces in Europe ought to have been ready, more ready for the fight. And why wasn't it more ready? These are the questions, I think basic questions, that have to be answered before we can move on to the next level of transformation.

I saw the Chief's vision statement and I'm very encouraged because I think what he's trying to do is very difficult and I think he recognizes that and he's started the discussion. I give him enormous credit for that. However, I don't think the discussion went far enough, as he laid it out in front of the Association of the United States Army the other day, or that it is fully developed. I don't believe it's broad enough. I don't believe it affects enough of the U.S. Army. It looks to me like it affects about 10 or maybe 12 percent of the U.S. Army. But I really think he's on the right track and I think we've all got to get behind him and encourage him to even greater efforts.

But you know, it seems to me that we're talking a lot about new technology. It's incumbent upon us not to apply new technology to old structures and to old doctrines. That's been done before. The French and the British tried it between the two great wars to dismal effect. So I think on the endeavor that the Chief has embarked upon, he's going to have to really change structure and he's going to have to change doctrine as well. Now in this, there's something that's very important and I think for those in this room, you will instantly recognize it. But when we publicly talk about Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) and technologies, we've got to return to one central fact.

RMA is important, but people are the most important element of this. And it seems to me that if we are in an era where noncommissioned officers (NCOs) sometimes and certainly junior officers, perhaps guarding a bridge in Bosnia could be a strategic asset, then these folks ought to be practicing decision making. We ought to be delegating down as much authority as possible. Instead, the Army seems to be going, and the Services in general, seem to be going the other way.

I received an unclassified memo about a year and a half ago from the 18th Airborne Corps commander, where he was taking away from battalion and company commanders decisions on discipline which normally resided in a battalion and a company. It seemed to me this was symptomatic of going in the absolute wrong direction.

And I'd like to ask the general officers here seated the following question. If you gentlemen had applied to you the standards we're applying to young NCOs and officers today, how many of you would be sitting here? I'll let you answer that yourself, I don't want to embarrass anyone. But I think it's quite obvious that very few of us would. Denny Reimer used to speak about this quite well from his own personal experience. And if we're going to have the type of people we want manning this transforming Army, we're going to have to not only let them practice decision making, we're going to have to have them be allowed to fail on occasion. We're going to have to get away from zero defect mentality.

Readiness. It seems to me that when we think about readiness that whatever discussion we have has to reflect today's requirements and today's warning times. And I can't come up with a better solution for readiness than rotational readiness, whatever the term of art is nowadays in the Armywhere you have a cycle that's predictable. A training cycle or where you're available for deployment followed by a reconstitutional cycle. I think this is important. It's important now for soldiers to have predictability in their lives. When I was a young officer, it wasn't very important. We thought nothing, my wife and I and children, of packing up and going from one coast to the other. People are a lot different now.

Our soldiers are different, our family structures are different, the economics are different. We've got to evolve a personnel strategy that represents this and a readiness strategy that represents the changed environment. I want to speak finally about a couple of lessons of leadership, General Chilcoat, that I think all of us need to keep in mind. I keep these comments as they float across my desk, sayings on leadership. I think that there are several that are very applicable for the senior leadership of our U.S. Army these days as we embark upon this great crusade.

The first is I think it's very important and as a quality of a good leader that we immerse ourselves, in the goal of creating an environment where the best, the brightest, and the most creative are attracted, they're retained, and they're unleashed in our national service. The second I think is very important to remember. That being responsible means occasionally pissing people off. You can't avoid it. Live with it. Third, that good leaders need to delegate and empower others liberally, but then pay very much close attention to details. And finally, that the commander in the field as far as I'm concerned is always right and the rear echelon wrong until proven otherwise.

And lastly, one thing that's often overlooked. It's the relationship between the chief of a Service and the service secretary. Very often the political leadership, Republican or Democrat, has not always put in as Service secretary the type of people who can partner and sometimes bully and sometimes cajole the service chief into doing things. But I think it's been over looked for a long time, the relationship between service chief and service secretary.

This relationship is extraordinarily important if you want to get things done. Sometimes the service secretary is going to have to be the bad guy. Sometimes he's going to have to be a big foot. Other times, he can be the front that approaches congressional leaders and congressional committees, to try to empower the Army to go in one direction or another. I think when we talk about Title X responsibilities, we talk about service chiefs, we need to realize that the service secretary has a huge role that's not a role that, in my view, has been filled equally throughout our Services and throughout our history with extraordinarily competent people, but it can be an extraordinarily important position. Thank you very much, General Chilcoat.

Chilcoat: Thanks very much, Mr. Ambassador. Representative Thornberry, please.

Thornberry: Thank you, General. As we think about how we prepare U.S. forces for the future, it seems to me that everybody in the room ought to at least be able to agree on one thing. And that is we will never know for sure with certainty exactly what the future is going to look like. Now there are trends that we ought to pay attention to. In fact, we'd be foolish to ignore things like the increasing importance of space, the increasing importance of information operations, the likelihood that weapons of mass destruction are something we're going to have to deal with. But even if you see these trends, you don't know exactly how things will shape out.

And so I was interested in a little comment from a book that I'm sure a lot of you have read called America's First Battles, that goes through the first battles in each of the wars that the United States has faced. The editors at the beginning of that book have written "that the record of Americans' abilities to predict the nature of war, of the next war, not to mention its causes, location, time, adversary, and allies, has been uniformly dismal. Of course such flawed records are typical worldwide, but the myopia of the past in no way lessens the need to prepare. Quite the contrary. Preparations of the most certain sort possible are required for a most uncertain future."

