Flournoy: If I could have your attention, we'd like to go ahead and start panel six. Which is on realizing jointness in the QDR process and producthow do to it right. I think it's only fitting that the subject of this final panel in this strategic responsiveness conference is on the QDR as the next QDR will provide us with the next opportunity to fundamentally reassess our current defense strategy and program. It will also be the primary vehicle that the next administration has to form a new joint consensus on defense priorities and directions for the 21st century.

If it is a strategy-driven exercise, it may well challenge inherited modes of thinking, offer alternatives to the status quo, and call some service equities into question. And as such, the QDR will be a high-stakes enterprise for the nation, for the Department of Defense, and for the individual Services. These high stakes suggest several imperatives for the next QDR.

First, the need to being developing intellectual capital, building intellectual capital for that review now. Starting to frame key issues, identify and assess a range of options in those issue areas. If we wait until the review begins, we will find ourselves flat-footed. We will find ourselves without enough time to bring hard issues to decision in the course of a review.

The second imperative is to take account of lessons learned from the last review and from the previous one before that and to incorporate those lessons, particular process lessons, into the next QDR.

The third imperative I would identify is the need for early top-down leadership. And by that, I mean full and early ownership and engagement in the review by the new SecDef and his or her team. Articulation of desired outcomes for the results of the review at the outside. Creation of the mechanisms needed, the management structures to ensure that the review actually reflects Secretary guidance and priorities.

The fourth imperative I'd mention is the need to empower strategy to drive the process. Yes, the QDR will be a resource-constrained exercise. Yes, it will be about deciding programmatic priorities. But if it is not driven by strategy, it will not serve the nation's needs as best it can. Above all, we must be explicit about where to place emphasis and where to take risk in the strategy. And those choices need to be tied directly to specific programmatic tradeoffs.

With these imperatives in mind, let me put several questions on the table for our distinguished panel. First, what are the lessons that we should learn from the last QDR and how can we improve the QDR process? Second, what are the most important strategy and programmatic issues that we need to address in the review? Third, what are the leadership demands of making the QDR as valuable as it can be? Both for the civilian leadership and also for the uniformed leadership in the joint staff and the Services. What kind of preparation should we be undertaking now to position ourselves for a successful review?

And finally, what can we as a broader defense community do to ensure that the next review process produces the best possible defense strategy and program within our means for our nation as we enter the next century?

With that, let me provide some brief introductions to our panelists. We have a wonderful collection of the right people to speak to these issues. First is Senator Jack Reed. Senator Reed was elected to the Senate in 1996. He represents the great state of Rhode Island and he serves on the Armed Services Committee among several others. Prior to becoming a senator, he served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. And he also has a strong Army background, having served in both the 82nd Airborne Division and the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. I expected that line to get applause in this audience.

The second speaker is David Chu. Dr. Chu is currently Vice President responsible for RAND's Army Research Division and also Director of the Arroyo Center. Previously, he served in the Department of Defense as Assistant Secretary, and Director for Program Analysis and Evaluation from 1981 to 1993. Which is probably one of the longest Pentagon tenures of anyone I know. Any civilian anyway. Prior to that, he also served as an Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office for National Security and International Affairs.

Our third speaker is familiar to many of you. Dr. Jacquelyn Davis is Executive Vice President of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and President of National Security Planning Associates. She has written widely on security issues ranging from force planning to our relations with our NATO allies, the Persian Gulf, East Asia, counter-proliferation. One of her most recent publications is very relevant to our discussion today and that is "Strategic Paradigms 2025: U.S. Security Planning for a New Era."

And last, but not least, we have Dr. Richard Shultz who is an associate professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and also Director of Fletcher's International Securities Studies Program. He, too, has lectured and written on a wide range of security topics and we are very pleased to have him here with us today as well. We have asked our panelists to keep their comments brief so that we have maximum time for discussion. And with that, Senator Reed, I'll hand over to you. Thank you.

Reed: Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here. I'm particularly delighted to join my distinguished colleagues on this panel. I want to commend General Shinseki for not only sponsoring this seminar, but also for his leadership today as the Chief of Staff of the Army and also General St. Onge and his colleagues for putting this excellent seminar together. Just briefly with respect to the Quadrennial Defense Review. I believe from my perspective it was a very useful first step to begin to grapple with some of the issues of strategy which have been alluded to.

And in the context of strategy, there are several elements, but ones I'd like to highlight out first, the identification of significant national interests and the threats to those interests. And then prioritizing those interests and those threats. Then based on those priorities, allocating resources. And in addition to allocating resources, reconfiguring force structured institutions to deal with those threats and protect those national interests. Those are some of the key elements and I believe that the QDR in 1997 made a very good first attempt to try to do those things.

Indeed, it was at an optimal time. We had just entered, in many respects, the post-Cold War world and I recall a comment that I readattributed to Ash Carterthat the term "post-Cold War" is very suggestive. It suggests we know where we came from, but we don't know where we're going. That we knew about the Cold War, but we're now in something after that. Something we don't know quite a bit about. And so the 1997 QDR, as I said, was a very good and useful first step. What it essentially evolved into was the development of a strategy of "shape, respond, and prepare." The shaping was an attempt to be proactive, to preempt threats to our national interests. Respond and prepare I think are obvious.

It turns out in the last several years we've been doing a lot more responding, I believe, than shaping. And in fact part of the QDR process put emphasis on the many small contingencies that we might be involved with. Indeed, we've been involved with many of them almost unremittingly over the last several years. Also the QDR talked about, for the first time in a comprehensive way, the asymmetrical threats that we now face in this post-Cold War world.

All of these things have been very useful to try to begin to redefine our interests and our response to threats to that interest. There has been, as you would guess, within Congress criticism of the QDR. I think the most prevalent criticism was it was a bit too cautious, that it did not look boldly ahead. That might be another indication that in this new age it's difficult to look boldly ahead because the age is still defining itself. The other aspect is that it tended to try to do everything and not prioritize among different missions, different roles, different threats. And then it also has been criticized as something that was budget-driven rather than strategy-driven. And to a significant degree, these criticisms are all valid.

Now I think as we look forward to the next QDR, there's a couple of issues that I think we should in fact emphasize. First, we should take advantage of experience obviously that we gained in the intervening years to try to shape the QDR process in terms of our deployments, in terms of trying to be more precise in prioritizing both national security interests and threats. It would be nice if, from the perspective of the Congress, if we could simply ask the QDR to come up and say what issues are important and what aren't important.

As I thought through that, this is one of those imprecise historical analogies, we've done that before. Ad hoc, I can recall in the late '40s where Dean Acheson said that Korea was out of our aspect of security and then a few months later when the North Koreans invaded, suddenly it was the primary focus of our national security policy. So we have to be very careful. But it would help to try to, in more detail, prioritize for the Congress what is a significant national interest, what are the threats to those interests, and not essentially suggest to us that everything is equal.

