[Senate Hearing 107-771]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 107-771
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO TRANSFORM THE ARMED
FORCES TO MEET THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
APRIL 9, 2002
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
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82-937 WASHINGTON : 2002
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
CARL LEVIN, Michigan, Chairman
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts JOHN WARNER, Virginia
ROBERT C. BYRD, West Virginia STROM THURMOND, South Carolina
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
MAX CLELAND, Georgia BOB SMITH, New Hampshire
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma
JACK REED, Rhode Island RICK SANTORUM, Pennsylvania
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
BILL NELSON, Florida WAYNE ALLARD, Colorado
E. BENJAMIN NELSON, Nebraska TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas
JEAN CARNAHAN, Missouri JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama
MARK DAYTON, Minnesota SUSAN COLLINS, Maine
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico JIM BUNNING, Kentucky
David S. Lyles, Staff Director
Judy A. Ansley, Republican Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WITNESSES
Department of Defense Policies and Programs to Transform the Armed
Forces to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century
april 9, 2002
Page
Wolfowitz, Hon. Paul D., Deputy Secretary of Defense; Accompanied
by Gen. Peter Pace, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, USN (Retired), Director of Force
Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Gen.
William F. Kernan, USA, Commander in Chief, United States Joint
Forces Command................................................. 5
Krepinevich, Andrew F., Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments............................ 77
Thompson, Dr. Loren B., Chief Operating Officer, The Lexington
Institute...................................................... 95
(iii)
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO TRANSFORM THE ARMED
FORCES TO MEET THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
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TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2002
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:38 a.m. in room
SH-216, Hart Senate Office Building, Senator Carl Levin
(chairman) presiding.
Committee members present: Senators Levin, Lieberman, Reed,
Akaka, Bill Nelson, E. Benjamin Nelson, Warner, Sessions, and
Bunning.
Committee staff member present: David S. Lyles, staff
director.
Majority staff members present: Daniel J. Cox, Jr.,
professional staff member; Kenneth M. Crosswait, professional
staff member; Richard D. DeBobes, counsel; Gerald J. Leeling,
counsel; Arun A. Seraphin, professional staff member; and
Christina D. Still, professional staff member.
Minority staff members present: Judith A. Ansley,
Republican staff director; Charles W. Alsup, professional staff
member; Edward H. Edens IV, professional staff member; William
C. Greenwalt, professional staff member; Gary M. Hall,
professional staff member; Carolyn M. Hanna, professional staff
member; Ambrose R. Hock, professional staff member; George W.
Lauffer, professional staff member; Patricia L. Lewis,
professional staff member; Thomas L. MacKenzie, professional
staff member; Scott W. Stucky, minority Counsel; and Richard F.
Walsh, minority counsel.
Staff assistants present: Dara R. Alpert, Leah C. Brewer,
and Nicholas W. West.
Committee members' assistants present: Frederick M. Downey,
assistant to Senator Lieberman; Davelyn Noelani Kalipi and
Richard Kessler, assistants to Senator Akaka; William K. Sutey,
assistant to Senator Bill Nelson; Eric Pierce, assistant to
Senator Ben Nelson; John A. Bonsell, assistant to Senator
Inhofe; George M. Bernier III, assistant to Senator Santorum;
Robert Alan McCurry, assistant to Senator Roberts; and David
Young, assistant to Senator Bunning.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARL LEVIN, CHAIRMAN
Chairman Levin. The committee meets this morning to receive
testimony on Department of Defense policies and programs to
transform the Armed Forces to meet the challenges of the 21st
century. Because Senator Warner must leave for a few minutes, I
am going to turn this over to him right now for his opening
statement or that part of it that he is able to give, and then
I will finish my own opening statement. Senator Warner.
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN WARNER
Senator Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will just
momentarily be detained, but I would like to welcome our
witnesses. This is an enormously important hearing. You have
laid the foundation in the Executive Branch. Now we must take
into consideration that foundation in the Legislative Branch. I
see from the opening statements provided by the witnesses that
great progress has been made.
I do hope that as this successful operation in Afghanistan
reaches its anticipated conclusion at some point in time--the
President said there will be no hurry until the job is
finished--that we take to heart some of the extraordinary
actions performed by the men and women of the Armed Forces,
utilizing the modern weapons that we have today. This
individual soldier, sailor, airman, and marine is exhibiting
courage and professionalism without peer in the history of our
country.
I can only think of the World War II era, when this whole
Nation stood behind the uniformed persons in the battle fronts
of the world. That same solid support is here at home today,
led by a President who shows really extraordinary qualities as
the Commander in Chief.
These soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines have made
history. We have to learn from that history as we continue the
war on terrorism with our allies, and direct our actions in the
future to protect our freedom here at home.
I will put the balance of my statement in the record. I
thank the chair.
[The prepared statement of Senator Warner follows:]
Prepared Statement by Senator John Warner
Senator Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I join you in welcoming
all of our distinguished witnesses.
This hearing focuses on the type of military our Nation will need
to face the challenges ahead. The basic question before us is this--how
should our military ``transform'' to meet future threats? I look
forward to the testimony of each of our witnesses.
I find it interesting that today we are discussing ``transforming''
our Armed Forces at the same time we are witnessing impressive
demonstrations of military capabilities and competence by our Armed
Forces as they prosecute the global war against terrorism. It is a war
unlike any we have fought before. As Chairman Levin and I visited our
servicemen and women in the region last November, I was struck by a
recurring thought--we are writing a new chapter in military history
with this operation and those that will follow.
This war has truly been a joint operation--U.S. land, sea, and air
forces operating together as one; and forces from the many coalition
nations interacting seamlessly. Soldiers on horseback and afoot are
directing 21st century weapons with extraordinary precision. Maritime
forces are operating hundreds of miles inland in a land-locked country.
Old bombers are delivering new weapons with devastating accuracy. New
communications systems and information processing technologies are
allowing U.S. and coalition forces to share information instantly and
execute orders quickly. Agility, precision, lethality, and
interoperability are the measures of success for our systems and
organizations.
The bottom line is that the professionalism exhibited by these
individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines has been remarkable.
The American people recognize this extraordinary effort and have
responded with an outpouring of support. Not since World War II have
our troops received such strong support from the home front. I know how
much these young servicemen and women appreciate this support and what
a difference it makes as they prepare for current and future
operations.
Clearly, we are focused on this current war against terrorism. It
is a war we must win; a war we will win. But, it is also important to
note that the President's fiscal year 2003 budget request also
recognizes the ongoing, traditional commitments and obligations of the
United States. Let no nation or adversary think for a moment that we
are not prepared to defend our interests and friends worldwide--beyond
the war on terrorism.
We have all been encouraged by early successes in Afghanistan, but
recent events serve to remind us that we are involved in a long
struggle that will take us to the far corners of the world. But it will
end some day and we must all be prepared for the next war--not the last
one.
``I hope there will be no more warfare. But, if and when such a
tragedy as war visits us again, it is always going to happen under
circumstances, at places and under conditions different from those you
expect or plan for.''
We have all wrestled with this predicament--how do you plan for the
unknown? I think Secretary Rumsfeld has made a very important
contribution with his extensive strategic review and Quadrennial
Defense Review, wherein he concludes that we must move from a ``threat-
based force'' to a ``capabilities-based force'' that can deter and, if
necessary, defeat the unexpected threats.
That brings me back to the focus of this hearing--transformation.
What does transformation mean? I believe that transformation means
different things to different people. Most discussions of
transformation quickly focus on weapons systems. but transformation
includes insertion of new technology and new capabilities, but that's
far from the whole story.
Secretary Rumsfeld, and others, point out that Germany's
``blitzkrieg'' concept terrorized adversaries and revolutionized
warfare in 1939. Curiously, only about 15 percent of the entire German
army was ``transformed'' with new equipment. Let me repeat that--only
15 percent new equipment. However, new ideas and operational concepts
were superimposed over their entire army. In that case, transformation
was at least as much about organization and the application of new
capabilities as it was about new equipment. Transformation today is
about new technologies, but it is also about new thinking, new
processes, and new ways to apply old capabilities.
The events of September 11, have given new resonance--and a new
urgency--to calls for change. The challenges are clear--history will
judge our response. But, the time to act--the time to secure a lasting
peace through current strength and wise investment in future
capabilities--is now.
Chairman Levin. Thank you so much, Senator Warner.
More than 4 years ago, the congressionally-mandated
independent National Defense Panel recognized the need for the
transformation of our Armed Forces. Its December 1997 report
entitled ``Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st
Century'' concluded as follows: ``The United States needs to
launch a transformation strategy now that will enable it to
meet a range of security challenges in 2010 to 2020. Yet we
must do this without taking undue risk in the interim. This
transformation promises to be complex. Yet we must make
critical decisions and choices entailing significant
investments of resources and energies.''
The Panel's report also stated that: ``A successful
transformation strategy must provide for frequent and large-
scale experimentation in potentially new ways of war, effecting
meaningful and appropriate change in operational concepts,
force structures, military systems, and budgets.''
Starting in the late 1990s, the Services began the process
of transforming their force structure to meet the challenges of
the 21st century. For instance, the Army began to transition to
a force that is strategically responsive and dominant at every
point in the spectrum of operations. This involves the
selective modernization and partial digitization of the current
force as a first step and eventual development of a responsive,
agile, deployable, and lethal Objective Force.
The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review submitted by Secretary
Rumsfeld to Congress last September reemphasized the
requirement to continue the transformation of our forces. In
his testimony before this committee last October on the
Quadrennial Defense Review, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz
testified that: ``Transformation is about more than technology;
it is about innovative concepts of operating and configuring
our forces, adjustments in how we train and base our people and
material, and how we conduct business day to day. The goal of
transformation is to maintain a substantial advantage over any
potential adversaries in key areas such as information warfare,
power projection, space, and intelligence.''
The purpose of today's hearing is to review the manner in
which the Department is pursuing the transformation of our
Armed Forces, to assess the progress that has been made in
terms of acquisition programs, experimentation activities,
operational concepts, organizational changes, and cultural
adjustments; to identify truly transformational items in the
fiscal year 2003 budget request; and to determine if
legislation is necessary to facilitate and promote
transformation.
Some of the issues that I hope our witnesses will address
this morning include: how do we define transformation and
identify its elements; how do we distinguish truly
transformational programs, concepts, and activities from those
that are not; what is the proper role of experimentation,
including in helping to decide what not to acquire; how can we
stimulate and incentivize creative and transformational
thinking; how do we provide funding to take advantage of
results from experimentation in the absence of programmed
funding; how do we avoid becoming so dependent on sensor
linkages that we create an Achilles heel that can be taken
advantage of by an enemy who finds a way to block such
linkages; and how do we share transformational innovations,
concepts, and programs with allies, particularly NATO allies,
so as to preserve interoperability and strengthen alliances.
We have two panels this morning. Our first panel will
consist of four witnesses from the Department of Defense and
the lead is Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who as I mentioned
earlier represented the Department last year in presenting the
Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress. We also have Retired
Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who is the first Director of the
Office of Force Transformation; General Peter Pace, Vice
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who serves as the
Chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and is a
member of several of the Department's boards that are involved
in the planning, programming, and budgeting system, all of
which have important roles in transformation; and General
William Kernan, the Commander in Chief of U.S. Joint Forces
Command, who is in charge of joint experimentation and is the
chief advocate for jointness and transformation.
Our second panel consists of Dr. Andrew Krepinevich and Dr.
Loren Thompson. Dr. Krepinevich is Executive Director of the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and was one of
the seven members of the 1997 National Defense Panel to which I
referred earlier. Dr. Thompson is the Chief Operating Officer
of the Lexington Institute. Both Dr. Krepinevich and Dr.
Thompson are frequent commentators on national security issues,
including military transformation.
Let me see if any of our other colleagues has an opening
statement.
Senator Bunning. I would like to put one into the record,
please.
Chairman Levin. Senator Bunning's statement will be made
part of the record.
[The prepared statement of Senator Bunning follows:]
Prepared Statememt by Senator Jim Bunning
I would like to join my colleagues in welcoming our distinguished
panel members for today's hearing on transformation. Though I have
concerns with many areas of transformation, some of which I hope to
address today, I am very pleased with the administration's vision and
energy in undertaking this tremendous and necessary task. I know there
has been a lot of hard work and dedication by our men and women in
uniform and our civilian workforce to move the transformation of our
forces forward. This committee and our Nation are very proud of their
efforts.
Last week, I had the opportunity to visit with Secretary White at
Fort Knox, Kentucky to see firsthand the Army's mounted maneuver battle
lab. Fort Knox has been designated as the lead for the Army's
transformation and the hub that will synchronize the efforts of all the
combined arms centers of the Army such as Forts Benning, Sill, Rucker,
Leavenworth, Lee, and Leonard Wood. Transformation is not something we
are going to do several years from now. Transformation is already in
progress.
Chairman Levin. Let me now welcome Secretary Wolfowitz,
Admiral Cebrowski, General Pace, and General Kernan. Each of
you have had a role and continue that major role in the
difficult task of transforming our forces for the challenges of
the 21st century. Each of your statements will be printed in
full in the record. I understand, Secretary Wolfowitz, that you
do have an opening statement and we would be happy to receive
that now on behalf of all of the panel members.
STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL D. WOLFOWITZ, DEPUTY SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE; ACCOMPANIED BY GEN. PETER PACE, USMC, VICE CHAIRMAN,
JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF; VICE ADM. ARTHUR K. CEBROWSKI, USN
(RETIRED), DIRECTOR OF FORCE TRANSFORMATION, OFFICE OF THE
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE; AND GEN. WILLIAM F. KERNAN, USA,
COMMANDER IN CHIEF, UNITED STATES JOINT FORCES COMMAND
Secretary Wolfowitz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate
very much the opportunity to meet with this committee to
discuss this important subject. As you have noted already, I
have with me three of the leaders of the Department's efforts
at transformation. You have picked an extremely important topic
and it is a pleasure to be here to discuss it.
Indeed, looking back, this committee and Congress have
played a major role in transformation efforts in the past,
including landmark legislation such as the 1947 National
Security Act, the 1973 All-Volunteer Force Act, and the 1986
Goldwater-Nichols Act. Congress, moreover, has sponsored and
supported numerous transformational technologies, including
stealth, cruise missiles, and precision guided munitions.
So as we undertake what may be the most significant
transformation of our military forces in many decades, we hope
to continue to work closely with Congress to achieve our common
national security objectives.
In the civil economy today, we are witnessing a
transformation in the manner, speed, and effectiveness with
which industrial and commercial tasks can be accomplished.
These transformational efforts derive from the impact of
advances in technology, in computing, communicating, and
networking. Taken together, they constitute an information
revolution whose effects extend far beyond technology into the
organization and even the culture of the business and
commercial worlds.
This transformational potential affects our military as
well. In the current campaign in Afghanistan, for example,
young noncommissioned officers are routinely integrating
multiple intelligence collection platforms by simultaneously
coordinating what amounts to several chat rooms. We have seen
them creatively improvise with new military applications not
unlike the technology they have grown up with. Indeed, they
display an agility with that technology that comes from being
completely comfortable with this new way of doing things.
In the same way, the agility that we need to continue
meeting threats here and abroad depends on more than just
technology, although that must be a fundamental part of our
response. It is tied also to changing organizational designs
and embracing new concepts. One of my key points today is that
transformation is about changing the military culture into one
that encourages, as Secretary Rumsfeld says, innovation and
intelligent risk-taking.