I think that's right. And if we are to prepare as best we can for uncertainty, it seems to me that Ambassador Armitage hit on the key and that is a flexible, responsive organization. I would also add to that a military culture that not only tolerates change, but fosters change. And I'm afraid we're a long way from there right now.

In September this year, a Defense Science Board study came out that argued, interestingly to me, that a Revolution in Business Affairs is essential not for the reasons that you always hear about, to free up enough money to pay for modernization, but it's essential to create that kind of agile responsive organization that can survive in a future that changes so quickly and with so much uncertainty. And yet that same study found that there was not the sense of urgency that was needed and that DoD is underestimating the focus and effort needed for fundamental transformation.

If you look at all the paper coming out of the Pentagon, you see the words transformation and Revolution in Military Affairs stamped on just about everything. But I'm afraid that a lot of what gets labeled transformation is really a justification or even advocacy for things that are already in the pipeline. So what do we do to try to get this agile responsive organization to meet an uncertain future?

One possibility that will probably be included is Congress can mandate change. We have done that before with Goldwater-Nichols. And, as you know, there's a study going on now that's supposed to have some recommendations ready for the next administration on how to reorganize the boxes. Not just at the Pentagon, but State Department and throughout the national security structure. And certainly I think there probably is a need to rearrange the boxes. But we've got to do more than that. We've got to get down into that culture. And there's no one piece of legislation I can write that's going to solve that problem.

But Governor Bush in his excellent speech at the Citadel, which Ambassador Armitage had a big role in, set the goal out there, I think, which was, quote, "a culture of command where change is welcomed and rewarded, not dreaded." And there are, in each of the areas that we are to address, I think there are some things that can help get that culture. And let me just tick through a few of them right quick.

Number one, in the key area of people. It's nearly so basic you hate to say it, but it's so important you can't leave it out. We've got to get the very best people possible. People who can think for themselves. And the importance of attracting top quality people is going to be more important in the future, not less. Secondly, once we get these people, we've got to think about how we treat them. And one of the things I think we have to look at are promotions. Of what we reward and what we don't reward, what we may even punish.

Of course we've got to ensure that promotions are based on merit, not some sort of good old boy network. But I think we have to take a different look at the kind of people and the kind of skills we promote. For example, we are very dependent on technology. Technology changes rapidly. And yet some highly technical skilled folks are limited in their promotions because of the system we have. I think we have to consider different career paths for some of these people and to recognize the importance of different skills. And I think everybody here acknowledges that you can have all of the words and visions from the top that you can stand, but what speaks far louder is what really happens when those promotion boards meet and it can drown all out all of the high sounding words that can come out.

The other thing I think we've got to do is protect the innovators. If we allow them to be stifled, then the bureaucratic self-interest will rule the day. Congress has played a role in doing that in the past. Especially with confirmations. And one of the things I think we ought to look at is extending the tours of service for some critical positions. Admiral Moffit was in his position 12 years, Rickover was in his for like 30. Sometimes to make these changes happen, you have to be there for a longer period.

In the area of hardware, I think it's essential that we strengthen the CINCs' and the joint roles voice in making resource decisions. Some people argue that the thinking elements of the military have no money and budget authorities for the bureaucratic and parochial elements call all the shots on programs, systems, and technologies. And I think we have to push at every opportunity, experimentation and particularly joint experimentation. All of the folks that have written books and articles looking at how militaries have revolutionized in the past keep coming back to experimentation.

But it's got to be true experimentation. You've got to have failures as part of it. You have to have enough money. You can't just be focusing on the seams and you can't just be worrying about interoperability. You've got to be really testing things out and you have to have a seat at the table where resource decisions are made.

I think a lot of people have mentioned the importance of funding research and development. It is an embarrassment to have last year's Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) request come out with nearly a 20 percent reduction in research and development. I think it's also an embarrassment to everybody in this room, the acquisition rules and regulations that we have to work with. And it just seems to me, as others have mentioned, that when Ford Motor Company can take a car from an idea to the showroom floor in less than two years and Compaq Computers can change their manufacturing requirements in a day, that the length of time it takes for us to field new technology is just an embarrassment.

One of the areas I'm hopeful about, about the Chiefs' reorganization of the Army is that maybe that will give us a chance to try some accelerated reformed acquisition procedures.

The other category of things is ideas. Edward Teller wrote that technology develops much more rapidly than the human mind accepts new ideas. And I think we all have a challenge in encouraging new thought. You know, in the business world the past couple of years, the hot book has been this one by Andrew Grove, the head of Intel, called Only the Paranoid Survive. Maybe we ought to ask are we paranoid enough in the United States military to survive in the next century?

As one writer put it when he was looking at the inter-war years, "The losers were forced by events to reexamine everything. Military losers are intellectual radicals. The winners, complacent in victory, feel the need for self-examination far less. Thus for the French, the lesson of World War I was that offensive warfare could not succeed."

I think a key to encouraging new creative thought is the system of professional military education. I think we ought to consider what a couple of European countries have and that is entrance examinations before you get into certain PME schools. We ought to make sure you have a basic body of knowledge before you get there so we don't have to re-teach that. We can focus on strategy and on creative thinking. I think we ought to have higher expectations going in and a more rigorous course while you're there.

Now I suspect there may be a person or two in the room who are saying, yeah, all of that stuff sounds good, but what are you going to do with your own house? What are you going to do about Congress who is part of the problem? And you're right, Congress is. I'm not saying any of this is going to be easy, but I am saying that the folks here and some of the people in Congress are absolutely determined to try to create the kind of momentum towards an agile, responsive, flexible organization that can keep up with what we have in the future. I think that momentum to accept and encourage change is key.