I think also we have to look and be concerned about the role of the civilian and uniformed leadership in terms of shaping this QDR. It goes back to the point that was made by our chairperson. And that is, without active civilian leadership, and this is going to be the next administration, there's a tendency that the bureaucratic forces within the Pentagon will dominate. It will be too late when the civilian leadership decides to enter into the fray to provide guidance, direction, and strategic sort of emphasis.

The other aspect that the next QDR I think should be conscious of, is the evolving and changing industrial base. We're a world where there's more off the shelf acquisition and we're a world in which acquisition is globalized. In fact, this morning we had Klaus Naumann in talking precisely about how there should be more cooperation between European defense industries and United States defense industries for mutual advantage. That should be part of it.

Then in addition to the Revolution in Military Affairs, we hopefully will emphasize the Revolution in Business Affairs and try to make the department in the context of the QDR also more efficient in terms of its use of resources in the way it does business. I guess try to boil it down also to perhaps an overly simplistic concept. From the perspective of the Congress, we often see ourselves as the guardian of all the resources with the administrationthe one who dictates the mission. And one of the great disconnects over the last several years has been this disconnect between the resources we're asked to apply and the missions that keep accumulating.

One would hope that in the context of the QDR, this construct between resources and mission would be much more closely integrated and that we would have a much clearer sense of the range in missions and the range of resources that are demanded by those missions. These are all, again, hopeful improvements over the process that began back in 1997. The other aspect here is that we have to make tough choices.

And it's much easier, I must say, on this panel to make tough choices than it is on the Armed Services Committee. But we have to understand that the notion of sunk horse. That there are some Cold War systems that no longer are most effective in providing national defense and that we should be capable, easier said than done, in recognizing what systems are no longer useful to us and taking these resources and investing them in other systems. But I say it's very easy to do that here, it's very easy to do that in the setting of a discussion, conceptual discussion. It's much harder in reality to make these changes.

And one other point I might add, too, is that in the context of QDR, in its development and also its implementation, I think one has to think consciously about a political strategy. Not an electoral strategy, but a political strategy in which these changes can be presented in a way that the Congress can accept them rather than instinctually reject themparticularly the difficult tough choices about platforms and systems.

I am just very optimistic thathopefully (I'm a naturally optimistic person)but optimistic that, based on the lessons of the last QDR, based upon the kind of discussion and input that you are providing and the work that's going into it right now, that we can have even more success with QDR. And we can come away with a strategy that will serve the best interests of the United States and a force structure and a military organization to serve that strategy. Thank you.

Chu: Michèle, thank you. It's a great pleasure to join this panel, and to have the privilege of speaking to this conference. As a realist, I recognize that the military Services and defense agencies are already preparing their answers for the next QDR. But as an optimist, in the spirit of Dr. Hamre's challenge at lunchtime ­ that this is an era of potentially important possibilities for changelet me speak to what I think the questions might usefully be in that coming debate.

The last QDR, the first with that formal name in the country's history, was organized, as you all know, around a series of subject panels: strategy, force structure, modernization, and so on. And while that's a useful way to think about how you might write the report for the Congress, I'm not sure it's the best way to organize the debate. The General Accounting Office, as people in this audience are aware, has urged the debate be structured around missions. That could be a useful template.

I'd like to suggest a yet different way of thinking about organizing the debate, and that is focusing it on the key implicit and explicit assumptions that underlie our current defense planningassumptions that might usefully be revisited as part of this review, revisited both in terms of their implications for national security strategy, as well as for the national military strategy that attempts to carry out those global objectives.

There are four reasons I think it's useful to focus on the assumptions that we are using. First, the most practical, is that people like Senator Reed are challenging the Department of Defense about the assumptions. You can see that challenge in the requirements for the report due in 2001. You can see that challenge in such events as Mr. Lewis' mark on the aircraft programs in this year's appropriations debatea challenge both to the level of investment in that particular area of endeavor as well as to how the money is being spent. You can see it in events like the formation of the National Security Strategy Group, and you can certainly see it in the early speeches of the potential candidates for president running in next year's elections.

Second, I think it's essential to look at these assumptions if we are indeed going to move beyond Cold War paradigms for structuring and managing the Department of Defense.

And third, I think it is a constructive way to try to promote a more joint perspective on defense solutions for the future. The present assumptions have a very service-centric character, I would argue.

Perhaps most compelling, it may be one of the most efficient ways to identify the pressing questions in front of the Department of Defense.

Like Ted Warner, as a veteran of the Pentagon, I really can't speak too long without charts. I do have just two to impose on you. I've tried putting together a short and non-representative list of vulnerable assumptions that could be the focus of the next QDR. In this first chart, there are several that relate to missions and the structure and equipment of the armed forces. The next chart, which we'll come to in just a second, speaks more to the business operations of the department.

The first assumption I think deserves debate is whether future missions will be like those that were so important in the Cold War. At a minimum, will the emphasis in the distribution of effort across missions resemble that of the Cold War? The mission emphasis of the two major theater war planning construct now uses. I think the presidential candidates and others are talking about new missions, whether those are missile defense or homeland defense or information operations. In this morning's panel, I was struck by the degree to which the Services are moving away from those Cold War emphases. I'm not quite so convinced the rest of the department's leadership is yet prepared to make that shift.

The second assumption I think worth revisiting is where we are most likely to engage in conflict in the future. As you know, our present planning paradigm emphasizes the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula. It's remarkable given that NATO is the preeminent alliance of concern to the United States that the planning guidance doesn't speak to how we might have to use military forces on the European continenteven though we have just done so.

A third assumption worth debate is the implicit conviction on the part of the United States that our opponents will behave rationally in these conflicts. Faced with the might of the United States or the United States and its allies, we believe that opponents will "see the light"as we had hoped would early be the case with Serbia. The long struggle with Iraq further demonstrates that this assumption may be invalid in many future conflicts.

Fourth, one of the candidates has already promised he will immediately review upon taking office whether the United States should keep major combat forces overseas. Both the present administration and its predecessor have measured American commitment to Europe and the Far East in terms of "100,000 troops on duty" in those spheres of the globe. I would question whether that's the right metric, to say nothing of whether that's the right answer.

Finally, on the acquisition front, I am struck by the degree to which our plans still assume that most ordnance is going to be delivered by manned platformsin the face of developments in robotics, in the face of the obvious possible use of unmanned platforms as a vehicle for aerial delivery.

Let me turn now to possible candidates for debate among assumptions that characterize the business operations of the department. The first relates to personnel.

One of the remarkable changes in the demographics of the United States in the last generation is that the majority of young people, including the majority of young men, who graduate from high school, now intend to go on to college. That's obviously a reaction to marketplace results, and the returns a college degree can now earn. But I think it calls into question the fundamental division of our personnel structure between officers and enlisted personnel. What is the difference in background characteristics or responsibilities that continues to justify this personnel model, in the face of this important social development?