Twelve months ago some might have questioned the continued
investment in improving our advantage, given the huge military
lead the United States enjoyed. Some were asking, who will
fight us now? September 11 brought home the fact that, while it
is likely few would seek to meet us head-to-head, they can
still attack us, they can still threaten us. When they did
attack last September, using box cutters and jetliners, our
response required much more than just box cutters and
jetliners. Our response, as we seek to deny future terrorists
avenues to similar attacks, has been and must be
disproportionately asymmetrical, and it does not come cheaply
or without great effort at innovation.
My second key point is that, although we now face the
enormous challenge of winning the global war on terrorism, we
must also address the equally large challenge of preparing our
forces for the future. We cannot wait for another Pearl Harbor
or another September 11, either on the ground, in space, or in
cyber space. Even as we fight the war of today, we must invest
in tomorrow. It is a process of balancing the risks of today
with those of tomorrow, one that should ultimately redefine how
we go to war.
Back in the 1920s and the 1930s, the French and British
establishments looked on the transformational issues of their
time with a victor's sense that the next war would be fought
like the last. But by the spring of 1940, with the Germans'
lightning strikes across the Meuse and through the Ardennes, it
was clear then that blitzkrieg had redefined war and would
reshape battles for years to come.
But we do not have to look back 60 years or even 20 years
to find dramatic examples of military transformations. In
Afghanistan today, brave Special Forces on the ground have
taken 19th century horse cavalry, combined it with 50-year-old
B-52 bombers, and, using modern satellite communications, have
produced a truly 21st century capability.
When asked what he had in mind in introducing the horse
cavalry back into modern war, Secretary Rumsfeld said, ``It is
all part of the transformation plan,'' and indeed it is.
Transformation can mean using old things in new ways, a natural
result of creative innovation.
Finally, our overall goal is to encourage a series of
transformations that in combination can produce a revolutionary
increase in our military capability and redefine how war is
fought. The capabilities demonstrated in Afghanistan show how
far we have come in the 10 years since the Persian Gulf War,
but they are just a glimpse of how far we can still go.
Let me briefly discuss how transformation was treated in
the Quadrennial Defense Review. Long before September 11, the
Department's senior leaders began an unprecedented degree of
debate and discussion about where the military should go in the
years ahead. The outline of those changes is reflected in the
Quadrennial Defense Review and the fiscal year 2003 budget
request. Among the new directions set in the QDR, the following
four are perhaps the most important:
First, we decided to move away from the Two Major Theater
War Force Plan construct. By doing so, we gain more flexibility
in planning for a wider array of contingencies and we gain more
flexibility in investing for the future.
Second, during the QDR the senior civilian and military
leadership agreed on a new framework for assessing risk. We
identified four categories of risk: force management risks,
operational risks, future challenges risks, and institutional
risks. The approach we adopted in light of this framework seeks
to balance risks in all of these categories and avoid extreme
solutions that would lower risks in some areas while raising
other risks to unacceptable levels.
Third, to confront a world of surprise and uncertainty, we
are shifting our planning from the threat-based model that has
guided our thinking in the past to a capabilities-based model
for the future. We do not know who may threaten us or when or
where, but we do have some sense of what sort of capabilities
they might threaten us with and how. We also have a sense of
which capabilities we have that could provide us important new
advantages.
Fourth, to support this capabilities-based approach to
force planning, we worked to define goals to focus our
transformation efforts. Historically, successful cases of
transformation have occurred to meet compelling strategic and
operational challenges. Therefore, we endeavored to determine
what those challenges were in the 21st century and what goals
we needed to have to address them.
The U.S. military is pursuing not a single transformation,
but a host of transformations, including precision
surveillance, network communications, robotics, and information
processing. The six specific transformation goals identified in
the QDR are: first, to defend the U.S. homeland and other bases
of operation and defeat nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons and their means of delivery; second, to deny enemies
sanctuary, depriving them of the ability to run or hide any
time, anywhere; third, to project and sustain forces in distant
theaters in the face of access denial threats; fourth, to
conduct effective operations in space; fifth, to conduct
effective information operations; and sixth, to leverage our
information technology to give our joint forces a common
operational picture.
In my written testimony, I elaborate on each of these six
goals, but in the interest of time let me just move on to
discuss how we have tried to reflect those goals in the budget
that is now before your committee. Taken together, these six
goals will guide the U.S. military transformation efforts and
improvements in our joint forces. Over time they will help us
to shift the balance of U.S. forces and capabilities.
U.S. ground forces will be lighter, more lethal, more
highly mobile. They will be capable of insertion far from
traditional ports and air bases and they will be networked to
leverage the synergy that can come from ground forces and long-
range precision fires from the air and sea.
Naval and amphibious forces will be able to assure U.S.
access even in area denial environments. Air and space forces
will be able to locate and track mobile targets over vast areas
and strike them rapidly at long ranges without warning. These
future attributes are the promise of U.S. transformation
efforts.
As I will be saying in a few minutes, transformation is
about much more than just investment, but investment is
important. Over the next 5 years, we plan to invest more than
$136 billion in transformational technologies and systems. Of
this, $76 billion represents new investments to accelerate or
start new transformations. We have applied a very strict
definition to programs to be included in these totals as
transformational. Many things that enable transformation or
extend current capabilities are not included in the figures I
will be citing. For example, the $1.7 billion in this year's
budget for funding Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, and
other precision-guided munitions, is not included. The total
additional investment in systems that support transformation
approaches $25 billion in the fiscal year 2003 budget and $144
billion over the FYDP.
Let me highlight some of the capabilities we are investing
in to meet the transformational goals. First, the goal of
protecting bases of operations. We are pursuing advanced
biological defenses and accelerating the development of missile
defense. Missile defense investment includes increased funding
for the airborne laser program, a directed energy weapon to
destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase. The budget
invests $8 billion in transformational capability to support
defense of the U.S. homeland and forces abroad, a total of
$45.8 billion over the 5-year defense plan, an increase of 47
percent.
I would note that that does not include some $10.5 billion
in our budget that is invested in programs for counterterrorism
and anti-terrorism, almost double from where we were 2 years
ago. Most of that is force protection measures associated with
the global war on terrorism.
Second, to project power in denied areas, we are developing
new shallow-draft fast transport ships to move forces into
contested littoral areas more rapidly and less dependent on
traditional ports. We are also developing unmanned underwater
vehicles that can help to assure U.S. naval access. Overall,
the fiscal year 2003 budget requests $7.4 billion for programs
to support the goal of projecting power into denied areas and
$53 billion over the FYDP, an increase of 21 percent.
Third, to deny enemies sanctuary, we are developing a
space-based radar system to provide persistent global ground
surveillance and tracking capability. We are converting four
SSBNs to carry more than 150 Tomahawk missiles each and up to
66 SEALs. We are also accelerating a number of unmanned vehicle
programs. The budget in fact includes $1 billion to increase
the development and procurement of Global Hawk, Predator, and
unmanned combat aerial vehicles.
Finally, we are developing a range of new precision and
miniature munitions for attacking deep underground facilities,
mobile targets, and targets in dense urban areas. The fiscal
year 2003 budget requests $3.2 billion for transformational
programs to support the objective of denying sanctuary to
adversaries and $16.9 billion over the FYDP.
Fourth, to leverage information technology, perhaps one of
the most important developments we are pursuing in this budget
is our investment in laser communications and space, the
technology that has the potential to provide fiber optics-
quality broadband secure communications any time and anywhere
U.S. forces may operate. That is a transformational technology
that can affect everything our forces do. The fiscal year 2003
budget requests $2.5 billion for programs to support this
objective and $18.6 billion over the FYDP.
Fifth, to conduct effective space and information
operations, we are increasing investments in both of those
categories. The fiscal year 2003 budget requests $174 million
for programs related to information operations, $773 million
over the FYDP. We request an additional $200 million to
strengthen space capabilities and $1.5 billion over the FYDP.
We could not have made these investments without
terminating a number of programs and finding other savings.
Although this year's defense budget is the largest in a long
time, virtually the entire increase was spoken for by needed
increases to cover inflation, health care and pay raises,
realistic costing of readiness and procurement, and funding the
war. We have saved some $9.3 billion by terminating and
restructuring a number of programs. Major terminations include
the DD-21 Destroyer program, which has been replaced by a
restructured DDX program, and we have cut 18 Army legacy
systems. We also terminated the Navy Area Missile Defense
program because of delays, poor performance, and cost growth.
But we are still looking to develop sea-based defenses under a
replacement program.
But, as we have seen in Afghanistan, transformation is
about more than just new technology. Although the Germans were
the first to make tanks a decisive instrument of war, they are
not the ones who invented tanks. They were not even the ones to
first field tanks in combat. What they did do first was to use
tanks to devastating effect through the combination of armor
with air and radio communications, the willingness to risk
employing a new and bold doctrine, allowing armor to emerge in
an army traditionally dominated by infantry, and delegating
responsibility to lower levels so that units could operate with
the autonomy that armor and radio communications provided them.
Their success went even beyond doctrine, beyond speed, beyond
communications. It was a culture change from top to bottom.
Another example of culture change in our own forces is the
development of our ability to conduct night operations. Drawing
from our experience in Vietnam, we worked to acquire technology
such as night vision goggles that allowed us to virtually turn
night into day. We now conduct extensive night training
operations and we have turned what was once a vulnerability
into an advantage. Today it is not hyperbole to say we own the
night.
The campaign in Afghanistan has planted the seeds of
culture change in other areas that will prove to be as
significant, I think. Historically, Special Operations Forces
have operated separately from conventional forces, but this
campaign has necessitated their close integration with
conventional forces and especially air forces. One of the
results is an order of magnitude change in how precise we are
in finding and hitting targets from just a decade ago. That is
not only changing the culture of Special Operations Forces, but
it is changing how the rest of the force thinks about Special
Operations and how it thinks about the integration between air
and ground power.
Another example from the present involves what it means to
be a pilot today. That is undergoing a transformation as well.
Not long ago, an Air Force F-15 pilot had to be persuaded to
forego a rated pilot's job to fly--I guess that is still the
word--an unmanned Predator aircraft from a location far from
the field of battle. Of course, UAVs have made a significant
impact in the current campaign and promise even greater
operational impacts, which is why the Air Force leadership is
working hard to encourage this pilot and others to think of
piloting UAVs as a major mission and to become trailblazers in
defining new concepts of operations.
Some of the greatest military transformations of the last
century were the product of American innovation: the
development of amphibious warfare, of aircraft carriers, of
stealth and nuclear-powered submarines, to name just a few.
Great names like Billy Mitchell and Hyman Rickover are
associated with some of these developments and it is no secret
that the unconventional style of some of these innovators was
sometimes difficult for their large organizations to adjust to.
But even less iconoclastic officers have had difficulties
when they clashed with perceived wisdom. In the period between
the wars, one infantry officer began writing about the future
of armored warfare, only to have his commander tell him that if
he published anything contrary to ``solid infantry doctrine''
it would mean court-martial. The commander even tried to
scuttle that officer's career. It took the personal
intervention of Pershing's chief of staff to put that soldier's
career on a new path. That officer so interested in the future
of armored warfare was Dwight Eisenhower.
One of our fundamental goals is to encourage all the
potential Eisenhowers who are thinking about war of the future.
Instead of stifling those who seek to look forward so we can
lean forward when necessary, we must encourage and reward them.
We need to accelerate the development of a culture that
supports the sort of innovation, flexibility, and vision that
can transform the face of battle.
From my observations, the Armed Forces today are much more
congenial toward innovation and innovators. Certainly the way
in which General Tommy Franks has experimented in Afghanistan
demonstrates an openness to change, an openness that is helping
us win the war and transform the military.
One of the best arenas for encouraging our forces to try
hard, lean forward, and risk failure is through field
exercises. Field exercises that incorporate experimentation at
both the joint and the service levels provide an indispensable
means for tackling emerging challenges. In the period between
the wars, Marine Major Pete Ellis perceived that war in the
Pacific was likely to come, and he proposed the landing concept
that we now call amphibious warfare. Taking Ellis's idea from
the drawing board to practice beaches resulted in success at
Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere in World War II.
General Kernan will be able to address in more detail how
Joint Forces Command is developing a joint experimentation plan
that uses war games, synthetic environment experiments, and
field experiments to develop and evaluate joint concepts.
Likewise, training must go hand-in-hand with the fielding
of new concepts and capabilities. We must train as we will
fight, and today we will always fight in combinations of
mission-oriented joint forces. We must, therefore, emphasize a
culture that stresses joint sharing of information, concepts,
and awareness to ensure that our troops can fight on day one of
the battle with experience and confidence. A centerpiece of our
training transformation effort will be a joint national
training center.
We have also seen the need in our transformation efforts to
redesign some of our military organizations to harness the
tremendous power of new technologies and exploit the synergy of
joint forces. DOD is taking steps to realign its organizations
to better integrate and deploy combat organizations that can
respond rapidly to events that occur with little or no
warning--the type of environment that characterizes our world
today.
To strengthen joint operations, the Department is
developing options to establish standing joint task force
headquarters with uniform standard operating procedures,
tactics, techniques, and technical system requirements, thereby
permitting the movement of expertise among commands. The
Department is also examining options for establishing actual
standing joint task forces. Standing joint task force
organizations could provide the organizational means to achieve
a network capability and serve as the vanguard for the future
transformed military.
Finally, we also need to ensure that the classroom
education our senior military leaders receive includes military
transformation, an education that nurtures innovative thinking
and encourages risk-taking and willingness to confront failure
in the pursuit of new ideas and capabilities.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, even as we fight this war on
terror, potential adversaries scrutinize our methods. They
study our capabilities, they seek our weaknesses, they plan for
how they might take advantage of what they perceive as our
vulnerabilities. So as we take care of today, we must invest in
tomorrow. We are emphasizing multiple transformations that,
combined, will fundamentally change warfare in ways that could
give us important advantages and help us secure the peace for
coming generations.
We realize that achieving this goal requires transforming
our culture and the way we think. We must do this even as we
fight this difficult war on terrorism. We cannot afford to
wait.
Thank you.
[The prepared statements of Secretary Wolfowitz, General
Pace, Admiral Cebrowski, and General Kernan follow:]
Prepared Statement by Hon. Paul D. Wolfowitz
the imperative for transformation
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee: You have provided our
country great bipartisan support and strong leadership, and our
relationship with the committee and its staff has been truly
outstanding. I appreciate the opportunity to return today to talk about
how the Department of Defense plans to meet the challenges of the 21st
century through the transformation of our forces.
This committee and Congress have played a major role in
transformation efforts in the past, including the role in several
institutional changes of transformational character, such as the 1947
National Security Act, the 1973 All-Volunteer Force Act, and the 1986
Goldwater-Nichols Act. Congress has sponsored and supported numerous
transformational technologies, including stealth, cruise missiles and
precision-guided munitions. As we undertake what may be the most
significant transformation of our military forces in many decades, we
hope to continue to work closely with Congress to achieve our common
national security objectives.
In the civilian economy today, we are witnessing a transformation
in the manner, speed and effectiveness with which industrial and
commercial tasks can be accomplished; these transformational efforts
derive from the impact of advances in technology in computing,
communicating and networking that, taken together, constitute an
information revolution whose effects extend far beyond technology into
the organization and even the culture of the business and commercial
worlds.
This enormous rate of change can be explained in significant
measure by a law known as Moore's Law, after Gordon Moore, co-founder
of Intel, who first advanced the proposition that the power of
computers will double every 18 months or so. Put more dramatically,
that means that the power of computers increases by a factor of a
thousand in a little more than a decade. But, the effect of this, as we
know from daily life, extends far beyond just technological changes.
Indeed, transformations that result from increased capability are due,
in even greater measure, to innovative minds that take this technology
and use it to transform everything--from how we work to how we navigate
on the highways and how we ship packages around the world.