In Governor Bush's speech, he referred back to Churchill. In one of his speeches, he talked about a period of consequence where the decisions you make now have implications over decades to come. And he went on to say that nothing in this generation could ever build or matter more than the means to defend our nation and extend our peace. I think this is worth the very best efforts of everybody in this room, whatever the obstacles are, and we ought to be committed to pursuing it.

Chilcoat: Dr. O'Hanlon. Please.

O'Hanlon: Thank you, General. It's an honor to be on this panel and at this excellent conference. I'd like to do two things with my presentation in the spirit that has been established here earlier today by the previous panel as well as ours. How do we pay for a lot of the creativity and innovation that people have rightly supported? And I think this is a bigger problem than most people recognize right now. So I'd like to talk about the budget realities as I see them and then a couple of thoughts on my own prescriptions for how to prioritize to the extent that I think we'll need to more than we have so far.

Because to innovate and to push along some of the new technologies we're talking about, some of the new ideas we're talking about, I think we have to rock the boat and break some old china a little more than we're willing to right now. Just to kind of give a snapshot of my view of how the last two years have gone, in 1997, under Secretary Warner and others, the Quadrennial Defense Review was produced. A very good document and I think it had a very sound fiscal prognosis. Which was that defense would stay at about $250 billion into the indefinite future in real terms for funding.

At that time, the QDR hoped that privatization and outsourcing would provide, as Congressman Thornberry just mentioned, a lot of the money needed for modernization. Two years later, at least the way I see it, the debate's changed. We no long have quite as grandiose hopes about the savings from privatization and outsourcing. At least not in the five- to 10-year time frames that are most relevant. But we've deluded ourselves, in my opinion, into believing that defense spending is going to go way up. And if you listen to some of the rhetoric from both political parties, you can see why.

And what I want to do in the first part of my presentation is to say why I think the answer is that, no, in fact we will not get those sort of resources. And then to motivate some prioritization that I'll touch on in the second part. So I've got a couple of slides to show to try to back this up. And I want to thank very much Major Higgins who actually produced these slides for me in the last hour or so. So that's the kind of rapid response that you're after, General Shinseki, and I want to salute you for your great people working with you. And thank you, Major Higgins.

This is from the February budget proposal of the administration. And this is in constant 1992 dollars. I don't know why OMB insists on using 1992 dollars, but in any case, I decided to stick with the numbers even though they look sort of funnysince you know the actual numbers are up around 280 billion, 290 billion in 2000 dollar terms. But all I'm trying to show here is that President Clinton, for all of his, in my opinion, correct rhetoric about the need to reverse defense spending cuts did not really do a whole lot in order to reverse them in a meaningful way. Now as a self-proclaimed chief hawk, I don't have too many problems with that. I don't think the QDR modernization agenda is essential to the extent that it's been laid out. But nonetheless, that is administration policy. And to fund that, you're going to need to do a lot better than this.

What this basically says is that, through the five-year period that was focused on in the budget proposal, resources are flat. Now in a minute I'll show another chart, it will be my third chart actually, to explain, as all of you know, something that you all know already, why flat resources will not be enough for the current modernization agenda of the Pentagon. But this is what is really coming out of all that talk about $112 billion defense spending increase that we heard from the administration last winter. In reality, if you get a $5 billion annual increase, you're doing pretty well. A lot of that $112 billion was measured against a baseline that was already headed downward. So a lot of it was just filling in the trough to keep things level. Only a little bit would actually push things up. That's point one.

Now if I could, with apologies, pick on the Congress for a second and have the second slide. This is in nominal dollars so we're going to have to adjust for inflation here in just a second. But what I want to say is that the Congressional Republicans, to my eye, have done a very good job of pushing the defense budget up. Maybe not in ways we would always agree with the last couple of years, but nonetheless, keeping a very attentive eye on readiness and I salute them for that excellent effort. But that in some ways gives a false indication of where their budgetary priorities really have been.

This is from the budget resolution from Congress last winter as the basis for the Republican tax cut proposal of an $800 billion reduction over 10 years. We all know that's not going to happen right now, but my understanding is that's still most of Congress' and Governor Bush's basic tax agenda. If you have that sort of tax agenda, in my opinion it's inconsistent with even a Quadrennial Defense Review and, with all due apologies, even more inconsistent with the very good speech that Mr. Bush gave at the Citadel. A speech that I liked but which, in most cases, would have driven spending up.

Most of the things he talked about in specificity, increasing research and development, increasing pay, deploying missile defense, would have actually increased requirements above the Quadrennial Defense Review requirements. He talked a little about trying to reduce deployments, but frankly, if he can save a billion or two a year out of that area, I would be very impressed. So I think the over all gist of the Citadel speech is to show that Governor Bush has just as much of a problem as the Republican congress.

What this line shows. If you wanted to even hold resources constant through the end of the next decade, you would need to increase the nominal spending level by about 20 percent. Just assuming about 2 percent inflation. Which means you've got to be up around $350 billion in outlays by the end of the next decade to have defense spending even remain at today's level. The Republican congress is about $30 to $35 billion short of that. Now granted in the next few years they go up with the President modestly. The real defense budget would go up a little bit. But after that, it would fall even more than it had gone up. So we're looking at average resource levels that are, if anything, a little less than today's.