Second, one of the most wrong assumptions of the present decade, in terms of the department's forward planning, was that new equipment would lower operating costs per unit. That was always promised whenever a new system came up during my time in the department. That has been wrong. It's one of the things causing what Bob Soule likes to characterize as the migration of funds from the investment accounts to the operating and support accounts in the department. It's one of the things we need to think about carefully in terms of what's truly going to be characteristic of the future.

Third, probably the least likely forecast for the defense budget is it will remain level. One of the problems with this assumption, of course, is it doesn't really encourage a free ranging debate (to which the Congress has opened the door) about the returns from a higherperhaps substantially higherlevel of defense spending. Such a level is well within the economic capacity of the United States to sustain, although not necessarily something that we will politically agree to do.

Finally, the department assumes the Congress will continue to govern defense in the future as it has governed it in the past, including how funds are appropriated. The appropriations process originates in a much earlier view of how governance of federal expenditures should be organized: that is, a focus on objects of expenditure. This causes all sorts of difficulties for those who want to execute the budget, because it's not the way you really carry out a program. It's also probably the wrong mind set for thinking about how we spend money on defense.

My view is that if we're willing to return to a debate about these kinds of assumptions, we can indeed make the next QDRas Michèle has properly suggesteda quadrennial strategy review, which is, I would argue, where our focus ought to be. Thank you.

Davis: Thank you very much. Following on from David's comments and I think that my presentation will fit very nicely with that which was just said, I'd like to raise the issue of the strategy derived quadrennial review process. And in so doing, I think we need to address three basic sets of questions.

The first is of course the nature of the rapidly changing global security setting and the types of threats or challenges or risks that we will face and that U.S. forces will face stationed overseas or operating overseas.

The second set of issues I think this review certainly needs to address are the new challenges that are emerging to threaten security at home in the United States. And that encompasses the whole range of issues that we traditionally have begun to talk about in terms of consequence management. It also includes national missile defense capability and it also includes counter terrorist activities.

And thirdly, I think the third set of broad, general issues that we need to address in this review is the changing nature of our alliance partnerships. Of which NATO's use of force over Kosovo, as I mentioned yesterday, I believe is the most recent and very vivid example of the constraints that military commanders are more and more likely to face with respect to the application of military power, rules of engagement, and command decision making.

I would just like to take a moment parenthetically to state for the record at this point in time that, given the difficulties that this whole Kosovo exercise presented the alliance and specifically the United States as the lead partner in the audience supplying the major military power, I for one think that General Wes Clark did a superb job of holding together an alliance of nineteen nations that had very, very different interests in this conflict. So I just wanted to say that parenthetically.

Getting back to the question of the next strategy derived review. From that, if we start to address the three sets of questions, should flow a more specific rendering of future force structure requirement and acquisition priorities. This is what, for example, we tried to do in our book on 2025. Craig, may I have the first graphic, please? This graphic that you see, and I know it's an eye chart and it's a little bit hard to read, but it is contained in the book, sets forward alternative paradigms as we thought through what the world of 2025 might look like.

Then I identified two planning considerations and then went on to talk about the key types of capabilities that might be required for each of the four paradigms.

The four paradigms we outlined were a coalition of opposing states. For example, China and Russia and India decide to get together to oppose U.S. unilateralism or U.S-European initiatives somewhere in the world.

Multi-polarity. A true multi-polar environment as the Chinese now are talking about as their desired end state for the world of tomorrow.

Uni-polarity. A uni-polar world in which the United States is the one, the only super power in the world, and acts unilaterally on behalf of its interests worldwide.

And the fourth world we talked about was chaos. It's a world in which you have a lot of failed states.

None of these paradigms are exclusive necessarily of characteristics in the others, but we tried to emphasize the kinds of predominant characteristics that each of the paradigms might manifest in order to think about key planning considerations. In terms of the key planning considerations, it was very interesting to me as I went through this exercise that several capability sets seemed to jump out as important to all four contingencies. Perhaps less so the chaos state that we painted, but certainly for the coalition of opposing states world, the multi-polar world, and the uni-polar world.

And the first set of capabilities that we have determined that is going to be very important for the world of tomorrow is a whole set of capabilities embracing counter WMD kinds of capabilities. And that's a whole other conference to talk about what counter WMD entails and how the Services should structure their forces to respond to those types of threats.

There are also implications in each of these worlds for a forward presence. David just mentioned power projection. And the difficulty in assuming, for example, that 100,000 is a figure that we are going to be able to maintain in Northeast Asia particularly when Korean reconciliation is on the board as a very real possibility. So power projection, forward basing. And what does that mean then for pre-positioned equipment? What does it mean for Task Force Hawk types of mobility considerations? What does it mean for F-22 type of aircraft which have shorter legs than may be necessary for the kinds of contingencies that we'll face tomorrow?

These are the kinds of questions that I think we need to think through. In addition to the whole set of questions relating to allies, coalition combined planning. How can we develop a plug-in type of force structure for Combined Joint Task Force development in which the United States races ahead with high tech development and its principal allies may or may not meet the challenge in this area? Do we identify specific allies that we think we're going to be operating with? For example, the United Kingdom seems to be an obvious example or even perhaps the Japanese in the Asian Pacific theater.

And do we try to foster development of our combined planning concepts with those specific allies in mind? Or do we step back and think about NATO as an alliance of 19 member states? Those are the kinds of issues I think the next QDR exercise certainly needs to address. And then there is the whole bag of consequence management issues.

The third set of issues that we looked at and we tried to relate on this chart are the key capabilities requirements that questions revolving around these considerations might imply in terms of what the Services ought to keep in their force structures. And it seems to me the important point to make here is that the debate that's very popular to have these days with respect to the Army, for example, is the future of heavy forces. Well, it seems to me if we think about some of the contingencies we're talking about, heavy forces continue to have relevance.

They may be in different numbers, they may be in different configurations in tomorrow's Army, but the need for heavy forces remains important for the United States Army as the spear for the other forces. As we heard earlier today in the discussion of the Chiefs' panel.

So these are some of the considerations we tried to set forth in 2025, thinking through the world of tomorrow. But for the purposes of this meeting, however, I have developed another graphic for your consideration. If you would just flash up the first part of this graphic. It depicts the specific functional areas in which I believe U.S. military forces will be challenged to operate in coming years. Most are self-explanatory and require little further comment on my part.

The two that are the most contentious are the military's potential use and support of domestic contingencies, as Waco has already demonstrated and as the development of Joint Task ForceCivil Support is beginning to focus attention with the American Civil Liberties Union, and operational deployments for peace support purposes. And it remains to be seen to my mind whether future administrations will attach as much importance to PSOs, for example, as does the Clinton administration.

But what must be understood, I believe, and certainly by members of Congress, is that if the American people support the use of American military forces in future Haitis or Bosnias, then they must be willing to pay the price for readiness for major theater war operational planning, and personnel retention and maybe even recruitment, depending of course on the state of the economy and national employment statistics.