This transformational potential affects our military as well--in
terms of both hardware and brainpower. In the current campaign, for
example, young non-commissioned officers routinely integrate multiple
intelligence collection platforms by simultaneously coordinating what
amounts to several ``chat rooms.'' We have seen them creatively
improvise with new military applications not unlike the technology they
have grown up with. They display an agility that comes from being
completely comfortable with this new way of doing things.
In the same way, the agility that we need to continue meeting
threats here and abroad depends on more than just technology, although
that must be a fundamental part of our response. It is tied to changing
our organizational designs and embracing new concepts. Transformation
is about more than what we buy or how much we spend on technology. One
of my key points today is that transformation is about changing the
military culture into one that encourages, in Secretary Rumsfeld words,
``innovation and intelligent risk taking.''
Twelve months ago, some might have questioned the continued
investment in improving our advantage, in real and intellectual
capital. Given the huge military lead we enjoy, some were even asking:
who will fight us now? But, September 11, brought home the fact that,
while it is likely few would seek to meet us head to head, they can
still attack us. They can still threaten us. When they did attack last
September, using box cutters and jetliners, our response required much
more than just box cutters and jetliners. Our response, as we seek to
deny future terrorists avenues to similar attack, has been--and must
be--disproportionately asymmetrical. It does not come cheaply or
without great effort at innovation.
My second key point is that, although we now face the enormous
challenge of winning the global war on terrorism, we must also address
the equally large challenge of preparing our forces for the future. We
cannot wait for another Pearl Harbor or September 11, either on the
ground, in space or in cyberspace. Our ability either to deter or
defeat aggression will continue to demand unparalleled capabilities--
from technology to training and decision-making. That is why we must
develop the transformational capabilities that will provide our crucial
advantages a decade or more from now. Even as we take care of today, we
must invest in tomorrow--an investment we simply cannot postpone. It is
a process of balancing the risks of today with those of tomorrow, one
that that should ultimately redefine how we go to war.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the French and British military
establishments looked on the transformational issues of the time with a
victor's sense that the next war would be fought like the last. But by
the spring of 1940, with the Germans' lightning strikes across the
Meuse and through the Ardennes, it was clear then that blitzkrieg--a
term coined by Western journalists to describe this unmistakably new
phenomenon--had redefined war and would shape battles for years to
come.
We do not have to look back 60 years--or even 20 years--to find
dramatic examples of military transformations. In Afghanistan today,
brave Special Forces on the ground have taken 19th century horse
cavalry, combined it with 50-year-old B-52 bombers, and using modern
satellite communications, have produced truly 21st century capability.
When asked what he had in mind in introducing the horse cavalry back
into modern war, Secretary Rumsfeld said, ``it was all part of the
transformation plan.'' It is. Transformation can mean using old things
in new ways--a natural result of creative innovation.
These two examples suggest my final key point: our overall goal is
to encourage a series of transformations that, in combination, can
produce a revolutionary increase in our military capability and
redefine how war is fought.
In the example from Afghanistan, we can see how dramatically our
military has changed in just the 11 years since the Persian Gulf War.
During that war, one of our biggest concerns was trying to destroy Scud
missiles, the only Iraqi system whose capability we had underestimated.
We flew hundreds of sorties and dropped thousands of pounds of bombs in
the attempt to attack these elusive and fleeting targets that our
pilots could not find from the air. Brave Special Operations Forces on
the ground in western Iraq succeeded in finding Scuds, but did not have
the capability to direct air strikes. In the end, as a result, we
managed to take out only one Scud ``launcher,'' and that one was a
decoy. The successful operations in Afghanistan demonstrate how much
progress has been made in the last decade, but that is only a glimpse
of where we can go in the decades to come.
Long before September 11, the Department's senior leaders--civilian
and military--began an unprecedented degree of debate and discussion
about where America's military should go in the years ahead. Out of
those intense debates, we agreed on the urgent need for real changes in
our defense strategy. The outline of those changes is reflected in the
Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2003 budget request.
Our conclusions have not gone unnoticed. One foreign observer
reported that the QDR contains ``the most profound implications'' of
the four major defense reviews since the end of the Cold War. What is
most interesting about this analysis is its source: a Chinese military
journal. That Chinese observer thinks the QDR is important as a outline
for where we go from here--and we think so, too.
Among the new directions set in the QDR, the following four are
among the most important:
First, we decided to move away from the two Major Theater War (MTW)
force planning construct, which in its day was a major shift from the
Cold War paradigm that planned for a global war focused on the defense
of Europe from a massive Soviet invasion. The two MTW concept called
for maintaining forces capable of nearly simultaneously marching on and
occupying the capitals of two regional adversaries and changing their
regimes. Today's new approach emphasizes deterrence in four critical
theaters, backed by the ability to swiftly defeat two aggressors in the
same timeframe, while preserving the option for one major offensive to
occupy an aggressor's capital and replace the regime. By removing the
requirement to maintain a second occupation force, we gain more
flexibility in planning for a wider array of contingencies, and we gain
more flexibility in investing for the future.
Second, during the QDR the senior civilian and military leaders
agreed on a new framework for assessing risk. We agreed that we
couldn't simply judge the program on how it addressed near-term
warfighting risks. A new framework was required, one that would get
other risk up on the table as well. We identified four categories of
risk: force management risks dealing with how we sustain our people,
equipment, and infrastructure; operational risks dealing with the
ability of our forces to accomplish the missions called for in near-
term military plans; future challenges risks dealing with the
investments and changes needed today to permit us to deal with military
challenges of the more distant future; and institutional risks involved
with inefficient processes and excessive support requirements that
jeopardize our ability to use resources efficiently. The approach we
adopted in light of this framework sought to balance risks in all of
these categories, and avoid extreme solutions that would lower risks in
some areas while raising other risks to unacceptable levels. While
reasonable people may differ on specific decisions regarding our
investments and budgetary decisions, it is important that we understand
the need to balance among the different risks that we confront.
Third, to confront a world of surprise and uncertainty, we are
shifting our planning from the ``threat-based'' model that has guided
our thinking in the past to a ``capabilities-based'' model for the
future. We don't know who may threaten us or when or where. But, we do
have some sense of what sort of capabilities they may threaten us with
and how. We also have a sense of which capabilities can provide us
important new advantages.
Fourth, to support this capabilities-based approach to force
planning, we worked to define goals to focus our transformation
efforts. Historically, successful cases of transformation have occurred
in the face of compelling strategic and operational challenges.
Therefore, we endeavored to determine what those challenges in the 21st
century and the goals to address them might be.
many transformations to revolutionize warfare
The U.S. military is pursuing not a single transformation, but a
host of transformations including precision, surveillance, networked
communications, robotics and information processing. When these
transformations come together, the resulting synergy could produce a
revolutionary level of improvement in the ability of U.S. joint forces
to dominate the battlespace. The convergence of military
transformations within our land, air, sea, space, and information
forces could allow the development of new concepts of operations that
will further exploit our ability to conduct military actions in a
parallel rather than a sequential manner. We will be better able to
overcome the enormous challenges posed by distance and geography. In
short, transformations over the next several decades can give U.S.
forces new asymmetric advantages while reducing many of our current
vulnerabilities.
six transformational goals--taking care of today while investing in
tomorrow
Setting specific transformation goals has helped to focus our
transformation efforts, from investments to experimentation and concept
development. The six goals identified in the QDR are:
First, to defend the U.S. homeland and other bases of
operations, and defeat nuclear, biological and chemical weapons
and their means of delivery;
Second, to deny enemies sanctuary--depriving them of
the ability to run or hide-anytime, anywhere.
Third, to project and sustain forces in distant
theaters in the face of access denial threats;
Fourth, to conduct effective operations in space;
Fifth, to conduct effective information operations;
and
Sixth, to leverage information technology to give our
joint forces a common operational picture.
Protecting Critical Bases of Operations and Defeating NBC Weapons
Above all, U.S. forces must protect critical bases of operations
and defeat weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. No
base of operations is more important than the U.S. homeland. Defending
the American homeland from external attack is the foremost
responsibility of the U.S. Armed Forces. Vast oceans and good neighbors
no longer insulate the United States from military attacks that emanate
from abroad. The attacks of September 11 revealed the vulnerability of
America's open society to terrorist attacks. Therefore, we must shore
up our vulnerabilities to all forms of attacks.
Projecting and Sustaining Forces in Anti-Access Environments
Future adversaries are seeking capabilities to render ineffective
much of the current U.S. military's ability to project military power
overseas. Today, U.S. power projection depends heavily on access to
large overseas bases, airfields, and ports. Saturation attacks by
ballistic or cruise missiles armed with nuclear, biological, or
chemical warheads could deny or disrupt U.S. entrance into a theater of
operations. Advanced air defense systems could deny access to hostile
airspace to all but low-observable aircraft. Military and commercial
space capabilities, over-the-horizon radars, and low-observable
unmanned aerial vehicles could give potential adversaries the means to
conduct wide-area surveillance and track and target American forces.
New approaches for projecting power are needed to meet these
threats. These approaches must place a premium on enhancing U.S.
defenses against missiles and NBC weapons; conducting distributed
operations; reducing the dependence of U.S. forces on major air and sea
ports for insertion; increasing U.S. advantages in stealth, standoff,
hypersonic and unmanned systems for power projection; and developing
ground forces that are lighter, more lethal, more versatile, more
survivable, more sustainable, and rapidly deployable.
Denying Enemies Sanctuary
Adversaries will also seek to exploit territorial depth and the use
of mobile systems, urban terrain, and concealment to their advantage.
Mobile ballistic missile systems can be launched from extended range,
exacerbating the anti-access and area-denial challenges. Space denial
capabilities, such as ground-based lasers, can be located deep within
an adversary's territory. Accordingly, a key objective of
transformation is to develop the means to deny sanctuary to potential
adversaries--anywhere and anytime.
This will require the development and acquisition of robust
capabilities to conduct persistent surveillance of vast geographic
areas and long-range precision strike--persistent across time, space,
and information domains and resistant to determined denial and
deception efforts. The awesome combination of forces on the ground with
long-range precision strike assets was amply demonstrated in
Afghanistan. It offered a glimpse of the potential future that
integration efforts can achieve if consciously exploited through U.S.
transformation and experimentation efforts.
Leveraging Information Technology
U.S. forces must leverage information technology and innovative
network-centric concepts of operations to develop increasingly capable
joint forces. Our ability to leverage the power of information and
networks will be key to our success in the 21st century. New
information and communications technologies hold promise for networking
highly distributed joint and multinational forces and for ensuring that
these forces have better situational awareness-about friendly forces
and those of adversaries-than in the past. C\4\ISR systems draw combat
power from the networking of a multitude of people using an array of
platforms, weapons, sensors, and command and control entities, which
are collectively self-organized through access to common views of the
battlespace. Leveraging information technology and harnessing the power
of networks poses three challenges: We must make information available
on a network that people will be willing to depend on and trust. We
must populate that network with new types of information needed to
defeat future enemies and make existing information more readily
available. We must deny enemies' information advantages against us. The
ultimate goal is to empower U.S. forces through the network, as
Assistant Secretary of Defense John Stenbit has put it, ``to move power
to the edge.'' The edge doesn't just mean the guy in the foxhole--it
refers to anyone who urgently needs information anywhere on the
network.
Assuring Information Systems and Conducting Information Operations
Information systems must be protected from attack and new
capabilities for effective information operations must be developed.
The increasing dependence of advanced societies and military forces on
information networks creates new vulnerabilities. Potential adversaries
could exploit these vulnerabilities through their own computer network
attacks. Closely coordinating U.S. offensive and defensive capabilities
and effective integration of both with intelligence activities will be
critical to protecting the current U.S. information advantage.
Enhancing Space Capabilities
The Department of Defense must enhance the capability and
survivability of its space systems. Both friends and potential
adversaries will become more dependent on space systems for
communications, situational awareness, positioning, navigation, and
timing. In addition to exploiting space for their own purposes, future
adversaries will likely also seek to deny U.S. forces unimpeded access
to and the ability to operate through and from space. A key objective
for transformation, therefore, is not only to capitalize on the
manifold advantages space offers the United States but also to close
off U.S. space vulnerabilities that might otherwise provoke new forms
of competition. U.S. forces must ensure space control and thereby
guarantee U.S. freedom of action in space in time of conflict.
Taken together, these six goals will guide the U.S. military's
transformation efforts and improvements in our joint forces. Over time,
they will help to shift the balance of U.S. forces and capabilities.
U.S. ground forces will be lighter, more lethal, and highly mobile;
they will be capable of insertion far from traditional ports and air
bases; and they will be networked to leverage the synergy that can come
from ground forces and long-range precision fires from the air and sea.
Naval and amphibious forces will be able to assure U.S. access even in
area-denial environments, operate close to enemy shores, and project
power deep inland. Air and space forces will be able to locate and
track mobile targets over vast areas and strike them rapidly at long-
ranges without warning. These future attributes are the promise of U.S.
transformation efforts.
Providing Capabilities to Meet the Transformational Goals
While new technologies represent only a portion of the Department's
overall transformation program, transformational investments account
for 17 percent (about $21 billion) of all procurement and research,
development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) in 2003, rising to 22 percent
by 2007. Over the next 5 years, we plan to invest more than $136
billion in transformational technologies and systems. Of this, $76
billion represents new investments to accelerate or start new
transformation programs.
It is important to note that we have applied a very strict
definition to programs we include in these totals as transformational
(the system should offer the warfighter a distinctly new kind of
capability). Many things that enable transformation, or extend current
capabilities, are not included in these figures. For example, the $1.7
billion in this budget for funding for the Joint Direct Attack
Munitions (JDAMs) and other precision guided munitions. This category
also includes buying more C-17s to modernize our lift capability, and
buying stealthy F-22s, and is, in fact, critical to making
transformation work. The total additional investment in systems to
support transformation approaches $25 billion in the fiscal year 2003
budget and $144 billion over the FYDP.
Not included in either of these totals is the $10.5 billion that
the budget invests in programs for combating terrorism, which is $5.1
billion more than we were investing in that area just 2 years ago and
approximately $3 billion more than we have budgeted on missile defense
in 2003. That is due, in very great measure, to new priorities we must
address in the wake of September 11--needs that range from immediate
necessities of hiring guards and building jersey barriers to long-term
necessities like training first responders and refining our
intelligence response to the on-going threat of terrorism.
There are many new transformation starts in this budget, many of
which will not reach fruition within our programming horizon. Because
they are new programs, there are limits to how much we can usefully
invest in today. However, many R&D programs today, if successful, will
place increased demands on procurement in the out-years. As
transformation initiatives mature, we need to be prepared to make
adjustments in the programs to take advantage of success. In doing so,
however, we will constantly have to weigh the risks I referred to
earlier between the need to be adequately prepared for future wars and
the need to sustain the current force and to be adequately prepared for
war tomorrow.
Let me highlight some of the capabilities we are investing in to
meet the transformation goals:
Protecting Bases of Operations. To address the goal of protecting
the homeland and other bases of operations, and defeating nuclear,
biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons and their delivery means, we are
pursuing advanced biological defenses and accelerating the development
of missile defenses. Missile defense investment includes increased
funding for the Airborne Laser program, a directed energy weapons to
destroy ballistic missiles in their boost-phase. The budget invests $8
billion in transformational capability to support defense of the U.S.
homeland and forces abroad--$45.8 billion over the Future Years Defense
Plan (2003-2007), an increase of 47 percent from the previous FYDP.