Now why is this a problem? You all know about the fact that the procurement holiday has to end. Let me just give you one chart to back that up and my final chart if I could. It's a busy chart so I won't ask you to look at everything. But this shows all the things we have to replace and the modernization agenda. It also points out something that many of you know and Congressman Lewis emphasized this summer. Which is we have to replace things that we don't even yet have plans to replace. And even if you cost out the modernization agenda of the Quadrennial Defense Review, you get numbers up around $70, $75 billion a year for what you have to spend on procurement. That's a $20 billion increase relative to today.

If you then add on top of that replacing things that we haven't yet planned to replace but know we shouldtankers, at some future date some support aircraft, various other sorts of thingsaccording to CBO estimates you have to spend $90 billion a year on procurement just to fund the Quadrennial Defense Review force. Now I grant you there will be debates about specifics systems and cutting back here and there, but we're starting from a benchmark of $90 billion. Not the $60 billion that the Joint Chiefs popularized in the mid-90s. Ninety billion. That's the steady state requirement for procurement spending if you really want to stick with the force and the modernization agenda of the current administration.

That's a $40 billion increase relative to today. So I don't know what the right number is. And having worked at CBO myself, I know that you can never get these things very precise and I'm sure the number is accurate to within plus or minus $10 billion. And so none of this stuff is very exact science. But nonetheless, the problem's big. Now that's my basic reading of both the politics of increasing defense spending, which to me look fairly non-compelling. I don't see the political pressure there to really do it when the rubber meets the road. And at the same time, the upward pressure.

The other major parts of the defense budget I think will stay more or less flat in real terms. Governor Bush was certainly right, Ambassador Armitage is certainly right to push the need for research and development, Congressman Thornberry. I salute them for that. That's a very good initiative, but that's just going to drive things up even a little bit more. So I've already taken close to all of my time laying out this sort of sober budget message. So let me just tick off three or four points very quickly before wrapping up.

To me the answer for how you deal with this is that you have to work very hard in every single area of defense policy today. You're not going to just cancel the F-22 and solve this. That's the argument of the Air Force's that I agree with most on the F-22 today. The F-22 can't solve this, the V-22 can't solve this.

Together with all other modernization priorities and a rethinking of the way we do naval overseas presence and a rethinking of whether we need the current two-war strategy, with the possibility of some modest additional cuts in manning strength, if you look at all these different things together, I think that you can save $3 billion here, $5 billion there and ultimately get by with a budget that's more or less at today's real-dollar level. But it's going to require work across a wide area of defense priorities.

And final word, let me just mention one quick thing on the modernization agenda. To me, I would go back to the original Admiral Owens vision. There have been a lot of Revolution in Military Affairs, hypotheses and visions in the last ten years. I like Owens' the best. I think it's the most compelling. Which is focus on "systems of systems." Recognize how much is improving in the realm of electronics, computers, munitions, miniaturization. Emphasize those things, be willing to spend less on modernizing platforms. You've got to replace the platforms anyway because they're wearing out. There's no doubt about that.

But I personally would not buy 339 F-22s, 2,700 Joint Strike Fighters, 360 V-22s and so forth. I'd try to make do with a lot of existing technology. Buying new F-16s, buying new F-15s, buying new transport helicopters and equipping them with better munitions and CQs and computers, information systems, better sensors, to try to get maximum modernization benefit for modest dollars and use that philosophy to try to scale back this agenda that right now is, in my eyes, simply unaffordable. Thank you.

Chilcoat: Thank you very much, Dr. O'Hanlon. Dr. Warner, you have the hammer.

Warner: I'd like to speak for a few minutes this morning on the issues of transformation, particularly transformation in our military capabilities to address the full spectrum of operations. If we could have the first slide, please. As an old member of the Rand Corporation and even as a result of my Air Force training before that, I've become addicted to the briefing format.

This chart goes back to the time of the Quadrennial Defense Review. It was during that review in the '96'97 time frame that the administration got a better focus on some of the many elements we have to balance within our defense program. Much of this was alluded to by the presentations by the chiefs and the vice-chiefs in the panel that preceded us. The three principal elements that we have to balance are outlined here, on this chart: the need to shape, respond and prepare. We, on one hand, as the world's surviving superpower with strong leadership responsibilities throughout that world, have a responsibility to be able to meet the two major thrusts of our strategy in the near term. We must shape the international environment through engagement and deterrence and all the activities that go with those goals and, at the same time, we must be have the capability to respond across the full spectrum of conflict. Those responses range from humanitarian to non-combatant evacuation, to peace operations, to smaller scale interventions and coercive campaigns and finally, at the high end, to major theater wars.

We all know this. The interesting thing in light of the fiscal realities that Michael O'Hanlon has just talked about is that getting both these objectives done in light of our global commitments is in itself an extremely demanding challenge. Then on top of shape and respond, the QDR identified the third arrow at the bottom of the slide, the "prepare now" arrow. This objective says that while meeting the challenges of today, we must in fact also prepare for tomorrow. And I'm in full concurrence with the previous speakers that this preparation means transforming our military, making it adaptive, making it flexible, while still assuring it is agile and lethal.

This is our joint military capability which in turn rests on the organize, train, and equip Title X responsibilities of the Services. I strongly applaud the new departure in the Army's direction that has come through General Shinseki's vision, announced within these last couple of weeks. That vision clearly reflects, by the way, some of the "prepare now" activities of the past decade which owe a lot to another man present tonight, General Gordon Sullivan. I'd like to focus the remainder of my remarks on the "prepare now" dimension of our strategy.