What will be needed as the second set of issues and concerns outlined and this chart talks about is a closer look at the role of the United States in the 21st century world. Everyone proclaims that the United States cannot be the world's policeman. But what does this mean in terms of our policy and what does it mean in terms of our national military strategy? Also necessary, I believe, will be an assessment of how the likely mission areas, that I've outlined in the first part of the chart, can be planned for or implemented in the joint, interagency, and combined planning arenas.

Now looking at some of the mission areas in the second part of the chart, the issues and concerns, I disagree a little bit with Mike O'Hanlon this morning who talked about strategic deterrence as being less important. I think "strategic" is in the eye of the beholder. I think deterrence remains a critically important mission area for all of the U.S. services. Now how we define that deterrence I think needs to be broadened.

It needs to be broadened to include conventional deterrence which we've already begun to do certainly in this country. But also to include theater missile defenses and national missile defenses. Because I believe that theater missile defenses and national missile defense capabilities in the face of so-called rogue nation threats or smaller nuclear force capabilities will give the United States a crisis management capability par excellence.

It will also give to us, I believe, a capability for reassuring allies so that, for example, perhaps our Japanese friends don't really need to think seriously about nuclear proliferation in the world of 2025 when they may face a united Korea, a different China with more formidable weapons than it already has, a Taiwan considering independence. So I think, for all of those reasons, missile defense capabilities are extremely important.

I also think when we look at the world of 2025 or you think about the world of 2025 and you look at the technology trends, the proliferation trends, the regional planning trends that are apparent today, other considerations really need to be factored in. And I'm coming back to the question of the forward basing issue. The United States Army and indeed all of the Services of the United States depend to a greater or lesser extent on forward basing in order to project power into key regional theaters. And more importantly, to engage allies and potential adversaries on a day to day basis to influence their thinking and, in times of crises, to have a role in helping them respond to a particular challenge.

Without the availability of forward basing, it will cause us to have some fundamental reconsideration of the basic assumptions that certainly went into the last QDR and certainly for the future QDR will have implications for strategic mobility, for combined planning, for Combined Joint Task Force development, for interoperability, and for space oriented warfare, information warfare.

Finally, I thought I should, since this is an Army predominated meeting, talk about Army equities in some of the key mission areas that I talked about earlier today. And I think the Army has a great deal of equity in all of the future missions that one might posit today for tomorrow. The Army has some particularly unique capabilities that are very, very important if we think about counter WMD. If we think about information warfare. If we think about peace support operations. If we think about power projection. If we think about active defenses and if we think about special operations and consequence management.

In conclusion, however, as the Army thinks through where it wants to be in 2025 and as we think through the kinds of capabilities that we need to acquire or procure for our military services to be able to meet the world of 2025, I think we need generally Service by Service, but also on a joint basis, to be much more serious thinking about the active, reserve force components. The Army has housed a lot of things in the reserve component today that I believe will be necessary for the world of 2025. Medical capability, counter WMD capabilities. Things that you will want to call up very quickly and get to an event as quickly as possible to mitigate and contain an event.

And I think employers increasingly are becoming frustrated with the tempo of operations. I was recently down at Special Operations Command talking to General Schoomaker. And he told me that, as you all know in this room, many of the civil affairs, and psychological operations personnel are housed in the reserve component. Well, he's now starting to see some employers being very hesitant about letting the same personnel deploy over and over and over and over again. I think we really need to look at this reserve force component, active duty issue, much more closely and in a much more systematic way related to what our future strategy will require us to do.

In the three critical mission areas of missile defense, consequence management, and day to day engagement activities, the Army, I think, is the premier Service in terms of engaging and has the potential to meet, given all the work you have done in biological warfare, counter WMD, the challenges of tomorrow. I applaud you for doing it. I urge you to keep it up. And I urge the Army and the Joint Staff as it looks through and the civilian staff of the Pentagon, as we look at the QDR, the next QDR, we are a little more creative about our thinking about the world of tomorrow.

I'm not talking about getting rid of legacy systems. I hope I made that point from the very beginning of my presentation. I'm talking about perhaps using them differently and perhaps reorganizing them differently. Thank you. With that, I'll stop.

Shultz: Well, let me first, as director of the program in Security Studies of Fletcher, to really thank General Shinseki for having us. And this is terrific for my program and for the school and it's great to be able to work with you.

I want to talk about special operations first. Now the goal of this conference is to gain a more precise understanding of the strategies and capabilities the U.S. will require, in fact, across the broad spectrum of probable security challenges we're going to face in the years ahead. And we've said over two days here that a critical ingredient in this process is close cooperation between the Services in planning and in executing future military actions. I would like to spend a few moments discussing the role of special operations forces in this process, if you will, of forging closer cooperation and true jointness.

Given the kinds of future threats the U.S. will face, I believe it's essential that those drafting this new QDR consider the contributions of Special Operations Forces (SOF) within a joint context. Now I feel like beginning simply by stating, looking at the SOF mission statement. It comes right out of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Publication One. And it says special operations are conducted in war and peace, either independently or integrated with conventional operations. They are targeted on strategic and operational objectives in support of a joint force commander's campaign plan if they're in war, or the geographic CINC's regional plan or the U.S. ambassador's country plan in peace time.

Now political and military considerations frequently shape operations and require clandestine, covert, and low visibility techniques. And this is what I really want to zero in on. The covert and the clandestine. Now this mission statement, if you will, has generated a number of special missions and collateral activities for SOF. These include missions that have received high visibility because they fit into peace operations, they support peace operations, humanitarian assistance. And of course SOF plays an important role in operations other than war. These are the visible or the overt actions of SOF and they are very much taking place in a joint and interagency context and I think we've learned that and we know a lot about that.

However, there is a black or a covert side to SOF that is and, I believe, will be very important in the early years of the next century. Probably well into the next century. And these include direct action, special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, combating terrorism, counter proliferation, psychological operations and information warfare conducted covertly.

Now we think, if we look back over the last 20 years, we look at the 1980s as the decade that SOF really came of age and was revitalized. And by the early 1990s, it was increasingly integrated into the Services' joint approach. And I think that that's been a great success story. However, I would note that this success did not come without opposition. If we look back into the '80s, what we see is that SOF revitalization was a real dog fight. It wasn't too different from the kind of dogfight that the Kennedy administration faced in the early sixties when it tried to build up special warfare capabilities. A dogfight took place between what I would call the mainstream military and the special operations community. Now while great strides have been made, I think it's in the area of covert SOF missions that we need to pay some attention to today.

Now recently I wrote a book and you probably saw it outside. It's called The Secret War Against Hanoi. The story is the largest, I think, covert paramilitary campaign that the U.S. conducted in the Cold War. And you might say, well, that's a long time ago. The U.S. created a special organization to do that. It was a black organization. It was called the Studies and Observation Group, SOG. And it's true, SOG was a long time ago. However, I believe and I try to argue this at the end of the book, the epilogue, that there are lessons from the SOG experience that point to enduring challenges and problems in using SOF in this area of covert operations.