Projecting Power in Denied Areas. To address the goal of projecting
power into denied areas, we are developing new, shallow-draft fast
transport ships to move forces into contested littoral areas more
rapidly and less dependent on traditional ports. Similarly, we are
developing the V-22 aircraft for inserting amphibious and special
operations forces into denied areas. We are also developing unmanned
underwater vehicles that can help to assure U.S. naval access in denied
areas. Overall, the 2003 budget requests $7.4 billion for programs to
support the goal of projecting power into denied areas, and $53 billion
over the 5 year FYDP (2003-2007)--an increase of 21 percent.
Denying Enemies Sanctuary. In the area of denying enemies
sanctuary, we are developing a space-based radar system to provide a
persistent, global ground surveillance and tracking capability. We are
converting four SSBNs to carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles
each and up to 66 SEALs.
We are also accelerating a number of unmanned vehicle programs.
Unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft like Global Hawk and Predator
offered a glimpse of their potential in Afghanistan. The 2003 budget
increases the number of unmanned aircraft being procured and
accelerates the development of new unmanned combat aerial vehicles
capable of striking targets in denied areas and sustaining persistent
surveillance and strike capability over key targets. The budget
includes $1 billion to increase the development and procurement of
Global Hawk, Predator, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles.
DOD is also taking steps to shift the balance of its weapons
inventory to emphasize precision weapons--weapons that are precise in
time, space, and in their effects. We are developing a range of new
precision and miniature munitions for attacking deep underground
facilities, mobile targets, and targets in dense urban areas and for
defeating chemical and biological weapons. We are also developing new
families of ground-launched munitions, such as the GPS-guided Excaliber
artillery round that will further the precision revolution in our
ground forces. The 2003 budget requests $3.2 billion for
transformational programs to support the objective of denying sanctuary
to adversaries, and $16.9 billion over the 5 year FYDP (2003-2007)--an
increase of 157 percent.
Leveraging Information Technology. We are also leveraging
information technology to create a single, integrated air picture. We
have increased investment in datalinks and communications, such as
Link-16, needed to transmit targeting information rapidly from sensors
to shooters. We are pursuing the development of laser communications in
space that has the potential to provide fiber optics-quality broadband,
secure communications anytime and anywhere U.S. forces may operate.
This capability could have a revolutionary effect across many of our
programs because bandwidth limitations are one of the key constraints
on our ability to exploit unmanned systems, networked information
systems, and new surveillance capabilities. Laser communications is a
good example of the synergistic effects that capabilities in one area
can have on others. The 2003 budget requests $2.5 billion for programs
to support the objective of leveraging information technology, and
$18.6 billion over the 5 year FYDP (2003-2007)--an increase of 125
percent.
Conducting Effective Space and Information Operations. Finally, we
are increasing investments also in information and space operations.
Many of these are highly classified programs. The 2003 budget requests
$174 million for programs related to information operations--$773
million over the 5-year FYDP (2003-2007)--an increase of 28 percent.
The 2003 budget requests about $200 million to strengthen space
capabilities--$1.5 billion over the 5-year FYDP (2003-2007)--an
increase of 145 percent.
We couldn't have made these investments without terminating a
number of programs and finding other savings. Although this year's
defense budget increase is the largest in a long time, virtually the
entire increase was ``spoken for'' by needed increases to cover
inflation ($6.7 billion), ``must-pay'' bills for health care and pay
raises ($14.1 billion), unrealistic costing of readiness and
procurement ($7.4 billion), and funding the war ($19.4 billion). We
have saved some $9.3 billion by terminating a number of programs. Major
terminations include the DD-21 Destroyer program, which has been
replaced by a restructured DD (X) program that will develop a new
family of surface combatants with revolutionary improvements in
stealth, propulsion, and manning levels. We have cut 18 Army legacy
systems. Although the Navy Area Missile Defense program was terminated
because of delays, poor performance and cost growth, we are still
looking to develop sea-based defenses under a replacement program.
It is important to point out that in the area of missile defense,
we are pursuing some parallel technologies to meet the same
objectives--for example, the kinetic kill boost vehicle and a space-
based laser. At this point, we are not certain which of these programs
will work best. But, we think that pursuing both will help us reach our
goal faster--success in one will inform the other. As we continue,
however, it is very likely that one of these programs will not survive.
As with the Navy Area Missile Defense program, when it becomes clear we
have reached a dead end, we must be willing to cut a program, take what
we have gained, and redirect our energy and efforts in more potentially
productive directions. This sort of intelligent risk taking, which can
sometimes produce dead-ends, is a necessary part of transformation.
transformation: beyond platforms and systems--changing the culture
As we have seen in Afghanistan, transformation is more than a
simple introduction of new technology. Although the Germans were the
first to make tanks a decisive instrument of war, they did not invent
the tank; nor were they the first to use the tank in combat, or in
figuring out that tanks could prove decisive in warfare. What they did
do first was use it to devastating effect through: the combination of
armor with air and radio communications; the willingness to risk
employing a new and bold doctrine; allowing armor to emerge in an army
traditionally dominated by infantry; delegating responsibility to lower
levels so that units could operate with the autonomy that armor and
radio communications could give them. The success of blitzkrieg went
beyond technology. It even went beyond doctrine, beyond speed, beyond
communications. It was when all these elements came together that
blitzkrieg was born. It was a culture change from top to bottom.
We may draw other transformation lessons from changes in culture.
The introduction of the all-volunteer force was certainly
transformational. Throughout the Cold War, one measurement of the
military balance was through end strength comparisons between Warsaw
Pact and NATO forces. After Vietnam, the U.S. moved away from
conscription. This bold move meant a smaller force, but a force that
was better trained, better prepared, and more highly motivated. The end
result is a peerless cadre of officers and NCOs who are dedicated to
serving our Nation.
Another transformational development is in our unparalleled ability
to conduct night operations. Particularly given our experiences in
Vietnam, we knew we had to fundamentally reduce our vulnerabilities in
this area. So, we acquired technology such as night vision goggles,
that allow us to virtually turn night into day. We conduct extensive
night training operations. We have turned a vulnerability into an
advantage. Today, it is not hyperbole to say we ``own the night.''
The campaign in Afghanistan has planted the seeds of culture
changes in other areas that will prove to be as significant, I think.
Historically, Special Operations Forces have operated separately from
conventional forces. But, this campaign necessitated their close
integration with conventional forces, especially air forces. One of the
results, of course, is the order of magnitude change in how precise we
are in finding and hitting targets from just a decade ago. This is not
only changing the culture of Special Operations Forces, but it is
changing how the rest of the force thinks about Special Operations as
well.
What it means to be a pilot today is undergoing a transformation as
well. Not long ago, an Air Force F-15 pilot had to be persuaded to
forego a rated pilot's job to fly an unmanned Predator aircraft from a
location far from the field of battle. It was a difficult choice for
this woman who was trained in the traditional cockpit. But, she
received assurance from the most senior leadership of the Air Force
that her career would not suffer as a result. Of course, UAVs have made
a significant impact in the current campaign and promise even greater
operational impacts--which is why the Air Force leadership is working
hard to encourage others to pilot UAVs and become trailblazers in
defining new concepts of operations.
Accelerating cultural change and fostering innovation
Some of the greatest military transformations in the 20th century
were the product of American innovation--the development of amphibious
warfare, aircraft carriers, stealth and nuclear-powered submarines, to
name a few. Great names like Billy Mitchell and Hyman Rickover are
associated with such developments, and it is no secret that the
unconventional ways of some of these innovators were sometimes
difficult for their large organizations to adjust to. But, less
iconoclastic officers also had difficulties when they clashed with
perceived wisdom.
In the period between the wars, one infantry officer began writing
about the future of armored warfare, only to have his commander tell
him that if he published anything contrary to ``solid infantry
doctrine,'' it would mean court-martial. The commander even tried to
scuttle the officer's career. It took the intervention of Pershing's
chief of staff to put the soldier's career on a new path. That officer,
so interested in the future of armored warfare, was Dwight Eisenhower.
One of our fundamental goals is to encourage all the potential
Eisenhowers who are thinking about war of the future. Instead of
stifling those who seek to look forward so we can lean forward when
necessary, we must encourage and reward them. We intend to accelerate
the development of a culture that supports the sort of innovation,
flexibility and vision that can truly transform the face of battle.
From my observations, the Armed Forces today are much more
congenial toward innovation and innovators. Certainly the way in which
the Commander of Central Command, General Tommy Franks, has
experimented in Afghanistan demonstrates an openness to change--an
openness that is helping us win the war and transform the military.
But, it will always be a challenge for a large institution like the
Department of Defense to encourage innovation while, at the same time,
allowing the organization to continue getting its job done. We have to
work constantly to encourage that creative tension.
Another way we can support the acceleration of a more innovative
culture is through the processes of experimentation and training. In an
environment where real intellectual R&D takes place, intelligent risks
don't produce failure. They produce insights and lessons. Taking risks
is all part of a discovery process, captured by the Rumsfeld Rule that
states: ``When you're skiing, if you're not falling you're not
trying.''
Experimentation and Concept Development
One of the best arenas for encouraging our forces to try hard, lean
forward and risk failure is through field exercises. Over the last
century, military field exercises and experiments that were oriented
toward emerging challenges at the operational level of war have been
important enablers of military innovation and transformation.
Field exercises that incorporate experimentation--at both the joint
and the service levels--provide an indispensable means for tackling
emerging challenges. In the period between the wars, Marine Major Pete
Ellis perceived that war in the Pacific was likely to come, and he
proposed a landing concept that we now call amphibious warfare. The
Marine Corps saw that the realization of this doctrine would require
special training and special equipment. Over time, and through repeated
exercises, the Marines perceived the need for three different types of
landing craft: one for the first troop assault; a second for the second
larger troop landing; and a third to put tanks ashore. Taking Ellis's
idea from the drawing board to practice beaches resulted in success in
the sands of Iwo Jima, Okinawa and others.
The ability of modern communications to integrate widely disparate
forces puts a much greater premium on joint operations than we have
already recognized with Goldwater-Nichols and the many innovations that
flowed from it. Along with experimentation, the development of joint
operational concepts and operational architectures will drive material
and non-material transformation solutions and establish standards for
interoperability, in much the same way that amphibious warfare was
perfected. New operational concepts-the end-to-end stream of activities
that define how force elements, systems, organizations, and tactics
combine to accomplish military tasks--are critical to the
transformation process. They may even reveal how we can accomplish our
aims with fewer people and resources.
General Kernan can address in more detail how Joint Forces Command
(JFCOM) is developing a joint experimentation plan that uses wargames,
synthetic environment experiments, and field experiments to develop and
evaluate joint concepts. This summer, JFCOM will conduct Millennium
Challenge, an exercise that seeks to exploit our asymmetric advantages
through joint operations.
Training
Secretary Rumsfeld has said that, if you were to give a knight in
King Arthur's court an M-16, and he uses the stock to knock his
opponent's head, that is not transformational. Rather, transformation
occurs when the knight gets behind a tree and starts shooting. But,
just because he starts shooting, that doesn't make him a marksman--only
training can do that.
Likewise, training must go hand in hand with the fielding of new
concepts and capabilities. We must train as we will fight. We must
train as we will fight. Today, we will always fight with combinations
of mission-oriented joint forces--selected from our services and those
of our allies. We must therefore emphasize a culture that stresses
joint sharing of information, concepts and awareness to ensure our
troops can fight on day one of the battle with experience and
confidence. At the conclusion of Desert Storm, when I visited the 2nd
Armored Division inside Iraq with then-Defense Secretary Cheney, the
Secretary asked a very tough Senior Master Sergeant whether the war had
been difficult. The sergeant answered: ``not nearly as tough as the
National Training Center.''
Recognizing how important such training has been to our operations,
a centerpiece of our training transformation effort will be the Joint
National Training Center, which will include a live training component
connecting multiple live training exercises and allowing ``best of''
practices to circulate among the services. It will also include a
virtual capability that will link main service training centers. Over
time, we want to increase the amount of joint field training that our
forces receive as well. Ultimately, these practices will encourage all
the services to fight jointly because they have trained jointly.
Organizational Redesign
We have seen the need in our transformation efforts to redesign
some of our military organizations to harness the tremendous power of
new technologies and exploit the synergy of joint forces. In the early
1900s, the head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Jackie Fisher, recognized a
similar need. He understood that the British Navy was no longer arrayed
for war as it was likely to unfold in the coming century. He initiated
a dramatic reconceptualization of the Navy's organization, its missions
and how it would carry out its tasks. His visionary strategy included
both weapons and doctrines that would come on line over a period of
time. His vision helped produce a revolutionary new battleship as well
as an organizational structure more suited to the world as it was then.
In the same way, DOD is taking steps to realign its organizations
to better integrate and deploy combat organizations that can respond
rapidly to events that occur with little or no warning--the type of
environment that characterizes our world today. Joint forces must be
scalable and organized into modular units that allow combatant
commanders to combine the appropriate forces to deter or defeat a
specific adversary. They must be organized to enhance the speed of
deployment, speed of employment and the speed of sustainment. The
forces must be highly networked with joint and multinational command
and control, and they must be able to integrate into multinational
operations.
To strengthen joint operations, the Department is developing
options to establish Standing Joint Task Force (SJTF) headquarters in
each of the regional combatant commands. Each headquarters will be
established under uniform, standard operating procedures, tactics,
techniques, and technical system requirements, thereby permitting the
movement of expertise among commands. Each SJTF headquarters will have
the means to develop a common relevant operational picture of the
battlespace for joint and multinational forces. It will also have
mechanisms for a responsive integrated logistics system that provide
warfighters easy access to necessary support without burdensome lift
and infrastructure requirements. SJTF headquarters will also use
adaptive mission planning tools that allow U.S. forces to operate
within the adversary's decision cycle and respond to changing
battlespace conditions.
Related to the development of such headquarters, the Department is
also examining options for establishing actual SJTFs. SJTF
organizations could provide the organizational means to achieve a
networked capability. They would employ new concepts to exploit U.S.
asymmetric military advantages and joint force synergies at lower total
personnel levels. A single Standing Joint Task Force could serve as the
vanguard for the future transformed military. It could undertake
experiments as new technologies become available as well as offer
immediate operational benefits.
Professional Military Education
We also need to ensure that the classroom education our senior
military leaders receive includes military transformation. As these
leaders go on to assume greater and greater responsibilities for
military operations, personnel, acquisition and administration, it is
vital that they appreciate the importance of transforming the military
and that we instill in them a spirit that not only tolerates, but
nurtures innovative thinking and encourages risk-taking and failure in
the pursuit of new ideas and capabilities. We want to inculcate in them
an entrepreneurial spirit and an understanding of how militaries have
been transformed historically, as well as an awareness of how private
companies have transformed themselves in the face of discontinuous
change.
Conclusion
Even as we fight this war on terror, potential adversaries
scrutinize our methods, they study our capabilities, they seek our
weaknesses. They plan for how they might take advantage of what they
perceive as our vulnerabilities. So, as we take care of today, we are
investing in tomorrow. We are emphasizing multiple transformations
that, combined, will fundamentally change warfare, in ways that could
give us important advantages that can help us secure the peace. We
realize that achieving this goal requires transforming our culture and
the way we think. We must do this even as we fight this difficult war
on terrorism. We cannot afford to wait.
______
Prepared Statement by Gen. Peter Pace, USMC
introduction
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the
distinguished members of this committee. Today is an excellent time to
discuss the transformation of America's Armed Forces as we prosecute
the global war on terrorism and prepare ourselves to face future
threats. We've been working the issue of military transformation and
welcome the additional emphasis placed on this critical process by
Congress. We must pursue this effort aggressively. I would like to
comment on two areas: transformation paths and the transformation
process.