In that "prepare now" arrow as it shows on the chart, we have the issues of the Revolution in Military Affairs. And I'll speak in a bit more detail about that. The slide also makes reference to the Revolution in Business Affairs that says we must both free up resources through the streamlining possible in an RBA to focus on our warfighting efforts and must also keep up with the modern practices of large organizations, of large business organizations in e-commerce, e-trade. All of the things that are happening in these modern practicesoutsourcing, commercialization, globalizationwould be recognized and reflected in the Department's activities. The Department of Defense is a massive business entity operating in a U.S. and international context that continues to change dramatically. We must change also.

We cannot continue to do what we need to do to sustain, supply, recruit, and operate military forces unless we pursue with real vigor this Revolution in Business Affairs. We must also modernize and modernization means both platforms and weapons and systems, implementing the C4ISR revolution that has just been talked about. But along with the RBA and modernization we must try to develop organizational activities and culture and adequate resources in order to pursue the adaptation and the evolution of our forceto pursue the ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs. The central technological dimension of this RMA is in the area of information technology, in particular the computer and how they impact upon our military operations. Next slide, please.

Let's focus now on military transformation. This thinking owes a lot to the work that Andy Marshall did beginning in the late '80s on into the early 1990s in the Department of Defense. As with Andy's work, our definition of a Revolution in Military Affairs is heavily based on Russian or Soviet concepts of this approach in the 1960s, again, in the late '70s. Our view is that for a military transformation we must harness new technologies via new organizational concepts and doctrine. All the pieces that Representative Thornberry talked about are important. You can't just do the technology, you must adapt the organizations and you must adapt the doctrine and concepts.

And below all those efforts, running as a constant thread through this, is people. You must have the innovative thinking; you must find, promote, protect, and foster this culture in the experimentation efforts and in the force more generally. And we must do this across the full spectrum of operations. We must forever remind ourselves, and I think this is another important part of the new emphasis of General Shinseki's vision for the U.S. Army, that all our forces must fight and win the nation's wars, but they also must continually, on a day to day basis, shape the international environment and respond to a set of contingencies.

So as we transform ourselves, we transform ourselves not only for the high end response of theater war, we transform ourselves for the day to day activities and the lower-intensity crisis response as well. Next slide, please.

The very good report on transformation that Representative Thornberry spoke about was by a Defense Science Board whose whole genesis owed itself to a congressional imperative, a direction that Representative Thornberry initiated. I commend this report to all of you. It's on DoD war fighting transformation and was published just a little over a month ago. It is a half empty/half full depiction of where we stand in our military in pursuing the Revolution in Military Affairs. And half empty/half full is a very accurate depiction.

I am keenly aware of this issue because over the last several years I've been in the middle of this process as both a student of it, and as an individual with some responsibility to try to push it forward. In the early 1990s, activities in this area were largely confined to some pioneering efforts in the United States Army, such as the "Louisiana Maneuvers," and the first battle laboratory. There was little else in the Services. There was no joint component to this. Science and technology was most certainly being pursued, but it wasn't being closely linked to warfighting challenges. We weren't looking for technologies and trying to relate them to future security challenges across the spectrum of conflict. Because time is short, I won't go into this in detail.

One of the most telling criticisms that I found in this DSB report was an indictment that we lacked an overall strategy for the pursuit of the Revolution in Military Affairs. I think we've had a tacit strategy, but it hasn't been made adequately explicit and it needs to be improved. So I concur with that criticism.

I developed this slide in the last two days to try to pull together what I think is that strategy. I think that we are seeking to pursue transformation through a series of interrelated activities, all of which have some fairly well articulated annual and longer-term plans. You can see the four areas there on the chartScience and Technology, Service Concept Development and Experimentation, Joint Concept Development and Experimentation, and People.

In the first category, science and technology, we have over the last five years developed mechanisms for connecting the Services' visions of their future military operational challenges to how from a technical standpoint they might meet those challenges. And the further you go out into the future, the possible technical solutions are increasingly broad concepts and thoughts.

And we tried to link these military operational challenges to science and technology so these efforts will bring along in the near, mid, and longer-term more fuel efficiencies, different kinds of munitions, different kinds of protection, and different C4ISR systems to give us the battle space awareness that was spoken of so eloquently by the previous panel.

The second area is Service Concept Development and Experimentation. We have now created a culture and a commitment on behalf of the top leadership of the Services to transformation and embedded within each of the Services a set of activities, including war fighting laboratories, battle laboratories of one sort or another, major types of experiments, "generation after next" looks. There are a myriad of stories to be told about what's come out of these kinds of efforts and how they're already beginning to influence the effort to wisely adapt for the future the U.S. military force that remains the best in the world.

There's no better case study than the U.S. Army and the recent activities undertaken by General Shinseki. The image of the Army, which reflects the recommendations of the National Defense Panel of a couple of years ago, is very much embedded in a lot of the innovative research done first by Andy Marshall, then in cooperation with the Army, and then by the Army itself, particularly in its "Army After Next" process. There are story after story of these Concept Development and Experimentation efforts pointing the way for important reforms. Does this mean we've got it all right? Heck, no. What it does mean is that we've succeeded in getting a process underway, that we've begun to resource that process, and that we've gotten a push from the U.S. Congress to accelerate and sustain the process. That's perfectly appropriate, and in fact we must accelerate and sustain the process.

We do not have a compelling foe today. But we do have a compelling set of challenges that are difficult today and, they will remain difficult in the future. We must adapt the force to meet them.

The third category is Joint Concept Development and Experimentation. Launching this effort was a critical step. This effort got underway first in the Atlantic Command starting just a little over a year ago. This command has now been renamed the Joint Forces Command. They have a campaign plan for Joint Experimentation, but they are barely out of the starting gate. It is of the nature of this challenge that it will take some time to get needed work fully underway. They are not simply working on the seams between the Services, but are truly assessing Joint challenges and capabilities.