And these challenges and problems endure at the policy level, they endure at the operational and at the joint level, the interagency level, and even at the level of liaison. And so QDR planners, I would argue, need to understand and address these enduring challenges because there are future threats that the U.S. will face that will necessitate the use of many of the different techniques that SOG used. Techniques are the same. Maybe technology allows you to do them in different ways, but there's a whole range of things that we did covertly that involved special operations forces that we will probably need in the future.

In this book, I try to talk about these lessons and how they affected SOG, but how they endure. And as I said, they exist first at the policy level. Where you have, on the one hand, presidents, all presidents, some more than others, have turned to the covert instrument. They've been drawn to it. This was true of Kennedy, by the way. The allure of covert action was definitely at play in 1961. From the early days of his administration, he embraced its use. Fit his act or his mentality. He made it clear that if Hanoi could foster insurrection and subversion in the south, he wanted to do the same thing in the north.

So presidents and others have had this enthusiasm for it, but they all tend to not understand the complexities that are involved. And that's an interesting dynamic. Enthusiasm on the one hand, but a misunderstanding of what these instruments can do and not do, how to use them. And this was true for Kennedy, it was true for other presidents. It also was true for their advisors. So as we look over this period, if you will, through the sixties to the present, we find that presidents and their advisors have wanted to play hardball, they've recommended the use of covert operations. But in many cases, they've not understood the complexities of it.

That's the misunderstanding at the policy level. But there's also been a great deal of micro-management and concern over how far to go with this covert instrument. And in fact, while most Cold War presidents have been interested in the use of covert action, they also have worried about the trouble it can get you into and they've spent a lot of time micro-managing that. That was true of SOG and true of other instances. So on the one hand, most presidents have been eager to employ covert methods. On the other hand, they've been apprehensive over the trouble that they could cause if exposed. And this seeming incongruity is epitomized in the SOG experience.

Now beyond the policy level, there are important lessons from the SOG experience and from other covert operations about the role of the military in this. And I would make two points here. You know, in the early '60s when Kennedy got tired of CIA's unwillingness to move out smartly in using covert action against North Vietnam, he turned to the military and said, well, we've built up special forces and, therefore, military, you do this and do it quickly and escalate it and accomplish all these things I want to accomplish.

This proved hard for even the special operations forces to do. And the reason is that there were many what I would call esoteric skills that dealt with human intelligence and agents and black side war and other esoteric activities that they weren't ready to do. And although much has changed since this experience, and of course in the case of SOCOM it has developed some very detailed special operations capabilities for the covert arena, nevertheless, some of these esoteric areas still need to be addressed. And it includes spies and agents and human collection. Unconventional warfare as a technique that we might want to use, black side war and so on.

So in the case of the military, while in the overt area we could say, well, gee, SOF has really come of age, there may be some growing to do in these less visible areas.

Now another lesson on the military side in terms of the use of military forces in covert special operations has to do with the kind of opposition there was to SOG. The opposition from senior military leadership was strong and the chiefs grudgingly accept the mission, but didn't believe that it could accomplish much and never tried to fit it into some larger approach to the war. It was contentious. And indeed, if we looked at the history of SOF and even its revitalization, some of the things that SOF does remain contentious to the mainstream. And I guess I think we need to get over that and understand that this is a capability that should be part of our overall approach to military operations.

SOF had an interagency element to it because it had to work with CIA. This didn't work well at all. Just the opposite. And in fact over the years, this relationship or this interagency component for covert or black operations has increasingly been one that hasn't been seamless, but just the opposite. And I think we need to address those factors as well. So in the SOG experience, there are lots of interesting lessons that endure. And they endure in terms of broader policy lessons as well as many operational ones, inner agency ones, liaison ones, and these weren't unique to SOG. Through the Cold War, you can see other places where the same kind of problems emerged.

Now these lessons I think are important. And I think they're important because of my answer to the follow questions. Will future presidents need to turn to covert paramilitary operations in an effort or as a means of countering new threats and challenges? And it won't be surprising to many in this audience who know me. I think the answer to that is yes. If I look at the agenda that Jacqui has talked about, I believe that there are several areas of threat and potential challenges where covert SOF capabilities have to be part of our larger effort.

And of course one of these that has received tremendous attention is the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. And we think about this in terms of rogue states. But we also need to think about it in terms of non-state actors. Now just as an example of this, I want you to consider the following statement by a fellow named Shamil Besayev. Some of you may know the name. The Russians know this name. He's the fellow who went into Dagestan. He was the Chechens' most able commander. He is driving the Russians crazy.

They just put a million-dollar bounty on his head, which is sure to make him even more popular in Chechnya. And what does he say about modern warfare? We call people like this "warlords." You know, we assume, I don't know, they're out there but they don't have much of an intellectual capability. Some journalist asked Shamil Basayev, you know, what do you think about warfare? And he said, "I rejoice in the fact that developments in the 20th century have usually improved my chances of succeeding where generations of freedom fighting ancestors of mine failed." And he particularly pointed to weapons of mass destruction. And he said that he would like to destroy Moscow.

He's thinking about it. There are many people out there who are non-state actors who are thinking in this way. And so this is an area where covert SOF may have an important role to play. There are other areas as well. The disruptive policies of regimes like Iraq and Libya and Iran and North Korea may lend themselves to some of the things that covert SOF can do. Terrorism, of course, is on my list. The end of the Cold War didn't bring an end to terrorism as you all know. Groups of movements motivated by religious ideas and ethno-national passions are more than willing to employ these tactics indiscriminately and may well escalate

Ethnic and religious violence and its impact on regional security. There are others in there that covert SOF may have a role to play. Organized criminal organizations. A good target, I think, for covert SOF. The linkages that exist between organized crime, ethnic and religious movements, terrorist and insurgent groups compound the gravity of this challenge and the proliferation of non-state actors is a real issue. So the United States will face each of these emerging security challenges in the years ahead and each will be difficult to counter. When developing policies and strategies to respond, all the instruments of statecraft should be considered including special operations forces employed in covert action missions.

However, if presidents decide to select from among the operational measures employed by SOG many years ago, they will have to resolve obstacles and complications that limited SOG's effectiveness during the Vietnam War. And given the fact that these impediments not only thwarted SOG, but generally frustrated the use of covert special operations forces by U.S. presidents throughout the Cold War, this will be a formidable task for post-Cold War presidents. Thank you. Throw a little fire out there.

Flournoy: Thank you very much to all of our panelists. I'd like now to open it up to the floor for questions. And I'd encourage anyone who has a question for Senator Reed, in particular, to raise your hand first as I believe we're going to lose the Senator to a vote very shortly.

Murray: I'm Colonel Murray, Army Reserve Command. What I've heard from the other panelists that really intrigues me is the use of Reserves. We just got done talking about using the reserves in Kosovo through 2002. How do you see the role of the Reserves and do you see them possibly taking another tack like joint reserves in the future?

Davis: Since I addressed this issue head on, I would like to suggest that I have no clear vision on how we ought to use the Reserves. But I certainly think we need to think through what mission set capability kits we place into the Reserves and, as a second set of issues, address the personnel issues attendant upon the continual deployment of people with certain expertise to continue to areas time after time after time. I don't know how many of you saw that Nightline program. It devoted the entire week to the Anthrax incident in the hypothetical subway system, which was Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago.