First, let me provide some context. In his remarks to the cadets at
the Citadel this past December, President Bush made defense
transformation central to winning the global war on terrorism.
Subsequently, in January of this year, Secretary Rumsfeld outlined six
key transformational goals in a speech at the National Defense
University. The goals are: (1) Protect the U.S. homeland and our bases
overseas; (2) project and sustain power in distant theaters; (3) deny
enemies sanctuary; (4) protect U.S. information networks from attack;
(5) use information technology to link up different kinds of U.S.
forces so they can fight jointly; and (6) maintain unhindered access to
space.
Using this framework, General Myers stated that his goal is to
foster changes that result in a dramatic improvement over time in the
way a combatant commander wages war. We must continually pursue this
transformational goal because our enemies will persist in attempts to
neutralize or erode our superiority and exploit perceived weaknesses.
Transformation is key to finding better ways to perform the fundamental
mission of the Armed Forces: fighting and winning our Nation's wars.
Pursuing a methodology to achieve these improvements includes the
following key considerations: First, we must base the process for
change on an overarching set of capabilities we believe our forces must
possess to support our Nation's security requirements now and in the
future. Second, we must develop joint operational concepts and
architectures that drive decisions concerning materiel and non-materiel
improvements to combat capabilities and to establish standards for
interoperability. Third, since transformation involves more than
fielding new systems, we must integrate requirements for new Doctrine,
Organizations, Training, Materiel, Leadership and education, Personnel,
and Facilities (DOTMLPF) into the transformation process. Fourth, we
must find ways to modernize and integrate legacy systems when it makes
sense. Finally, we must retain the ability to operate in coalitions.
Fully exploiting these transformational objectives will require
cultural change. This will be as much about ``mindset'' as it is about
anything else.
transformation paths
Transformation is a process, the objectives of which will be
achieved on two paths: revolutionary breakthroughs and evolutionary
modernization. Both are necessary; both must be underpinned by
transformed mindsets.
Revolutionary breakthroughs in the past have included new
technologies, organizations and doctrine that have led to rapid,
dramatic improvements in warfighting capabilities. Technologies and
advances hold the potential to revolutionize certain aspects of
warfare, profoundly shifting or making previous methods of warfare
obsolete. Technologies, such as stealth and satellite surveillance, and
organizational developments, such as Napoleon's use of independent
corps formations, are examples of these breakthroughs. Significant
transformational change has also been achieved through the cumulative
evolutionary effect of modernization efforts. Both paths have the
potential to dramatically improve the combatant commander's ability to
wage war, particularly when the capabilities are applied across the
joint force through new or innovative combinations. A case in point is
the Global Positioning System (GPS). Originally conceived as an
improved aid to navigation, GPS was not, in and of itself,
transformational. But subsequent modernization efforts with GPS have
enabled commanders to synchronize both communications and the movement
of forces, as well as enable all-weather precision engagement. Although
starting out as a modernization program, GPS has proven to be
transformational, vastly improving the joint warfighting capabilities
of all our combatant commanders.
A significant transformational example is the mindset change
fostered by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Fifteen years after its
enactment we have a joint force producing outcomes on the battlefield
that would not have been possible had we stayed in our Service-centric
approach to warfighting.
Whether transformation comes in incremental steps or radical leaps,
it must be balanced with the standing requirement to maintain readiness
for today's conflicts and threats. If we only prepare for the future we
will find ourselves at risk for today's threats; if we only prepare for
today's threats we incur huge risks in the future. Thus changes through
modernization can provide a hedge against near-term risk, while
experimentation can produce the breakthrough developments we must
pursue to be properly positioned against future threats.
the transformation process
In the past, transformational efforts--such as the development of
strategic bombing, carrier aviation, combined arms warfare and
amphibious operations--have been service-specific. Today we seek to
enhance our military capabilities across the joint battlespace.
Therefore, transformation requires proactively combining, synchronizing
and integrating various transformation efforts. We must ensure that the
transformation process is characterized by unity of effort based on
clearly defined goals. The Secretary of Defense defines these goals in
his Defense Planning Guidance.
The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) plays a critical
role in this process. My predecessors put some teeth into the Joint
Requirements Oversight Council and made it an engine for joint
acquisition. The JROC now has front-end influence to ensure that major
weapons systems are ``born joint.'' With my seat on the Defense
Acquisition Board and my role in the budgeting process I can help
ensure that all major systems are validated as ``joint'' before they
are procured.
We have already had some success with this newer process in program
areas such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition and all-weather close
air support. But the JROC must move beyond simply grading the services'
homework. We must examine the Defense Planning Guidance, select
specific goals that come properly within our purview, and be the
driving force in attaining those specific goals.
As I mentioned, experimentation is a key element in the
transformation process. We've tasked United States Joint Forces Command
(USJFCOM) to develop and evaluate joint operational concepts and
architectures, conduct and evaluate experiments, recommend legacy
system integration, provide feedback from the field, and recommend
emerging operational concepts for evaluation. This summer, as a part of
this ongoing effort, USJFCOM will conduct the largest joint field
experiment to date, called Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC 02). The goals
of MC 02 are two-fold: (1) to seek improvements in C\4\ISR by
evaluating several joint warfighting concepts and related tactics,
techniques and procedures; and (2) to seek improvements in our Armed
Forces' ability to achieve rapid, decisive effects throughout the
battlespace.
Combatant commands play an important role in the transformation
process as well. Although their primary focus is on near-term
warfighting, they have the inherent authority and responsibility to
submit doctrinal, organizational, training, or other change
recommendations. Combatant commands also provide lessons learned from
operations and exercises, such as what U.S. Central Command is doing in
Afghanistan. These lessons are fed to USJFCOM for evaluation. Finally,
combatant commands provide their warfighting requirements to the JROC.
In these ways, current and near-term warfighting readiness issues
inform the long-term transformation process.
The services organize, train, and equip the force. Their efforts,
as guided by the Defense Planning Guidance, will continue to be
critical to the transformation process. They will develop and evaluate
both service-specific and joint operational concepts and architectures;
support joint concept development with service experimentation; support
joint experimentation; provide feedback from the field; ensure future
system development supports validated joint operational concepts and
architectures; and also oversee integration of joint DOTMLPF
recommendations. The Vice Chiefs of each service are members of the
JROC and are ideally positioned to influence the transformation
process.
conclusion
Transformation is a process wherein we seek to make dramatic
improvements in our warfighting capabilities. Breakthrough changes and
modernization changes both contribute to the transformation process. To
accomplish military transformation we must articulate goals, harvest
ideas, modernize equipment, experiment, and change our mindset. The
Nation's security demands that we pursue an aggressive and balanced
approach to transformation. Thank you for the opportunity to appear
before you and thank you for your consistently strong support of your
soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.
______
Prepared Statement by Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, USN (Ret.)
Chairman Levin, Senator Warner, members of the committee,
I'm honored and grateful for the opportunity to appear before you.
By virtue of the fact that you've called this hearing you recognize the
significance of transformation in the Department's plans, and I look
forward to a very robust dialogue on this matter of vital importance to
the future of our Nation.
There are many perspectives on transformation--many lenses through
which we can view the issues before us. However, first and foremost,
the President and the Secretary have elevated transformation to the
level of strategy, and that is probably the most important lens through
which we should look at transformation. Strategy is about how one
selects a competitive space and determines the attributes within that
space which will lead to advantage. Strategy answers the fundamental
questions of how one controls the scope, pace and intensity of a
competition. So we begin our work with strategy and the elements of the
strategic environment that create opportunity and drive the compelling
need for transformation.
The current and future strategic environment has been described in
terms of ``chaos,'' ``revolution,'' or simply ``change.'' Because
social, cultural, economic and technological change is an indelible
part of the world in which we live, transformation naturally flows from
the profound changes happening around us. Impetus for our current
transformation lies at the confluence of three broad trends. The first,
and most important is the transition of our society from the Industrial
Age to the Information Age. This is a transformation we are all living,
so we should not expect our military to be immune from its effects. The
second trend is the appearance of an expanded array of threats in a
more uncertain context, and the third is the vast technological
opportunities available to friend and foe alike. Individually, these
trends provide a host of relevant issues to consider as we examine a
potentially transformed U.S. military. Taken together they provide the
starting points for discussion of the strategic, threat, and
technological issues that drive the compelling need for transformation.
The barriers to competitive entry are falling. Ours is the team against
which everyone measures themselves, and to the extent we do not
transform we provide would-be adversaries a fixed target. The success
or failure of this transformation will determine the degree to which we
and our allies are positioned to meet the security challenges of the
21st century.
While many within the DOD acknowledge the need for transformation,
it clearly means different things to different people. For some, it is
synonymous with modernization and focused on material acquisition.
Others more appropriately see transformation going beyond modernization
to embrace innovation and fundamental changes in our theory of war.
Specifically, Network Centric Warfare (NCW) is such an innovation. Last
year, in the conclusions of the report to Congress, the Department of
Defense said that NCW should be the cornerstone of DOD's strategic plan
for the transformation of forces. To date we have barely scratched the
surface of what is possible. However, early experimentation by Joint
Forces Command and the services has provided significant justification
for continued investment in NCW as the foundation of future force
capabilities. NCW will provide increasing return on investment by
providing our most important resource--our people--the high quality
shared awareness necessary to speed mission accomplishment. NCW
capabilities will accelerate our ability to know, to decide and to act.
The benefits of NCW are not dependent upon a particular geopolitical
future or set of scenarios. NCW is at the heart of military
adaptivity--the ability to respond to uncertainty in dynamic
situations, day-to-day, at every level of warfare, and across the range
of potential military operations. Both experimentation and practice
show that a given level of warfighting effectiveness can be obtained
with fewer resources when the transformation resident in network
centric concepts and capabilities is embraced.
How do we implement transformation? Transformation is not just
about technology and ``things''. Rather, it is more about culture,
behavior, and the creation and exploitation of promising concepts to
provide new sources of military power. Creative concept development,
combined with wide-ranging experimentation of various types is an
essential element of the transformation process. A military bureaucracy
does not squelch innovation by modernizing its forces; innovation is
undermined when experimentation and prototyping of new ideas is
prevented, and when newly developed and fielded systems are
subordinated to outdated operational concepts. Effective concept
development must yield new ways to accomplish critical operations,
missions or tasks. Real experimentation must be at and beyond the
margins of the doable. That may mean money spent on failures without
remorse because there is often more knowledge gained in failure than in
well-orchestrated demonstrations of success. Well-choreographed, well-
rehearsed experiments and exercises are excellent venues to demonstrate
promising new capabilities, but true experimentation must seriously
push the envelope of military operations--often involving attempts to
implement completely new ways to accomplish new missions and tasks. The
experimentation process must foster innovation involving real risk of
failure if it is to produce new concepts of operations that will drive
military transformation.
To maintain competitive advantage in the information age,
transformation must achieve a cultural change. Researchers note that
culture is the last thing to change in an organization. Consequently,
the work on cultural change must begin first. There are some tools for
that. The schoolhouse is one starting place, but that tends to take a
very long time. However, education is a long-term investment we will
make. There are other examples that go much faster. Experimental
articles provide military personnel the opportunity to work directly
with new physical prototypes while developing new concepts. The key
leverage in the use experimental articles is that they help people see
the range of possibilities for performing operations in new ways that
abstract discourses on innovative ideas cannot. This is crucial if the
culture of change is to be widely adopted. When we introduce an
operational prototype--when we put something in the hands of young
operators--they have little trouble visualizing the potential of the
system. They rapidly extrapolate from that experience to innovative
ways to use a system or capability. That can be very powerful, and
there are several examples of that happening right now. The lease of
high-speed transport ships for experimentation with the Army, the Navy,
the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard and the Special Operations Forces is
one such example. Though these ships have been in the hands of
operators for only a short period of time, creative minds are already
projecting greater potential for these platforms. Another example is
the Predator--exploration of its potential really began as an
operational prototype. Recent experience in Afghanistan has
demonstrated how far the idea has progressed since it was first used
several years ago in the Balkans.
What we are attempting is incredibly difficult. Historically we
have recognized transformation only in retrospect. Some people don't
understand how incredibly messy, contentious, and filled with
uncertainty previous transformations have been. Military history is
rife with examples of cultural and institutional impediments to
transformational change. But what makes that history relevant is that
many present-day impediments were also evident in previous efforts to
transform military institutions, culture and capabilities. Many of
these impediments have metastasized in the core processes that shaped
the forces that won the Cold War. While they remain functional for
their intended purposes, many believe that these processes are
incapable of delivering the transformational change that the strategic
environment now indicates. Much of our operating doctrine and our sense
of military power springs from a vanishing, industrial age, and now
inappropriate, threat-based approach. Until we rebalance and revalue
for the information age, we remain at risk.
In summary, the barriers to competitive entry are falling as a
result of new technologies made possible in the age of information. The
goal of transformation is not to establish a new end-state for U.S.
military power. Rather, it is to create a continuous process that if
vigorously pursued, can provide a solid foundation for sustaining the
long-term competitive advantage of U.S. forces. The critics of
transformation will cite various risks--operational, technical,
organizational, and political. However, it is precisely for these
reasons that a multifaceted transformation effort throughout the
Department of Defense must be accelerated. The lessons of history
regarding the maintenance of military primacy clearly demonstrate that
should we rest on our laurels, time will not be on our side. We live in
a competitive world, and to the extent we do not transform we area at
risk strategically.
The President and the Secretary of Defense are committed to
transformation, and I am committed to helping them make transformation
a reality for our forces. I look forward to a continuing discussion
with you on this vital subject.
______
Prepared Statement by Gen. William F. Kernan, USA
Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, I am honored
to testify on U.S. Joint Forces Command's role in the transformation of
our Armed Forces.
Let me open by assuring the committee that U.S. Joint Forces
Command is steadfastly supporting the global war on terrorism (GWOT),
actively securing the homeland and aggressively pursuing military
transformation.
U.S. Joint Forces Command is successfully executing a comprehensive
set of missions, all of which are directly linked to readiness and
transformation.
With over 1.1 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines--some
80 percent of the Nation's general-purpose forces--U.S. Joint Forces
Command is the primary force provider to our country's other Combatant
Commanders worldwide. Headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, our
subordinate commands span the continental United States. In this role,
Joint Forces Command provides trained and ready joint forces and many
unique capabilities in support of operations at home and abroad.
Joint Forces Command is currently responsible for land and maritime
defense of the homeland and provides military support to civil
authorities including consequence management support to lead Federal
agencies in response to weapons of mass destruction attacks.
Joint Forces Command is also responsible for joint training that
includes support to all Combatant Command joint exercises and training
our three star service headquarters to be joint task forces.
Additionally, I am the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with a separate NATO staff,
also in Norfolk. This command is our trans-Atlantic bridge, promotes
interoperability within the alliance and is responsible for the NATO
Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) currently supporting
Operation Noble Eagle under Article V of the NATO treaty.
Each of these roles is important, but my testimony today is focused
on Joint Forces Command's essential role in transformation of our
country's Armed Forces. Protecting our homeland, winning the War on
Terrorism and preparing our Armed Forces for the future is inextricably
linked to Joint Forces Command's mission areas. Indeed, each mission is
essential to ensuring readiness today and transforming for the future.
the global war on terrorism
Given this broad mission set, it is no surprise that the attacks of
September 11, 2001 significantly impacted all aspects of Joint Forces
Command. Simply put, those attacks placed our Nation and this command
on a wartime footing. All elements of this command, Active, Reserve,
National Guard, Civil Service, and contract employees are involved in
this two-front war--at home and abroad. Indeed, there can be no more
important mission than fighting terrorism overseas and simultaneously
securing the homeland. Our Nation's offensive operations significantly
enhance our homeland security.