They are working on fundamental challenges, key tasks that must be jointly met, key enablers, particularly in that C4ISR backbone. Finally, I want to talk about one of the tasks that the top leadership must help perform, both the military and civilian leadership of the Department in concert with the top leadership of the Services, and that is to focus on the right joint problems. We have limited resources, limited time, limited activities. These activities cannot be open ended. What are the right questions? And, again, because the future is ambiguous, the questions we pose to the Department must be broad and challenging, not narrowly tailored issues.

Finally, the issue of personnel policy. Everyone on this panel has emphasized, and I certainly second it, that all of this is related to the initiative of people. There are two elements to this. One is all of our forces must be better able to exercise initiative. Rich Armitage was very strong underscoring, and I certainly concur with him, that the military force in the field in the last analysis, when enabled by the new C4ISR architecture must be able to react quickly and this will require people with the skills and predelictions to do so. That is true. But the second element is that we must cultivate innovators in particular. We must create, nurture, protect, and promote the innovators; give them adequate support in every way.

Let me stop at this point. The time is certainly short. I'd be happy to respond to your questions.

Chilcoat: Thanks very much, Ted. Let me say thanks to each of our panel members. We have about 15 minutes left. There is much grist for the mill here. We welcome your questions. We have one over here.

Rothrock: Hi, John Rothrock, Colonel, Air Force retired. One of the imperatives that most people I think at this point agree comes with the information age is the diffusion and the flattening of decision-making structures. Yet this seems to run directly against the grain of what I think is also accepted as a still current principal, that you don't manage against .50 caliber that's opposing you, you lead against it. Which demands some sort of hierarchy. How does this tension play out in changing not only the structure, but the character of the service in the 21st century?

Chilcoat: Rich? Please.

Armitage: I'll give it a shot, sir. It seems to me that I'm in agreement if what you're saying is that we need to flatten out the hierarchy, the levels of command. If that's what you're about, I'm in full agreement. What I'm talking about, one of the things I'm talking about, we're talking about new structures and new doctrines. Whether you still need an Army, a corps, an Army division, and so forth, on down or whether you ought to flatten that. My own view is you ought to drastically flatten it. And I think that just the information age developments that you referred to is what allows us to do that.

Further, it seems to me that if we collectively and you, sir, in the Army specifically, put the huge emphasis on C4ISR, it's going to drive you in just that direction. It will flatten the sort of structure. And it's my hope.

Thornberry: For me, I think you're hitting on one key example of what I was trying to get at. How culture and natural self-interest goes against the grain of the way some of these changes are happening. And when you have all these different rungs on the ladder between here and there and people are used to moving up pretty quickly, you flatten that down and you don't have the kind of movement perhaps that you have had before. So it is against the natural interest to promote one's career to do that flattening even though the technology and for a variety of reasons we're headed in that way.

That's an example of the kind of challenges I think we face in driving change that may go against the self-interest of a Service. And that is part of, I think, the tremendous challenge in making this transformation happen.

Chilcoat: Other questions. We have one over here, please.

Clark: Thank you. Jeff Clark, Army History Office. About 40 years ago, we had a brand new President and a brand new Secretary of Defense. They were going to be bringing in changes in DoD from the business community about how we did business. Bringing in practices from Ford Motor Company, etc. We were going to have a new way both the Army and our Services address missions. A full spectrum of the conflict. Getting away from just reliance on nuclear warfare, looking at both conventional capabilities, special forces, all sorts of new things. And we truly tried hard to bring about a cultural change starting in about 1960 and onwards and we had some outstanding successes and perhaps some outstanding failures. But that cultural change was real difficult to bring about.

I know that all the speakers mentioned that. That that was really necessary to do. And I wondered if they have any more ideas about how you effect that sort of thing. Certainly you talk about the problems with zero defects in the Army and the other Services right today, but we have a congress and an American public that really won't almost tolerate zero defects in operational commitments, casualties. And that makes even that very difficult for the service chiefs to implement when, you know, the civilian, the American public won't stand for that, too. But do you have any insights into how, looking at the past, how we could do a better job making those cultural changes in the way we do business, the way we look at ourselves? Thanks.

Chilcoat: Ambassador Armitage?

Armitage: You bet. It seems to me that, first of all, I take great disagreement with your comment about the ability or the willingness of the American public to take casualties. They'd be nuts if they wanted to take casualties. But it seems to me that a short time ago during the Gulf War, the national leadership was talking about the possibility of 10,000 body bags. Ten thousand! Publicly. And the appetite for the sacrifice was in the American public, I think, because the national leadership was united, we had a very stirring and, at last, very edifying debate, in my view, in the U.S. Senate concerning the Gulf War and we came out with a position supporting the president.

So I think for reasons that are well understood and well explained to the American public, that you can get away from the no casualty antiseptic prosecution of war.

On the larger question of how do you get a whole organization to change a la McNamara, etc., clearly it starts with the President, it goes through the Secretary of Defense. In my view, it goes through all the lieutenants in that building. And I'm talking about the civilian lieutenants. And I think it's got to be very clear to our serving uniformed officers what is valued and what is not valued. And if what is valued is a sense of experimentation and willingness to get out and really seek the right answer, not be afraid of failure and that's what's rewarded. If people are out, and the term of art, I guess, is "wildcating," then I don't think it takes long for that message to get through.

In fact, the very culture that you all who are in uniform embodyobedience, commitment to authority and things of that natureare what we count on to get the change. But I think internal to the Army, we'll just speak about here with your permission, that's who is assembled, it seems to me that there is an awful lot that we all can do to solve our own problems. And I'll give you a specific example.