And a couple of things were very interesting in the way the program presented that issue. The first was there was not one military person on the stage to talk about capability sets. There were civilians from other agencies represented, but no military representative or OSD representative. Now if you think about an incident with Anthrax somewhere, you're going to think about medical needs right away. And where are the medical units in the bulk of our forces today? If they exist, if they're not contracted out to civilian agencies, they're in the reserve, for the large part, reserve components.

The point I'm trying to make is some of the capability sets that I believe we really will need because of the changing nature of the challenges we will face are being housed in the reserves or were housed in the reserves for the last 20 years or migrated there over the last 10 years. Maybe it's time now to sit down and do a fundamental scrub of what we're placing where.

The other part of that issue is, for example, the Marine Corps has just decided to take organic air defense units out of its active service structure. If we're talking about a world in which ballistic missile capabilities are going to be prevalent in theater environments for use by non-state actors, Usama Bin Ladin comes to mind, etc., is it proper to think through in terms of future needs to have the Marine Corps rely on the Navy or the Army for tactical missile defense capabilities in an expeditionary scenario?

I just pose that as a fundamental question that we have to start thinking through. And in the Army's case also. You're putting a lot of your Patriot units in your reserve components. Is that really where we want to place them if the world of tomorrow is talking about a different kind of challenge? I pose that as a question. I don't have a clear answer in my own mind. I have an inclination as to where I think I would go, but I don't have an answer. In terms of how we would use the reserves in a specific contingency, I think that question also remains to be looked at much more closely than has been done.

Reed: Let me make two quick points though, or three quick points. First, we've come to appreciate the critical role that reservists play. Particularly in the Kosovo environment. It's something that we might have been aware of, but it's quite explicit now how critical the reserves and National Guard are. The second issue gave me the sense that the same type of operational burnout affecting reserves is affecting regular forces and we have to be very sensitive of that in terms of looking ahead. That might require additional authorization for more reserve forces given the fact that you can't pull someone out of their hometown every six months. Which is happening.

I've got a civil affairs unit in Rhode Island. They've gone back and back. In fact the leader retired rather than go again.

The third point is, as we struggle with this issue, many European armies are beginning to recognize the value of more extensive and formal reserves and are beginning to think about organizing themselves along our lines because the same demands have been placed on them in places like Kosovo and Bosnia. So the role of the Reserves has been enhanced, I believe, within the last several years and we have to treat it as an enhanced component.

Flournoy: Another question? Yes, sir.

Nagle: Thank you. John Nagle from the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. I have a question for Senator Reed. Sir, you and your fellow congressmen have mandated that the Department of Defense undergo the Quadrennial Defense Review and that is a good thing and a good process. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on turning the process the other way? Whether you think that there are changes that Congress needs to make institutionally in the way it oversees the national security process of the United States?

Reed: I think that's an excellent point. I was reacting to David's comments too, with respect to don't assume that we're going to be the same we are now 10 years from now. However, I would say, given my experience in legislatures at both the state level and the federal level, if you have to bet on the status quo versus radical, innovative change, I'd always bet on the status quo. So I think we're going to be doing this just about the same because of personalities, because of institutional stakes, because of political dynamics.

But we, too, should be responsive to a new environment in terms of the way we proportion out responsibilities institutionally in terms of committees. And, you know, I think we should take the challenge up, as you suggest, of looking at ourselves in terms of how we deal with these issues of national security.

The other issue though is, as I tried to allude to in my opening remarks, is it seems that our responsibilities are, by the founding fathers, clearly separated in terms of the Congress raising resources and also, back then, declaring war. And I think the original context of the Constitution was we pick the missions and we pick the resources and logically we would be operating in that world and we'd do that. Well, we all realize that the missions are now primarily dictated by the President, not by the Congress, and so we're left with this disconnect.

That inhibits our ability, I think, to do what you suggest. Reforming ourselves very efficiently, very effectively, so that we can be comparable to the strategic viewpoint that the Pentagon is trying to develop and the administration's trying to develop.

Tanready: Thank you. Sam Tanready. I'm a Navy captain. I pose this out to the panel in general. And my question in a nutshell is where can we take risk? You've all talked a bit about having to restructure and having to make choices. And I think in making choices what has to happen is that we have to decide that there's some things happening in the world that we won't touch or there's some missions that we won't touch or there's some missions that we can kind of de-emphasize for now and then bring focus. Either the reserves, perhaps, in our mission area or something like that. Would anybody like to hazard a statement as to what we can put at risk?

Flournoy: Any takers? David?

Chu: Well, let me underscore one that I identified in my mark and then add a second. I would argue that, given the state of the world, the United States does not need to undertake on a routine basis all the overseas deployments it now has committed itself to. Many of which are deeply rooted history. I think this debate is starting. General Shinseki in the Pentagon. That doesn't mean that we want to go back as sort of a, I think, to Acheson-like, unfortunate statements about things being outside our ambit of interest.

But I'm arguing that, particularly given the kinds of capabilities the United States has built, is building, will build, that we don't have to keep as much in a forward deployed mode, especially combat as we have in the past.

Second, I think it's ironic to me that the two major theater of war scenario tried to replicate the Cold War planning paradigm so faithfully, albeit on a smaller scale. The emphasis on the nearly two simultaneous wars. I just wanted to say that it is tied down some place and that's the argument of the strategist in committing to something different. But I think a bit more ambiguity on our part about just how far the forces would go might be helpful in this regard. Particularly because in an uncertain world, I think what we really are trying to do with our force structure and investment decisions is hedge our bets against the uncertainties.

And the problem with focusing so much on this one object is that we are perhaps overspecializing in that capability to the expense of everything else we need to be doing.

Flournoy: Anybody else like to respond to that? Okay. Any hands over here? Yes.

Muchmore: Tim Muchmore from the Army Staff. And, pardon me, my voice is almost gone. But for those who know me, that's good. I guess primarily for Senator Reed and then Dr. Chu. The legislation calls for the QDR to be conducted immediately after a new president, assuming he's a first-termer, assumes office. And we learned from QDR '97, that it's extremely difficult to pull together such a complex process in a very, very short period of time. And yet Congress put legislation in place to immediately impose upon a new administration such a process. What was your thinking for doing that as opposed to perhaps making it in the second year when the administration had its feet on the ground?

Reed: If you're looking for a rational response, I'll try. The feeling was that the administration should own not only the process, but also the outcome and be committed to implementing the outcome. And that's done probably early in the administration when they haven't by default locked themselves in other positions because of the budget process, everything else. The defects which you suggest is that we have a situation now where one could argue the most important part of the process takes place way before the administration gets in power. At this juncture.