Since I last appeared before this committee, Joint Forces Command
has made solid progress in improving the military aspects of securing
our homeland. Notably, Joint Forces Command has activated a provisional
Joint Force Headquarters for Homeland Security (JFHQ-HLS). Commanded by
a two-star general, the JFHQ-HLS oversees the planning, organization
and execution of our homeland defense and military assistance to civil
authorities responsibilities. Leveraging the insights and concepts
gained from our joint training and experimentation work, we are
employing emerging concepts to organize, train and operate this new
organization as a highly functional command and control headquarters to
conduct homeland security. Formed ``out-of-pocket'' and ``out-of-
hide,'' this headquarters has operational control of Joint Task Force-
Civil Support (JTF-CS), our consequence management headquarters for
chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive
events (CBRNE), and Joint Task Force-Six (JTF-6), our task force
responsible for providing counter-drug support to civilian authorities
here in the United States.
Working with our key partners, including the services, National
Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, Federal agencies, and the law enforcement
community, our military capabilities deepen the homeland security
bench, so to speak, behind the civilian first responders and the
National Guard as it is employed under state control. While we clearly
remain in a supporting role we continue to maintain active duty ground
force rapid reaction forces, remain prepared to provide naval assets in
support of the Coast Guard operations, provide Active and Reserve
component tactical aircraft and AWACS to NORAD and, in partnership with
Pacific Command, will provide maritime forces, if needed, to defend our
coasts. We have identified additional support forces, such as chemical
and biological detection and defense units, that are required to
maintain the appropriate consequence management capabilities and are
providing soldiers from the National Guard to augment border security
operations. This necessary and robust support posture is not without
cost. Current homeland security and force protection requirements
demand nearly 10 percent of Joint Forces Command's assigned forces.
Balancing readiness, operational deployments, and responsiveness
requires careful and innovative management. Finally, the force
requirements described above do not include the numerous and
substantial employment of National Guard forces by the Governors, in
state status.
Key to the homeland security mission is the integration of our
efforts at the local, state and Federal levels. We have more work to do
to achieve full intelligence and information fusion in order to produce
accurate, actionable, predictive analysis. Once we are able to do this,
the response community will be able to transition from today's more
reactive posture to a more proactive stance and therefore a more secure
homeland.
Overseas, troops from all Joint Forces Command components are
actively involved in support of operations in Afghanistan, comprising
nearly 40 percent of the forces supporting U.S. Central Command in
Southwest and Central Asia. This force commitment has doubled our
normal overseas force rotation and does not include the substantial
obligation of active and Reserve Forces to homeland security, force
protection and infrastructure protection. Nevertheless, these trained
and ready forces are a proud reflection of the great capabilities found
across your military--dedicated, hard working and committed patriots.
Additionally, other less known elements of Joint Forces Command, such
as the Cruise Missile Support Activity, Joint Personnel Recovery
Agency, the Joint Communication Support Element (JCSE), and the Joint
Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), are providing critical support to the
global war on terrorism and Operation Enduring Freedom in particular.
What we have witnessed in Noble Eagle and particularly in the
execution of Operation Enduring Freedom has been truly extraordinary.
Our forces have deployed halfway around the world, and under the superb
direction of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command,
conducted an exceptionally adept and precise campaign, defeated the
Taliban and freed a nation, and dislocated the enemy al Qaeda base of
operations and worldwide network. These deeds and ongoing operations
reflect an agile mix of new capabilities and operational concepts with
tried and true principles. All of our troops have performed superbly.
This operation is replete with many lessons that, when balanced against
the unique nature of the current fight, will inform future operations
and shape transformation.
transforming our armed forces
Overview
Building upon prior and ongoing joint and service concept
development and experimentation and leveraging the warfighting
innovations from ongoing operations, we are actively developing
solutions that enhance the full range of joint warfighting capabilities
needed to combat terrorism and sustain our dominance in the 21st
century. This comprehensive effort includes aggressive experimentation,
joint force training, and integration of joint warfighting requirements
necessary to meet future challenges, all balanced by the need to
sustain a trained and ready force for today's operations.
Meeting requirements at home and abroad, including maintaining the
capability to deter and if necessary decisively defeat other threats,
remains a manageable challenge. However, sustaining such a capability
requires adequate resources to maintain warfighting readiness, ensure
sustainable levels of personnel and unit activity, and afford our
troops and their families with an acceptable quality of life.
These areas reflect the priorities of U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Our forces are an integral part of the war against terrorism abroad.
Here at home, our first priority is the defense and security of our
homeland. As noted, transformation is critical to the success of both
efforts. Our transformation efforts, a relatively new mission area for
this command, are designed to achieve 21st century capabilities
relevant to current and future threats. It is our intention to maintain
and improve the Nation's battlefield dominance. Finally, none of this
is possible without well-led, trained, equipped and motivated people.
It must be clearly understood that these areas are all inextricably
linked to transformation. The ongoing war is a catalyst for innovation
and acceleration of emergent capabilities as well as providing lessons
for the future. As well, transformation efforts feed the needs of
ongoing operations, with a number of innovations rapidly reaching
maturity. Moreover, the readiness of our current forces is not only key
to near term victory but trained and ready forces provide the necessary
foundation for successful transformation.
The challenges of the 21st century require adaptive, flexible,
rapidly deployable, and employable and dominant joint forces. Building
on the readiness of our present force, the synergy of Joint Forces
Command's varied roles is an essential transformation enabler.
As the force provider, our service components' forces, intellectual
input, and operational experience shape, enable, and assess
transformation activities, particularly concepts and experimentation.
Joint training provides the opportunity to assess the operational
challenges facing the entire joint force, identify new ideas, examine
promising concepts, and promote jointness--enhancing our principal
asymmetric capability.
Joint concept development and experimentation builds upon these
challenges and insights to develop the operational capabilities of the
future joint force. Here experimentation collaborates with joint
training to complete the transformation of the force through the
synthesis of personnel, doctrine, and technology in the crucible of a
training event.
Finally, joint integration reaps insights from training and
experimentation and feeds them back into the force. At the same time,
our engagement in joint requirements helps us identify needs and focus
our efforts.
Leveraging Transformation
As the President stated, this is a war ``unlike any other.'' It
demands fresh approaches and new thinking. In that regard, the
Secretary of Defense recently outlined six transformation goals:
protect the U.S. homeland and our bases overseas; project and sustain
power in distant theaters; deny enemies sanctuary; protect U.S.
information networks from attack; use information technology to link up
different kinds of U.S. forces so they can fight jointly; and maintain
unhindered access to space. Furthermore, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs identified key areas for improving joint warfighting
capabilities, including interoperability and joint experimentation, as
well as transformational capabilities such as establishing standing
joint force headquarters for the combatant commanders.
Additionally, we welcome the creation of the Office of Force
Transformation and look forward to strengthening our solid partnership
with Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski. His office provides the necessary
bridge between strategy and policy and the future operational concepts
and capabilities of our Armed Forces as well as assisting with
streamlining the acquisition process to capitalize on rapidly
developing 21st century capabilities.
The Department leadership's intent and guidance establishes a clear
transformation way ahead. Far more than new materiel, transformation is
a comprehensive effort that touches on all aspects of the military.
Transformation components include new ideas, concepts and new
capabilities, developed and refined through aggressive experimentation,
as well as evolutionary and at times revolutionary change that will
sustain our military dominance in a rapidly changing world. These
evolutionary and revolutionary components demand that we sustain the
readiness and capability of our current forces or they will not be in a
position to exploit those changes.
The priority placed on transformation is unquestioned. Within a
month of taking office, the President visited Joint Force Command and
noted, ``Eleven years after the Cold War, we are in a time of
transition and testing . . . We must seize this moment.'' Let there be
no doubt that U.S. Joint Forces Command clearly understands the intent
of our senior leadership, and we are seizing the moment.
Joint Forces Command, in partnership with the services and
Combatant Commanders, has a number of programs and experiments already
underway to achieve the President's transformation vision. Moreover, we
are actively working to leverage the innovation seen in the war in
Afghanistan in order to accelerate the ongoing transformation of our
Armed Forces. Furthermore, the continued support of Congress for Joint
Experimentation and associated effort will ensure that U.S. Joint
Forces Command has the necessary resources to fulfill its key role in
this extensive, Department-wide effort.
With our redesignation as U.S. Joint Forces Command on October 1,
1999, we assumed the responsibility to lead--as a pathfinder--the
transformation of the U.S. Armed Forces to achieve dominance across the
width, depth, and breadth of any battlespace. That means that anywhere
on the spectrum of conflict, we will fight and defeat any adversary.
For just over 2 years, Joint Forces Command has focused on achieving
that objective. Further, the events of the past months, both at home
and abroad, have shown that we must accelerate those efforts. We need
today's forces to get to the objective area quicker, dominate the
situation, and win decisively. Comprised of highly trained, competent
units and leaders, those forces need to operate with agility,
versatility, precision, lethality, and survivability.
Concept Development
Transformation is about thinking differently. Joint Forces Command
started out with that as a guiding premise, developing new concepts
based on new ways of thinking about warfare in order to frame the
capabilities needed to ensure military dominance in the 21st century.
One of the most promising concepts that will help build the future
joint force is called Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO). RDO can be
summarized as ``a rapid series of relentless strikes by a full-spectrum
joint force operating in an inter-agency context to defeat a regional
power'' and takes the fight to the enemy, anywhere and everywhere, on
our terms, under conditions uniquely to our advantage. RDO proposes an
alternative to our legacy sequential, linear and predictable operations
by providing a construct for early, distributed, full-spectrum attacks
against the enemy's ability to make war.
RDO leverages the unique asymmetrical advantages and capabilities
of our Nation. These advantages generally span the elements of both
national and joint military power and include our ability to project
power, do so precisely, exploit space and integrate information into
knowledge. Individually powerful, when those elements of national and
joint military power are integrated and synchronized-we are unmatched.
Achieving this new level of integration and national power
projection requires new operational approaches. The following
supporting concepts inherent in the RDO concept allow us to better
exploit these strengths:
Standing Joint Force Headquarters (SJFHQ) exploits new
operational and organizational concepts and technology to
reduce the ad-hoc nature of current joint operations and
planning times. This concept will significantly enhance
integration, interoperability and operational execution.
The Operational Net Assessment (ONA) comprises
approaches and tools to understand the enemy as a system. This
system synthesizes large, diverse databases, producing
actionable knowledge that enables better, faster decisions.
This will permit a precise focus of effort enabling more
effective employment and protection of our own forces and more
effective destruction of the enemy.
Effects Based Operations (EBO) is a new way of
thinking about fighting the enemy. Effects Based Operations
seek to continually focus the full range of our military and
inter-agency asymmetric advantages against the enemy's system
break-points to destroy his coherence. Early inter-agency
involvement enhances our influence, deterrent, and coercive
effects over an adversary and our preparation and execution of
operations. Effects Based Operations are transforming the art
and science of war.
The Common Relevant Operational Picture (CROP) is a
tailorable, cross-echelon, cross-organizational, knowledge-
based collaborative environment that creates situational
awareness and agile unity of action. The CROP is about adapting
the science of command and control to the evolving art of
warfare-moving from operational design and execution away from
the deconfliction of our joint forces to their integration.
Integrating these concepts within the RDO framework should allow us
to decisively and rapidly defeat opponents ranging from a non-
traditional enemy such as al Qaeda to a competent regional power
employing competitive strategies and capabilities. We have seen and see
today the asymmetric approaches and capabilities we must contend with,
including Terror, Anti-Access, Information Operations, WMD, TBM, and
Cyber Attacks as well as legacy threats. Joint Experimentation has been
working to defeat the enemy we are confronting today and prepare for
tomorrow's enemies as well.
Leveraging Transformation for the War on Terrorism
Combating terrorism, protecting the homeland, and transformation
are intertwined. We are working today with Operation Enduring Freedom's
joint warfighters to rapidly operationalize the innovative ideas
emerging from our joint concept development and experimentation
program. The war on terrorism cannot be won with legacy means alone.
Development of advanced techniques, tools, and organizations for these
challenges requires innovative thinking and aggressive experimentation
to develop alternatives for the future joint force.
As the Secretary of Defense recently observed, transformation is
happening now. Clearly, the war in Afghanistan is a catalyst for
energizing promising capabilities such as precision weapons,
accelerating developmental capabilities such as Global Hawk, and
stimulating new and innovative operational approaches at the tactical
and operational levels of war.
In that regard, U.S. Joint Forces Command has been working for over
a year on proposals for transformation that can directly address the
operational requirements we face today. Last May, in partnership with
U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, Joint Forces
Command conducted an advanced concept experiment, Unified Vision 2001
(UV 01). Unified Vision 2001 envisioned strategic and operational
conditions similar to those we face today. The intellectual foundation
for dealing with these new conditions should put us in the position to
operationalize more rapidly our best concepts.
Converting these concepts into operational capabilities is now our
challenge. Within this command, we are integrating many of our new
ideas into our own organization and operations to execute the homeland
security mission. Likewise, the fight against terrorism abroad will be
enhanced by the doctrinal, organizational, training, and technical
findings that come from our transformational efforts. Some of these
enhancements will take time, but some are in the hands of the
warfighter today or will be very soon. Let me provide several examples
based on UV 01. In addition, I expect more to follow from Millennium
Challenge 2002 (MC 02), this year's major experiment.
Our Joint Warfighting Analysis Center (JWAC) is
already providing an important new capability to our Operation
Enduring Freedom warriors. The Research, Integration and
Technology Environment (RITE) capability makes use of JWAC
expertise and advanced tools to provide a near real time fused
intelligence product that is tailored to the user for kinetic
or non-kinetic action.
We have developed the Joint Enroute Mission Planning
and Rehearsal System-Near Term (JEMPRS-NT) that will provide
the warfighter with on the move, collaborative planning,
command and control, and a first-generation common relevant
operational picture. Leveraging commercial and government off-
the-shelf technology, JEMPRS-NT was successfully demonstrated
in airborne testing in January and March 2002. MC 02 will
validate this capability and we expect to get it in the hands
of the joint warfighters shortly after that. Our Combatant
Commanders want this capability now.
Our experimental insights on interagency coordination
were a driving factor in forming interagency coordination
groups for each of the regional Combatant Commanders.
Standing Joint Force Headquarters, described
previously, is the Chairman's number one transformation
priority. Our experimental insights confirmed the way ahead.
This capability will be a centerpiece of the MC 02 experiment,
and, in partnership with the other Combatant Commanders, will
be developed and refined in order to deliver operational
organizations to the regional commands in fiscal year 2005.
Enhanced C\4\ISR for HLS Operations (ECHO) is a new
fast track initiative to identify solutions that provide
assured crisis action connectivity from the first responder at
the incident site to the highest Federal levels. This system
will enable coordination and collaboration at all levels as
well as information sharing and access across multiple
information and security domains. This is an accelerated
program designed to deliver a prototype system within four to 6
months using a spiral development process.
The operational demands that frame these flexible capabilities and
the velocity of technological change demand an equally agile process of
acquisition. At a minimum, as experimentation and other programs such
as the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations (ACTDs) uncover new
opportunities and capabilities, funding must be available to bridge the
gap between discovery and formal acquisition. With business and
technology horizons constantly compressing, a mechanism must be
established to ensure our own capabilities are synchronized with the
velocity of technological and operational change.
Joint Experimentation
These advances will greatly enhance operations in the near term.