It seems to me that we promote very well as a general matter right up through colonel. We get to general officer, it gets a lot harder. Why would, and I'm not singling you out, Chief, but why would a service chief promote an officer to three stars if he didn't believe that officer had a chance for four stars unless it was a very unique situation like a West Point? Why? It doesn't make sense to me. But there is a reluctance generally to be very ruthless in these general officer policy matters. It seems to me that these are things that we have to solve in-house.

And it's been something, as you can see, that's bothered me for a long time because we promote, I think excellent, right up to colonel and then things go a little awry and you find officers who stay in some jobs, senior jobs, longer than they should when there's no hope of promotion to another job. And it seems to me we ought to ask those folks to go home and bring in others and let them have a chance and really get some change in the organization. I just used that as an example.

Panel Member: It gets harder at the higher level, Mr. Ambassador. I would add to the ambassador's comments, we have the means at hand to change culture in our military forces.

Warner: For another key institution on that and that's the Joint Requirements Oversight Council which, as the systems are being born, a lot of systems until very recently were born service and then have to be turned joint or at least joint-compatible. What we're trying to do with the Joint Forces Command is also to get both systems and concepts that are born joint. Now looking toward the future, and this is the piece the Joint Forces Command as its Atlantic Command antecedent was just officially assigned about a year and a half ago and took the baton with its start-up data on one October of last year, this is this question of joint concept development and experimentation.

I do not interpret General Jones' remarks in your ways and I've had a chance to talk to Jim on several occasions on these matters. I think General Jones is a strong supporter of the idea of Joint Forces Command doing important work on joint tasks, on joint enablers like the common operational picture or common operational database. Which in turn empowers the kind of more horizontal structure we're talking about. And I thought his initiative to say he was ready to provide Marine forces at the cost to the Marine Corps just to operate them to help do experimentation.

Now he said that he would either, because they themselves have both air and land and sea related components integral to them, he saw them as a potential test bed. We have an oversight board headed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense where we use the Resource Management Board to look at RMA on about a quarterly basis and try to provide, to help create the culture, provide the direction, provide the resources to pursue this innovation. It was General Jones, after discussions were made about can we dedicate funds to implementing what we find with experimentation, that he was supportive of doing that within his service and he is supportive of doing that within the Joint Forces Command.

So I think on your broader question, which gets towards the resourcing piece, I'm less convinced that Joint Forces Command ought to be a major participant in the building of the budget other than it should be, like all CINCs, well represented about its sets of concerns that are budget related. And its sets of concerns would be the investments in, in fact, making good on our commitment to jointness. To joint capability, to joint interoperability, to joint training. In those areas, I would see it as a powerful voice that should be heard in the budget process.

I'm not convinced yet that this general thrust that I've heard from the Defense Science Board off and on for several years, there is a constituency that somehow thinks they can get the CINCs to almost be equal to the Services in the building of the programs. I think they need a voice in the Services and through the Chairman, but I don't think we need another participant in literally the specific building of the programmatics.

Chilcoat: Thanks, Ted. We have time for one more question. Let's take it and then I'm going to come down the panel, starting with Dr. Warner, and please wrap the answer to the question into your wrap up comments. Thank you.

Hodges: Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Hodges, Army Legislative Liaison. First, to Ambassador Armitage. Sir, I'm living proof that it's not a zero defects Army. My question to Congressman Thornberry, sir, what role does the Congress want to play in helping the Army transform.

Thornberry: Congress is 535 folks and there is a wide disparity in the interest in what happens to the Army, much less what they want to see happen. And it is true that there's lots of people who would be more than happy to spend a fair amount of the money that goes into the military now on other things. And there are very few that are really focusing on what we do around the corner and what we do in the future. And so it becomes hard. But leadership inside Congress and among the Washington community is critical.

And that's why I commented on the momentum. Once we get the momentum going, once you have the service chiefs come and talk to us about the need to change, once you have the Secretary of Defense talking about it and then following up the words with action, it can develop a momentum which can carry through to the Congress. And I told Dr. Warner that I viewed my role in Congress and others as being there to push every step of the way. Whatever he comes up with, I'm going to be pushing him to go further because I know all of the difficulties and obstacles towards making this transformation happen. And so I think a big part of Congress's role is to keep pushing so that we have an eye on the future.

Chilcoat: Did I get a signal that the Chief would like to make a comment?

Shinseki: I'd just like to invoke the host's opportunity just to say thanks to this panel. I think all four perspectives were very interesting and I think we'll give them a chance to also close up. I think for this chief, this new chief, in position about four months, you've described for me my great challenge in your varying perspectives that says don't turn lose of the war fight and do everything else, not enough money to do it all and so forth. And the challenge in how to get transformation with the innovators you're talking about in as short a time as possible. So I think you've described for me very much the environment in which all of the chiefs operate and this one in particular.

I feel that I have to respond to Ambassador Armitage's comments. I share his concerns about the youngsters that we have serving in our force. And I would like to assure you publicly that is our concern as well. And by no means does a day go by where our seed corn are not very much at the forefront of our concern. Quality leadership is what it's about. From the day a youngster joins the force, whether enlisted or officer, we are about leadership and we do intend to keep faith with that regard. So the zero defect mentality is a concern for me as much as it was for Denny Reimer.

I would just caution us though. The more we talk about it, the more you force me to go down there and look at it and in some ways that reinforces the notion that something is in fact extant when it may not. And I would ask you to let me work that.