Where you have the Clinton administration is departing and I'm sure the Services are working hard and Secretary Cohen's working hard, but they know it's not going to be a final product on their watch. And no one knows and we won't know until the end of next year who will succeed him. So as a result, that's a flaw. But the rational reason, and again, there might have been other political reasons which I'm not privy to, but the rational reason was if you assume a four year term, if you assume any type of impact on the budget processes and everything else, it's better early than late.

But there's a tradeoff between really being involved in the beginning, which I think would make a great deal of sense, or not really having an impact on the budget process as you develop them in the first two months of your administration.

Chu: If I could add a practical reason. If you look at the history of the first year of most first term presidents, within roughly nine months of taking office, the president has to complete his revisions of the budget. And back to this morning's comment of a vision without money is a hallucination. I think that's where the rubber does meet the road. What does the new president say he wants in the budget that is either the same as or different from what the previous president said. And I think the Congress was thoughtful in choosing September of 2001 for the deadline.

Using history as a guideline, most administrations get their visions done by that time. The Congress of course will insist that it's going to act anyway by the fall even if the administration's not ready. So that inconvenient as it might be and unhelpful to the analyst perspective, I think this is a realistic time at which to try to accomplish such a review.

Reed: The only other point I'd make is that the politics of this is very often strategy evolves ad hoc on the campaign trail. And by the time you get there, even if you have second thoughts, you're stuck with the strategy. Particularly when it comes to procurement of different platforms. But, as you point out, David, this is closely tied into the procedural and the process of coming up with their budget and their add ons and their systems, recommendations.

Flournoy: Yes, right here.

Hulin: I'm Rick Hulin with U.S. News and World Report magazine. Question, I guess, for Dr. Chu and Senator Reed. If getting out of the two major theater war construct seems like the right thing to do, how do you do that politically, as much as anything, given that if you withdraw or appear to withdraw from one of those scenarios, you are, you know, perceived as sending a signal to the North Koreans or the Iraqis that maybe you're not going to be there. That gets to the ambiguity you talked about, Dr. Chu. But just exactly how might that happen?

Chu: Well, I think it's useful to remember how we got into this two major theater war paradigm. And that is gradually. In fact, originally, as you may recall, what Colin Powell tried to advocate was the use of illustrative planning scenarios. And that broke down because they lacked enough detail to be truly helpful in making decisions in the Department of Defense. And so I don't think there needs to be somein fact I think some of the rumblings in the present administration are potentially helpful in this regardthis doesn't have to be some watershed change. It could be done gradually.

Particularly given the opening the Congress has provided the Defense Department by mandating a QDR and the willingness of the present administration to allow some preparatory steps to be taken, this can be evolved in debate. I would underscore it does not mean the United States is abandoning its commitment either to the security of the oil resources in the region or to peace on the Korean Peninsula. Those are different statements. This is an issue of what the planning focus of the Department of Defense is going to be.

And what I obviously would argue for is that planning focus needs to be wider than a concentration on just these two particular scenarios to the exclusion effectively. And I think that was really one of the conclusions the last QDR, that exclusion was mistaken. Although I don't think we went far enough. To the exclusion of other things as my fellow panelists have emphasized, the American military must be prepared to ensure our security over the long term.

Reed: I think as you try to make any significant changes, the first thing is getting the idea out there and running it up and see who agrees or disagrees. And that's the process, how most things change very slowly here in Washington. Because there's the notion of thinking out loud about whether there's two major war scenario works, is helpful. And gradually, if the discourse is such like we're having today where people start commenting about how it's no longer useful or practical, that helps build up sort of support for decisions that have some political consequences to make those decisions.

And I think part of is just continuous dialog. At some point, that dialog might yield a change in the official position about planning for two major regional wars.

Davis: Michèle, if I could only add on that. I think that probably you're overstating the perceived importance of that particular issue in the context of the broader national security strategy that the president or a future president will articulate. I think it's far more important to a North Korean leader what the leadership in the White House says, what the foreign policy objectives of the United States are articulated to be and the strategic framework within which then the QDR will place itself comes out to be for the force sizing exercise.

And I think we have to keep in mind then that the QDR is part of a much larger tapestry that I think sends a signal that is far more important than what decisions of the QDR very specifically will send in terms of perceptions of regional strength and potential foes.

Flournoy: Any other questions? Yes.

Audience member: I asked an earlier panel a question that had to do with the narrowing social economic identification of the overall enlisted force. In that context, I'd like to carry that concern a bit further. The Pew Trust has a substantial body of research which some of you might be aware. That they update regularly. Which is showing an increasing divorce between the priorities of various opinion elites and John Q. Public. What are the strategic implications of that and this class issue that's evolving in the context of the overall force? How do you think is really going to play out for us in terms of deciding what missions not only need to be done, but can be done?

Davis: Well, I think you already see this playing out to a certain extent in the debate over Kosovo. You saw the military leadership being slightly more conservative with respect to employment of forces and types of force packages that needed to go in to meet the objectives that military commanders suggested they needed to meet. And the political civilian leadership of the alliance, in particular, which was saying from the outset get troops on the ground in there right away. That's one manifestation, I think, of this asymmetry, if you can call it that, between military/civilian perceptions in thinking about specific issues.

There was another study done by Duke University which has been widely referenced in the press as well. And I think that's even a much more interesting study with respect to what it says about the willingness to use the military as an instrument of public policy. And I think that that is a debate that really needs to be joined at some moment on the national level. And I don't know if a presidential election is the place to do it unless there is some devastating incident which forces the mind of the American political community and the American public alike to address the issue of the role of force in international relations.

But I think this could have consequences for how we do decision making, how quickly we are able to respond to contingencies, and the types of force packages that will be required to do a response if the civilian leadership decides to intervene or have U.S. Forces intervene in a crisis.

Flournoy: Senator Reed, did you want to comment on that?

Reed: Yes. As I think about the question, which was a fundamental one about how the American society relates to the military and that there's this separation. My sense, again from spending a lot of time up in Rhode Island and with my constituenciesI'm sorry, I guess the mike is not working, but I'll . . . My sense is that probably less than this pulling away of the military from civilian life, the issue might be more generallyand I don't know if indifference is the right wordbut a sense that the threats out there are no longer of the same consequence of the Soviet Union. And therefore, the use of military power, it's not a question on everyday the tables and the coffee shops of America.

And the other thing is that the military succeeded so well in these operations that there's a sense of we've already got the solution. Air power works. We don't have to extend, use people on the ground. All these things are circulating today. And interestingly enough, I think we've reached this point where it's difficult to read sort of the public mentality or mindset when it comes to real use of force. One example that struck me recently is we have for years ongoing commitments to Taiwan in case of a unprovoked assault by the People's Republic of China.

And there was some polling recently done that, despite that, a significant member of Americans would not support that even it if was an unprovoked attacked. And we all operate here in Washington in these policies, you know, these elites, with this notion of "of course we'd do that," we'd have to defend our commitments we've made over several administrations. But yet I wonder, having done that, would the American people, weeks, months into such an operation, be supportive or not.