However, transformation is also a comprehensive, long-term effort that
demands concerted effort. Many of the inter-war innovation models,
including American aircraft carrier and amphibious warfare development,
and the often-mentioned development of ``blitzkrieg'', were years in
the making. In the latter case, historians note that the Germans'
``lightning'' victories in 1939 and 1940 were a surprise only to their
opponents, as this ``revolutionary'' warfare was the product of some 20
years of effort. However, as successful as their initial efforts were,
failure to follow through cost the Germans dearly on the Eastern Front.
In that new environment, shortcomings in operational design (concepts)
and failure to continue force wide transition to these new
``blitzkrieg'' capabilities contributed to their defeat. Innovation and
transformation follow through must be continuous, flexible and
resourced.
Likewise, prematurely capitalizing on new capabilities presents
substantial risk as well. The Italian air force of the 1920s and early
1930s was state of the art, but was irrelevant as World War II
unfolded. Similar examples can be drawn from our own experience with
coastal defense, dreadnought battleships, dirigibles and, more
recently, the Pentomic Army. These lessons are in part why we have
undertaken robust joint and service experimentation programs.
The Joint experimentation program provides the framework for
comprehensive examination of change. Notably, last year's UV 01
experiment, previously mentioned, was very successful. Unified Vision
2001 focused on the Joint Forces Headquarters organization and systems
needed to execute RDO in a 2007 small-scale contingency. Over 40
organizations and 350 personnel joined in this robust, wargame-style,
model supported experiment. Unified Vision 2001 validated RDO as a
sound operational concept and provides a solid foundation for MC 02,
this year's major field experiment.
Key insights from UV 01 centered on leveraging inter-agency
capabilities and joint organizations and operations. Examining
combatant command and inter-agency partnerships through joint force
staff integration, we confirmed that early and continuous inter-agency
involvement is essential to mission success and enhanced our influence,
deterrent, and coercive effects over an adversary and our preparation
and execution of operations. Our examination of experimental
organizations indicates that a core standing joint force headquarters
(SJFHQ) is a high-value means to reduce the ad-hoc nature of today's
JTF operations and increase the timeliness, effectiveness and
efficiency of future operations. This joint-interagency capability
developed an Operational Net Assessment (ONA) that affords
comprehensive knowledge of opponent systems (political, military,
economic, etc.), enabling compressed decision cycles, strengthened
deterrence, and development of comprehensive strategic to tactical
actions using all elements of national power. Exploiting ONA, the
Effects-Based Operations process leverages the full weight of national
power to create integrated effects tailored to rapidly defeat a
specific foe.
Over the fall and winter, a number of follow-on experiments have
built upon and matured these concepts as well as the insights and
outcomes of last year's very productive UV 01 experiment. These
experiments and ongoing preparation will establish a firm foundation
for successful execution of Millennium Challenge 2002 this year.
With strong support from the members of this committee, this year's
joint experimentation funding will ensure effective execution of MC 02.
With great support from the services and participating agencies, MC 02
is suitably scoped to fulfill all experimentation objectives without
taking away from the requirements of ongoing operations against
terrorism.
Millennium Challenge 2002 is a major milestone towards
transformation. Examining a high-end, small-scale contingency with
potential to escalate MC 02 is based on a real-world military threat.
Millennium Challenge 2002 will permit us to experiment with the RDO
concept with both real and simulated forces, using a broad array of
land and ocean training areas, facilities, instrumentation, modeling
and simulations. The experiment will span the western ranges--Nellis
Air Force Base, Twenty-nine Palms, China Lake, Camp Pendleton, Point
Magu, the National Training Center at Fort Irwin--and our own Joint
Training Analysis and Simulation Center facilities in Suffolk,
Virginia.
Millennium Challenge 2002 will bring together around 13,000
personnel from all the services and incorporates the services' future
concepts and capabilities--the Navy's Forward From The Sea, the Marine
Corps' Ship To Objective Maneuver, the Air Force's Aerospace
Expeditionary Forces, the Army's Interim Brigade Combat Team, along
with Special Operations Command and other interagency initiatives--all
within a joint operational context. Allied involvement consists of NATO
observers this time; robust allied participation will take place during
our next major experiment called Olympic Challenge 2004. In the area of
multinational and allied experimentation, I would also note that the
co-location of NATO's Allied Command Atlantic with Joint Forces Command
makes cooperation in transformation much more effective.
We want to experiment to see how we can develop a common relevant
operational picture that will allow us to fuse intelligence, do the
collaborative planning, make decisions very quickly, and compress our
decision-cycle to the point where we can prioritize and attack targets
and seize objectives faster than the enemy can respond, achieving a
rapid and decisive victory.
Coming out of MC 02, we expect to have some significant
recommendations, backed by quantifiable data to develop the
architectures, systems, processes, tools, and capabilities necessary to
empower a standing joint force headquarters to execute high tempo,
effects-based operations that employ agile, decision-based forces. We
are already seeing the benefits of this conceptually based new way of
war in Operation Enduring Freedom and joint concept development and
experimentation efforts will continue to improve our capabilities.
Moreover, these endeavors set the conditions for unified
transformation activities to take place across the services and the
joint force. Our concept development and experimentation efforts over
the past 2 years have established the common joint context, have
facilitated collaborative concept development across the services, and
have synchronized the joint and service experimentation programs.
I look forward to discussing with you further the power of these
concepts and emerging capabilities and invite you and your staffs to
visit Joint Forces Command and our Component forces in late July and
early August to observe this experiment.
Trained and Ready Joint Forces--the Foundation of Transformation
Transformation is more than just experimentation, the
interoperability of current and future systems or some new technology.
Enhancing jointness--that is, the way our forces train to interact and
fight the enemy--is a critical aspect of transformation. To that end,
another benefit to the preparations and execution of MC 02 is the
electronic linkage of many of the existing service ranges and training
areas in the Western U.S. This effort, necessary to conduct a robust
joint field experiment, will also provide us the opportunity to explore
the benefits of establishing a Joint National Training Capability that
provides the opportunity for the conduct of embedded, multi-echelon
joint and service training that is live, virtual and constructive,
using electronically linked ranges, simulators and simulations.
Additionally, with the robust capabilities of the Joint Training,
Analysis, and Simulation Center located in Suffolk, Virginia, the
potential exists to make such a capability a reality, with smart
investments that leverage existing capabilities and integrate them with
means such as the Joint Simulation System (JSIMS).
Interoperability
To facilitate Department of Defense transformational efforts,
USJFCOM develops, experiments on, documents, and submits appropriate
joint doctrinal, organizational, training, materiel, leadership,
personnel, and facility (DOTMLPF) changes for implementation as
directed by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), to which I
have a standing invitation. These submissions, the product of joint
experimentation, training, and operational lessons, include joint
operational concepts, command and control structures, and capabilities
that become joint requirements once approved by the JROC. To further
discipline this process and better direct our efforts along the vector
established by Secretary Rumsfeld's transformation goals and the
Chairman's intent, we recently published a CJCS-approved 5-year Joint
Experimentation Campaign Plan. This Campaign Plan describes the
strategy, timeline, planned activities, and program goals necessary to
realize near term transformation opportunities and sustain the effort
for the future. Given the dynamic nature of transformation, this is a
living document and will be updated annually or as required.
Joint Forces Command is addressing critical interoperability
problems for the warfighter. To ensure new systems are born joint, the
Command reviews all requirements documents under development to ensure
sufficiency of interoperability key performance parameters, information
exchange requirements, and operational architecture views. In addition
to reviewing other organizations' requirements, Joint Forces Command
also develops requirements that fill uniquely joint needs. The JROC has
approved four Joint Forces Command Capstone Requirements Documents-
Global Information Grid, Information Dissemination Management, Combat
Identification, and Theater Air Missile Defense.
In our role as the chief advocate for jointness, Joint Forces
Command identifies, collects, categorizes, and prioritizes warfighting
interoperability requirements critical to the Combatant Commanders and
then seeks solutions. Joint Forces Command also synchronizes JROC
endorsed DOTMLPF solutions to interoperability and integration
shortfalls in order to provide the joint warfighter with integrated
remedies that enhance warfighting capabilities. In particular, Joint
Forces Command is currently developing recommendations for
infrastructure, information management and assurance, and joint data
network enhancements for legacy joint task force command and control
capabilities.
To speed exploitation of technological and other opportunity
solutions stemming from experimentation, Advanced Concept Technology
Demonstrations (ACTD) and other programs, Joint Forces Command
established a stabilization fund program element line that will
facilitate the rapid insertion of solutions to identified
interoperability shortfalls. This funding provides programmatic support
to the lead service or agency between Program Objective Memorandum
(POM) cycles.
In addition to our review and implementation roles, Joint Forces
Command established a training program for Combatant Commands, services
and agency requirement developers to streamline the process and speed
development of needed capabilities. This training greatly facilitates
the identification and formulation of parameters that meet the
interoperability requirements. These customers have embraced program
and to date has involved over 50 organizations and 1,500 personnel.
Readiness
While working towards transformation, we have a big job right now
that will demand attention and resources. We have to get through today
to get to tomorrow. Risk management is necessary, but it must be
prudent. Part of prudence is striking the right balance between
readiness, transformation, quality of life, and operations. This is
both a management issue and a resource issue. Risk can be managed to a
point, but resources must also be committed to secure our dominance for
today and the future. Transformation, modernization and selected
recapitalization cannot occur without adequate resources.
Readiness provides the foundation for not only our current
security, but the transformation for our Armed Forces. Many pundits
have held up World War II and the innovation that preceded that
conflict as a model for our own age. The innovation exhibited by many
nations, including the United States, clearly provides lessons for
transformation today.
That era also provides paths to be avoided. In our own experience,
the readiness of our forces was not on par with the capabilities
developed from inter-war experimentation. Indeed, in the case of my own
service, the Army learned many hard lessons in North Africa and the
South Pacific because the pre-war Army was unable to match the demands
of new capabilities and the realities of changing warfare. The
realities of the 21st century counsel that we balance and co-evolve
both the readiness of our forces and the transformational capabilities
needed for the new century.
Our present joint forces are highly capable, as recent operations
demonstrate, but they are overdue for recapitalization. Near-term
modernization of our forces to capitalize on the many technological
advances made over the last decade is necessary. We need these updated
legacy systems to continue to fight today and bridge our modernization
gap as we move forward with transformation.
While I have outlined a number of challenges and priorities for
ensuring we sustain our edge worldwide, I must note the criticality of
congressional support. Within the constraints of competing national
priorities, even in this time of conflict, the support of the members
of this committee is reassuring. The challenges and requirements I
outlined above remain, but we have a plan to address them and, due in
great part to your support, our forces remain the best in the world.
For that we are all proud and thankful.
Moreover, transformation is clearly occurring. Our efforts aim to
accelerate these trends. Further, I think that these insights are
compelling and have immediate application. As I mentioned earlier,
these concepts guided the stand-up of our provisional JFHQ-HLS and the
development of our Homeland Security Campaign Plan. Likewise, much of
what we see in the war on terrorism is transformational-from tactical
employment of armed unmanned aerial vehicles to integrated, effects
based joint operations against an asymmetric enemy. Money can certainly
influence the rate of transformation, but I regret to say that in many
cases time is perhaps the more critical resource. Many aspects of
transformation will remain evolutionary, even when the results are
revolutionary.
I look forward to working with you to give our troops what they
need today and for the future and reiterate my invitation to visit
Joint Forces Command and see transformation at work.
conclusion
In all of this, we have to remember the basics. War remains close,
personal, and brutal. There are no silver bullets to change that. There
have been revolutions in how we fight such as gunpowder, nuclear
weapons, and computers. In the end, however, it still comes down to our
national will and the commitment, training, and tenacity of our troops.
It is never safe, easy, or risk-free. The enemy sees to that. Today
while I speak our troops are flying, sailing, and standing in harm's
way, under enemy guns, at night, and far from America and their loved
ones. Our national will, combined with their spirit and tenacious
commitment, will define our success.
In closing Mr. Chairman, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines
of U.S. Joint Forces Command are ready to defend our homeland and are
deployed to fight terrorism abroad. Each day, we improve our
capabilities, refine our plans and increase our homeland security
capabilities while providing trained, ready, and-over time-
fundamentally transformed forces for combat operations against
terrorism and any other threat to our Nation. We are all very proud of
them and privileged to serve with them.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Secretary Wolfowitz.
Let me start with Admiral Cebrowski. Secretary Wolfowitz
has mentioned the need for transformation of new operational
concepts, new organizational changes, and I am wondering
whether you agree with that, which I think you probably do. But
more importantly, would you point to any new operational
concepts or organizational changes that have been formally
adopted or should be formally adopted?
Admiral Cebrowski. Mr. Chairman, I do agree wholeheartedly
that transformation is really a broad spectrum of technology,
organizations, culture, and processes. Key amongst this is of
course operational concepts. Operational concepts flow from our
understanding of the evolving situation in strategy, in
technology, and with regard to threat. That indicates a certain
way ahead for us.
Yes, I can say that some key operational concepts are
emerging. First and foremost amongst this process is the
transformation from the industrial age into the information
age. In the Department we call that network-centric warfare. A
report to Congress was submitted by the Deputy Secretary last
summer with regard to that subject, and that is absolutely key.
If we do not succeed in transforming from the industrial
age to the information age, then all of our other efforts in
transformation will not likely bear fruit. This indicates
certain features and some of those address the questions that
you had raised in your opening remarks. For example, we see the
moving to primacy of sensors and the appearance of something
that we might call sensor wars. We have done very, very well
with weapons, and weapons are indeed critically important and
we have magnificent weapons reach. But in the dynamics of
warfare, the enemy controls the sensor reach. So what is
emerging in all of the services is the recognition that we have
to have a robust, well-networked sensor capability which is
capable of fighting in close, that is, that sensors emerge as
elements of the maneuver force themselves.
We are seeing the enormous payoff from that. We are seeing
the recognition amongst all the services that these
capabilities must be networked to develop high quality shared
awareness. So you see the terminology of shared awareness and
self-synchronization appearing in all of the service
documentation and concepts. That of course is good news as
well.
You see an enhanced appreciation for speed. It shows up,
for example, in collaborative planning. We can plan far faster
now than we ever could before. But there is a wholesome
dissatisfaction, and there always should be because it is never
fast enough, and we need to keep working in that area.
You also see it in terms of speed of deployment, which
shows up amongst all of the services. The most tangible form is
the appearance of the high-speed vessel to help us deploy
forces more quickly, the recognition that speed indeed counts a
good deal. Not just tactical speed, but speed of deployment,
speed of employment, and speed of sustainment. These things all
integrate with each other.
We can see in the land forces, both Marine Corps and Army,
the appearance of doctrine for fighting in the non-contiguous
battlefield, that is moving away from front lines with a rather
static and set piece form of combat to alternative concepts
which would allow us to draw on the power of smaller units,
higher mobility, and the great information advantage which our
Nation provides the military forces.
So there is a lot of good news here in the way things are
going. This does not say that the work is done, however. Very,
very far from that. A great deal more must happen.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Admiral.
General Pace, your formal statement notes that your
chairing of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and your
seat on the Defense Acquisition Board enable you to ensure that
major weapons systems are ``born joint'' and validated as
``joint'' before they are procured. Then you go on to say that
the JROC has moved beyond simply grading the services' homework
and must select specific goals from the defense planning and be
the driving force in attaining those goals.
I am wondering whether or not that will require a cultural
change. You made reference to it in your opening statement when
you said that this is all as much about mindset as it is about
anything else. Do we need a cultural change? Do we need a
change in mindset in order that the JROC be the driving force
in attaining the goals that you referred to?
General Pace. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I do believe that if we did nothing else other than change
our mindset and apply those different thought processes to the
assets we already own, that we would take a huge step in the
direction of transformation. You can look at what General
Franks is doing on the battlefield in Afghanistan right now.