Not broad enough. I accept your comment on the vision. I'd ask you to give me a chance and let all of us show you how far this vision is intended to go. The vision for transformation, as I've laid out as the 34th chief's contribution, as Ted Warner says, to a process that should carry over to following chiefs and to the degree the vision has any utility, it will be picked up by others. But give us a chance to lay that out.

The final comment I would make on Task Force Hawk, and this is really the reason I stood up, I share your concerns. No one in uniform, not this uniform or any one of the other uniforms represented here, ever likes to face the issue of soldiers or service people who die in training. Whether it's preparation for commitment or training just to keep our regiments' level where they ought to be, it's something we take seriously and we go and look at. And I assure you 11th Attack's readiness situation is something we have looked at.

There are several issues with Hawk. One of which is most commonly referred to and that's the amount of time it took to get there. It's common discussion. I would also suggest that the CINC, when I talked to him, says they were on his time line, he was satisfied with it. When you look at the deployment priorities for Taranta Airfield with the mobilization that it had, about 20 percent was allocated to Task Force Hawk. So there was greater capability to get them in there faster had those priorities been decided.

In terms of the tragic accident that occurred, I would say that any time we employ military formations in a way that we have not doctrinally prepared to be used, that is attack helicopters or any aviation asset without a ground component, we have to adjust. And that's a part of what was going on there. The loss of those two aviators is something we looked at closely. And that's the readiness issue you talk about. We're looking at that as well.

Chilcoat: Sir, thanks for those comments. We have about two and a half minutes left. I'm getting the signal from Dr. Pfaltzgraff, we've got to wrap it up. Dr. Warner, any summary comments, please?

Warner: Pursuing the Revolution in Military Affairs is inherently difficult. Push from the Congress is needed and appreciated. We have the capacity to do it. I am greatly impressed by the achievements of the last five years. We have seen the beginning of the embedding of both organizations and states of mind and commitments of top leadership, civilian and military, to make it happen. I almost chimed in on a much earlier question. Never underestimate the talent pool that is in the United States armed forces today. This all-volunteer force is staffed by professionals. The young people coming in, both officers and enlisted personnel, are coming in out of this electronic culture.

They bring with them more, I think, openness to new approaches, to how to do things. If we will provide the right environment for all those forces and for the civilians that work and support them, we can in fact transform this military. We can keep doing the day to day jobs, which are very daunting, and yet we can transform as well. It will be tough under the dollar conditions, it will always be allocating some scarcity because we seek to do so many things. It can be done. It is being done. But only with strong efforts can we continue.

Chilcoat: Dr. O'Hanlon?

O'Hanlon: I just very quickly say that when we think about platforms and modernization, it's nice that it wouldn't be nice to have all the F-22s, V-22s, Crusaders, and everything else. These are very good platforms. The only thing I actually think is bad to have for the safety of the country and the world is the current nuclear force which I think is far too large and far too alert in terms of ready to respond. Other things are desirable, but they have to be lower priorities in my eyes than readiness.

And I, as a person outside the process, am incredibly impressed by the way the U.S. Armed Forces and the whole national security establishment and the Congress and the Pentagon have performed in the 1990s. We can't mess with that readiness. Debates about whether it's headed downward are welcome, but the levels are high and we have to keep them there. Readiness is essential.

Procurement to keep the force reliable and safe is essential. We can debate about modernization, but we cannot debate about keeping things in the force only a reasonable amount of time to make sure that we're not operating 40- and 50- and 60-year-old platforms because that's too dangerous in most cases. And research and development, as Ambassador Armitage has emphasized, as Congressman Thornberry has emphasized, that's also essential. So these things to my eyes cannot be reduced in priority and, therefore, we have to look at things like a cheaper two-war strategy, less focus on platforms, and less spending on nuclear weapons.

Chilcoat: Thank you. Representative Thornberry?

Thornberry: If anyone expects that all of the challenges that we face in the military and defense are going to be solved by some new infusion of money on the top line of the defense budget, you're going to be disappointed. Because there may be some increases in the defense budget here and there, but it's not going to be the kind of money that comes and solves over all of the problems that we have. Governor Bush called for new thinking and hard choices and I think that's exactly what we have to focus on.

And that means there's going to be some pain. There's going to be pain in the culture of the United States Army, as well as the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. There's going to be some pain as far as Congress goes and some of our constituents. I try to step back every once in a while and look at this from a little broader perspective and see that throughout history, nation after nation has thought they were the dominant military power in the world and then, in the blink of an historical eye, they are no longer there. You can say that that's going to happen to us someday. It's inevitable.

But my goal is to put that day off as long as I possibly can. And that means that we have to change and adjust to new circumstances. I think we have to keep pushing in that direction because the obstacles to us getting there are so high.

Chilcoat: Thank you. Mr. Ambassador.

Armitage: Chief, General Keane, optimism is a force multiplier. I think you'll generally agree with that. I'm pretty optimistic. Mainly because, from my point of view, you stepped up big-time to a very difficult issue. And I would only in this last minute, urge you, sir, to, in addition to making good, tough decisions about technology, to simultaneously, and not, also make, try to make, begin to make tough decisions about structure, about doctrine, about personnel and promotion policy.

And I'm delighted, because I'll interpret what you said the way I like it, is that it seems to me you are enthusiastic about returning to one old way of doing business. And that is where you empower junior officers and NCOs to make the decisions they're very capable of making. I think that in itself will be a force multiplier. Thank you.

Chilcoat: Ladies and gentlemen, you've been a great audience to our panel members. Let me say deep thanks. You have contributed significantly to our strategic dialogue.