So that I think is one of those manifestations of some of the things you're talking about. We take for granted the support of the American people if we get into a hard struggle which requires casualties, it requires extraordinary resources. And perhaps, unlike 10 years ago or 20 years ago, we might not be able to do that.

Flournoy: No other questions? If I could just use the prerogative of the chair to ask one more question before Senator Reed leaves. You've mentioned the Revolution in Business Affairs and I think a number of people have raised this issuestreamlining infrastructure, adopting better business practices in order to balance the books, to move more resources to the war fighter. Do you have any advice for the executive branch on how to be more successful in pursuing that agenda with Congress?

Reed: Well, you always run into parochial concerns. I know the Army particularly has been trying to close down depots or reallocate work to depots, they're running into some fierce opposition from people, my colleagues, who have interests there. I can speak because I don't have a depot. But essentially, the best way to do it is to make the case that you are saving resources in a way that does not necessarily imperil a highly visible project someplace or facility. And also that these resources are necessary to help us solve another issue which bedevils us.

How do we keep funding the Defense Department in constrained budgets? And the notion that David suggests and others suggests is that we're going to have, you know, flat budgeting over several years. You might have to question that. We're in a very difficult situation today. Had this across the board cut in the budget impacted, it would have been significant costs to the Department of Defense as well as civilians. And so despite our surplus, we still have budget concerns.

So I guess the way I would best advise is you've got to pick your shots. You've got to have very compelling evidence that you're really saving money and improving service. And then you have to be sensitive to the political, who's going to oppose you. And then finally, I think you have to make the argument that if we don't this, we have to do something even worse down the road to stay within our budget caps.

Flournoy: Well, please join me in thanking our panel for a very enlightening debate. And I'll turn it over to Dr. Pfaltzgraff.

Pfaltzgraff: It was agreed that I would make some, and I underscore, very brief closing remarks for the conference today. And I begin by saying that although it is impossible in the very, very short time that remains this afternoon to summarize or synthesize or even to reflect extensively on the many outstanding presentations and discussions that we have had during these past two days, it nevertheless is useful it seems to offer a few brief concluding comments. You noted I've used the word brief quite a few times, so I'll be very brief.

First of all, we all agreed that the U.S. military establishment remains the best in the world and we've seen this amply demonstrated. This superiority amply demonstrated in conflicts from the Gulf at the beginning of the 1990s to Kosovo at decade's end.

Secondly, since the end of the Cold War, our armed forces have been deployed in far greater numbers of situations, extending across a very broad spectrum from armed conflicts to peace time operations. Indeed, I would add, given the security setting that was described many times during this conference, we probably can conclude that this is unlikely to change. Or if it does change, that the demands made upon our armed forces in the early decades of the next century are more likely to grow than they are to diminish.

Thirdly, in the last decade, the types of conflicts and peacetime operations have brought into sharp focus, as we saw so often over the past few days, the need for the Services to work much more closely together to create and implement a Joint Strategic Vision in order to achieve maximum synchronization and synergy among land forces, maritime capabilities, and aerospace and now cyberspace information warfare.

Fourthly, what can be said about the implications of the challenges of the new security setting that we talked so extensively about for joint operations encompassing U.S. military forces is fully applicable, and perhaps even equally applicable, also to alliance coalition operations. Nearly all of the tasks that the U.S. military undertakes, as we saw so often these past two days, will have an alliance coalition dimension. At least one dimension, if not many. Here we face numerous challenges and opportunities as Operation Allied Force in Kosovo and the other operations of the 1990s have demonstrated.

They include, I would argue among other things, not only political factors, and we can underscore political factors, that shape the options available to the alliance, but also of course the implications of the Revolution in Military Affairs for the ability of allied coalition forces to operate together and to achieve necessary options of cooperation, integration, and interdependence.

Fifthly, precisely because the United States will continue to possess the world's most advanced military force well into the 21st century, as long as we can hopefully, the incentive will grow for asymmetric strategies and operations against it undertaken by various types of actors, including terrorist groups and extending possibly to the homelands of the United States and its allies. Therefore the sina qua non for effective strategic responsiveness will lie of course in our ability to think strategically. That is an important statement even though it sounds trivial.

For example, homeland defense and strategic responsiveness are inextricably linked in a seamless web that constitutes 21st century national security strategy. If we are vulnerable at home, we will not be able to maximize our potential for strategic responsiveness abroad. Another theme that I saw come out very often in this conference.

Sixth point. Even with its superb armed forces, the United States faces numerous problems that must be fixed in the years ahead. And we talked about these quite extensively in the last two days. First of all, people, personnel, recruitment and retention at present high standards must be maintained in a rapidly changing technological environment and full employment civilian economy.

Seventh, achieving the appropriate balance between near-term readiness and longer-term modernization and recapitalization. Even without the numerous demands placed upon our forces in recent years as we all know in this room, we would face the need to replace aging equipment. Something else we talked extensively about.

Eighth, one of the major themes of this conference has been the need to move larger as well as smaller forces, divisions, and combat capable brigades much more rapidly to wherever they are needed as part of the joint package if we are to achieve strategic responsiveness.

Last, but not least, if we are to surmount the challenges and maximize our opportunities, we will need, as we all so often discussed, a transformation strategy that retains what is best from the past while casting aside obsolete modes of thinking about military capabilities and their relation to the other elements of national security strategy. Indeed, again, as we saw repeatedly during this conference, each of the Services has taken major strides forward. Shaped both by the crises and other situations that we as a nation have faced in the past decade and by innovative thinking that has gone on within and among them about their vision of the future.

As we heard during these past few days, much is being done and yet much remains to be done if we are, as General Shinseki stated in a recent speech and I quote, "To train soldiers and grow leaders and to create a multi-component integrated force that can operate as part of a joint and combined team capable of commanding multinational operations." End of quote.

I wrote down as I listened to the many discussions, both from up here and down in the audience there, some of the very many sound bites or simply terms, if you want to state them as such, that helped to focus our thinking about strategic responsiveness. And I am almost about to prepare, I suppose, a lexicon for us that we could have before us. But in any event, here are some of them.

Effectiveness, integration, innovation, adaptation. Of course transformation. Lethality, complementarity, rapidity, vision, versatility, agilityI'm going to lose my ability to pronounce some of these termsagility, deployability, sustainability, interoperability, superiority, decisiveness, endurance, flexibility, dominance, mobility, and I could perhaps add others. But all of which it would seem to me are to a greater or lesser degree essential if we are to achieve strategic responsiveness.

Our task is to find what exactly is the mix and the relationship among these many variables as we think about the equation that leads us to strategic responsivenessit was the title that we had, indeed, it was the nature of the discussions that we had.

We hope to have the opportunity to hold another conference of this kind which will hopefully build upon what we have done today in the next year. Perhaps just after the year 2000 election, presidential election.

I would like then to conclude by expressing thanks not only to our co-sponsors, but also to all of our speakers and to the other participants who have made this endeavor such a great success. Again, many thanks. The conference is now adjourned.

page created 31 October 2000

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