You can look back to the mindset change that Goldwater-Nichols
instituted some 15 years ago.
Chairman Levin. If I could interrupt just for a second,
could you be specific in terms of the changes in mindset that
you think are necessary, the future changes?
General Pace. Yes, sir. With respect to the Joint
Requirements Oversight Council, of which I am the chairman and
each of the service vice chiefs is a member, our predecessors
have given us a system that does a very good job of taking
ideas that come from service laboratories and service
experiments and determining whether or not the services have
applied to those initiatives enough jointness so that when they
bring that computer system to the joint battlefield it can plug
and play along with others.
Over the past several years, we as the JROC have gone from
taking systems that were already in the process of being
developed and trying to adjust their final outcome to moving
the gate forward in the process to where now no major program
of any service even gets one dollar applied to it before the
JROC blesses it as joint. That is good, but that is the point
where we are grading other people's homework.
What I am saying, Mr. Chairman, is that we need to take the
defense planning guidance, the capabilities that we want this
Nation to have in the future, and as a Joint Requirements
Oversight Council look at what we have right now, what are the
gaps in those capabilities, and determine as a council whether
we want a service to come up with the solution, or need to ask
Joint Forces Command to experiment with some ideas so that
instead of waiting for ideas to come in the door from those
around us, we become part of the initiative process and we take
on that.
That is a mindset change of sitting back and waiting for or
in fact being a part of the process. It goes to what Goldwater-
Nichols did for the joint environment. My first 19 years in the
Marine Corps, I knew that I was supposed to be thinking about
the Marine Corps and I was not worried much about the Army,
Navy, and the Air Force. My last 15 years in the joint world, I
have seen a huge difference that the Goldwater-Nichols Act has
brought about.
Look simply at Afghanistan. You cannot imagine the force in
1986 doing what the force did just several months ago,
thousands of miles--from September 20, when Tom Franks got his
first order to go until October 7, thousands of miles away, a
landlocked country, joint and combined operations. That is a
mindset change, sir, and the willingness to look at things
differently and to take what we have and to apply it in a
different way.
Chairman Levin. Thank you. Senator Warner?
Senator Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Really a fascinating presentation. I have been privileged
to sit here for many years hearing successive presidents and
secretaries of defense propose to Congress their vision for the
future. I guess what is crossing my mind at the moment is
concern about what I have heard thus far. I am not sure that we
are coming to grips with the integration between our projection
of forces abroad to deter and defend, and are we losing any
emphasis on what I think is my main concern here at home.
I have not heard anyone discuss how we are going to secure
our ports against the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction
into the borders of our Nation, to the extent that any of this
reflects the porosity of our borders. Then lastly, gentlemen,
the Deputy Secretary, the Chairman, and I were just discussing
that the crisis at hand in the world is the Middle East and the
weapon of selection is one that, while there have been isolated
chapters of its use in the history of warfare, we are now
seeing it employed to where the human bomb has brought any
discussions to try and solve the Israeli-Palestine crisis to a
stalemate thus far. I hope it is soon broken--the ability of
conscientious minds in both the world and everyone.
It is the human bomb that has brought about what appears to
be an impasse and a stalemate. To what degree did this thinking
of emerging threats and the isolated terrorism poised against
our Nation and other nations enter your plans? We listened to
Admiral Cebrowski talk about the battlefield. Battlefields now
are isolated individuals bringing about enormous devastation
utilizing weapons of mass destruction.
To what extent did that type of thinking go into the
formulation of these various goals? Mr. Secretary, do you want
to tackle it? Then General Pace.
Secretary Wolfowitz. We are all involved in this in one way
or another. But in fact, we specifically identified defense of
the homeland and defense of our bases as the first priority.
There is a lot going on in this area, including the quite
transformational work to stand up a new Homeland Defense
Command, which will be something both in mission and in the way
it is organized, I think, very different from the commands we
have had in the past.
I do think in fact that this challenge of homeland defense
and of dealing with the vulnerability of our bases involves a
number of mindset changes. One of them is that we have to think
not just joint, but inter-agency and inter-governmental. One of
the biggest challenges in doing homeland defense is sorting out
what is the right role of the military and what is the right
role of civil authorities. Normally we have not had to think as
deeply about that kind of issue.
When we engage in the war on terrorism overseas, we are as
frequently in a supporting role for the CIA or for the FBI or
for other agencies of the U.S. Government as we are actually
engaged in military operations.
A second mindset change that is involved is understanding
that the same ways in which our country can be vulnerable to
attack, our bases can increasingly be vulnerable to attack. We
have enjoyed the luxury for a long time of assuming that we
operated out of a sanctuary, and that is not a luxury we can
assume. That I think is a mindset change.
But I would also say that one cannot separate defense and
offense. What we are doing in Afghanistan, I think, has
contributed in significant measure to preventing other
terrorist attacks here at home, and at the same time that we
take all reasonable measures to increase our security here--we
are not going to win this war simply going on defense. We have
to go after the terrorists, and I know you agree with that.
Senator Warner. I share those views. I want to make certain
that we have an integrated plan for defending ourselves here at
home, which has been a very low priority up until recently. I
am not faulting anyone. We always felt the two oceans and our
projection gave us the security here at home so that we did not
have to devote the assets and the time. But that has changed.
Then we see on the battle fronts today the utilization of
suicidal attacks as bringing about a transformation in warfare
in the Middle East that I do not think any of us fully
envisioned until this tragic chapter unfolded here in the last
year or so. It has cost untold crises to a valued ally, Israel.
General Pace, do you have some comments to assure the
committee that you and your colleagues are looking at the
homeland defense as an integral part of all of this?
General Pace. Sir, we are, and I would echo two thoughts
that you have. One is the need for an inter-agency approach to
this, especially homeland defense. Each of the CINCs now has a
joint inter-agency coordination group with his command element,
which is developing in the inter-agency world what we have
developed over the last 15 years in the joint world, meaning
the trust, the understanding of the standing operating
procedures of the groups, so that we are working together
homogeneously across that spectrum.
With regard to homeland security itself, the recommendation
from the Joint Chiefs to the Secretary that we stand up the
Homeland Security Command now----
Senator Warner. I am fully aware of that. As I looked
through and listened carefully, I did not hear anyone mention
homeland defense. Now, maybe I missed it, but I listened
carefully. I suspect it is in these documents and I will refer
to it. But my time is up, Mr. Chairman, and I do not want to
encroach on others.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Senator Warner.
Senator Reed.
Senator Reed. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
appreciate it.
Welcome, gentlemen. I particularly want to welcome Arthur
Cebrowski, who was in Newport at the Naval War College. Good to
see you again, Admiral Cebrowski.
Admiral Cebrowski. Thank you, sir.
Senator Reed. Mr. Secretary, a lot has been said about the
new thinking, spiral development and capabilities-based
development. But I am tempted to think this might just be new
buzzwords, not new thinking. With respect to spiral
development, we have in the past developed systems and then
fully anticipated those systems would be improved as they were
in the field.
Can you, for example, describe the difference between a
block buy for an F-16, for example, and spiral development? Is
there anything different there?
Mr. Wolfowitz. I will ask General Pace to help me on this
also, but I think it is more in the degree of formality in the
process in moving forward. Obviously, as you point out
correctly, with the F-16 we have done what is in effect a
spiral development. But I think there was a tendency at each
step along the way to figure out what was the maximum
technology we wanted and then put that on, whereas I think the
thought with spiral development is to recognize that getting
something out in the field quickly with less than perfect
capability may be much better than increasing your requirements
and thereby slowing down and increasing the cost of first
fielding systems.
The F-16 has been around a long time and those changes have
come gradually over time. I think the approach that Secretary
Aldridge has in mind, for example, with the Joint Strike
Fighter, would get systems out into the field more quickly,
recognizing that as they are fielded, as we gain experience
with them, we will have a much better idea what the
requirements will be.
You have a fair point, that it is not a completely unknown
process in the past. But what we are trying to do is to
recognize it more specifically and try to have people ask
consciously why are you not doing it that way.
Admiral Cebrowski. If I could, sir.
Senator Reed. Sure.
Admiral Cebrowski. In spiral development or adaptive
acquisition, the difference is toward the front end. The useful
metric is capability cycle time. Right now the capability cycle
time of the Department of Defense is considerably larger,
perhaps two to ten times larger, than that of the commercial
world. So we should be making efforts to move that forward.
What Under Secretary Aldridge talks about when he talks
about spiral development is how we reduce that cycle time. So
it is, rather than waiting until you have 100 percent of the
requirement satisfied and you have suppressed all of the
technical risk--that frequently results in your first article
not appearing in the forces for 10 to 20 years--is to go ahead
and start well short, if need be, of the requirement to put
some things in the field, to start production.
Then in the process what happens is, because you have
articles in the field sooner, you are getting concept
development sooner and any appropriate organizational changes
and doctrine much sooner. So it is a way of pulling things
forward rather than a way of dealing with things once they are
already in the field.
Senator Reed. One other way to look at this--and Secretary
Wolfowitz alluded to it when he said that there seems to be
less formality in the spiral development--but that might also
be described as not having the same type of very specific, well
defined requirements that one can measure progress against and
one can measure cost against. Is that a danger with this spiral
development approach?
Admiral Cebrowski. Actually I would say, Senator, that it
is laudable, because with the spiral approach we seek to have
upstream influence on the national security environment. That
is, upstream influence on the market, create a market by virtue
of the fact that we are moving into it more quickly. It is more
of a venture capital approach than it is an investment banker
approach to acquiring systems. So the risk moves to different
areas in this, and of course, because it is new, it will
certainly have the appearance of being more messy.
Senator Reed. Well, let me go to another aspect of this. I
find this topic goes quite a bit beyond simply what systems we
are going to buy and how we are going to buy them. When we
emphasize the capabilities approach, which ties in, I think, to
the spiral development, one of the dangers I see is that you do
not consciously, or at least as we did in the past, integrate
specific threats. There is a real danger, I think, out there of
saying, listen, we have to build whatever we can build because
some day we will need that capability, which makes it very hard
then to come to decisions about budgets, about specific
systems, about many other things. There is a limited amount of
resources we can devote, even in this time of great danger to
the country.
Without, I think, this touchstone of what is the real
threat, we could go about building all sorts of systems, some
of which we would never use, some of which we may use, some of
which are always good to have. Frankly, the appetite of the
Department of Defense for systems and building things, because
of the nature of the business that you are in, is rather
substantial.
How do we make those--and this is my final question because
my time has run out. How do we anchor our decisions about what
we are buying and building to the real world, which I would say
comes to what the real threats we face now and project in the
future?
General Kernan. Senator, let me try to tackle that. You are
absolutely right, the intellectual change has to drive the
physical change and it has to be a relevant capability. We have
moved toward a capabilities-based strategy in conjunction with
the combatant commanders and the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD). We will do the strategy to task analysis, we
will do the joint mission area analysis and determine precisely
what is required in the region in the way of capability.
We will, obviously, then have to prioritize where we have
deficiencies and work through those. But this is a very
thoughtful process, and it is blast off at the Joint
Requirements Oversight Council. It is also done in partnership
with the combatant commanders, who are the employers of these
forces, as well as the services which provide this force. So it
is a very thoughtful process.
Senator Reed. Thank you very much. It is nice to know that
you are all investment bankers now.
Admiral Cebrowski. No, no. Venture capitalists.
Senator Reed. They work together, I am told.
Thank you.
Chairman Levin. Given the recent condition of the stock
market, I am not so sure that you are moving in the right
direction. But nonetheless, Senator Sessions.
Senator Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Transformation is an important subject. I am glad we are
having a hearing on it. There is this constant tension between
those who committed many, many years to new programs and
systems they believe deeply in and then the world we have
changes and we have to say no to some of those. Maybe they were
a good idea in 1980 when they came up, but maybe they are not a
good idea today.
I think one thing we can see from this war in Afghanistan
is we are transforming. Militaries around the world have been
traditionally criticized and many wars have been lost simply
because they fought the last war, they made no changes
whatsoever in tactics, equipment, or doctrine during that
period of time. Our military, more than any military I believe
has ever existed, is challenging itself, bringing forth new
weapons systems, new technologies, and actually employing them
in a way that works.
The sergeant on the ground can call in the Air Force. That
is a very significant thing and I think we should celebrate
that. But that is not there yet. We have a $380 billion, $379
billion defense budget. Can we innovate more? Can we use more
of that money effectively to integrate new capabilities and
systems to be even more effective than we are today? I believe
we can, and I salute you for moving in that direction.
I have saluted Secretary Rumsfeld from the day he came here
as a person committed to transformation. I salute President
Bush. He used the words ``agile, lethal, readily deployable''
at the Citadel, which reminds me of Coach Eddie Robinson
talking about his defense department, the winningest coach in
football history. He wanted a defense department that was
agile, mobile, and hostile. That is pretty close to what we
need.
So I think that is the right direction. I salute you for
moving in that direction. I believe Congress has to support you
in that and I want to do that.
This cycle time question, I believe Senator Reed asked
about it. I just visited a Honda Motor Company plant in
Alabama. There was a field there 2 years ago. Today they are
rolling out brand new automobiles, in 2 years from ground to
new automobiles. They pour the block, they build the entire
automobile there.
Secretary Wolfowitz, do we not need to make some historic
leaps forward in our ability to bring on new systems, and would
that not save us money if we could?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Absolutely, yes, Senator. We need also
to work very hard at transforming the way we do our basic
business. We have to, particularly in this era when we are
looking for more and more highly trained, educated people in
our military, we have to be really rigorous about what
functions are truly military functions and what functions we
can afford to contract out to more appropriate civilian
operations.
As you said in your question, we have to figure out how to
bring systems on line faster. Part of that is what Admiral
Cebrowski addressed in the context of spiral development. When
it takes us 10 or 20 years to bring on a major weapons system,
that is not a way to transform. That is a way to impose a kind
of unilateral disarmament on this country, and we have to get
out of that.
Senator Sessions. Thank you. I believe it is a critical
thing. This Congress needs to confront it and figure out how we
can help you be more capable in doing that. Many of the delays
are because of procedures set in law. I know that to be a fact.
Admiral Cebrowski, do you want to comment on that, what we
can actually do to bring these systems on sooner?
Admiral Cebrowski. I think the discussion about spiral
development points to that. I think that this is tightly
involved in our culture, which has developed over the last 50
years, focused on cost-benefit analysis and optimization, risk
reduction. What has happened is we have become so focused on
one particular area of risk that we have lost sight of the fact
that risk is going out of balance.
While a 16- or 20-year program might do well in suppressing
technical risk, it aggravates all of the other areas of risk,
on which we had not been focused. So we need to refocus on some
of those other aspects to do that.
I do think it is possible to bring on board very, very
quickly sharp changes in our capabilities. Broadening our
capabilities base is very important. I think the example of the
high-speed transport is illustrative here. This did not exist
as a program in any of the services, certainly not in the Navy
where I was involved with it. But it became clear that this was
the broad thrust of technology and of the marketplace, and so
we went out and we just leased one and we put it in the hands
of the operators.
Until we did that, the institutional Navy had no interest
in this. But once they got their hands on it, it fired their
imagination and they wanted to get on with it. People who
objected to it after being on board for only 10 minutes wanted
to take charge of it. It was a marvelous thing. Now we see that
that experimental article is on its way to Central Command,
where it will be used to support the U.S. Army.
All this happens in less than 2 years. So this kind of
change does not have to take 16 years. From the first time that
we started negotiating the lease until potential combat
operations for a new capability, entirely new capability, less
than 2 years. So its existence is proof that it can be done.
It shows up again and again in our history. For example,
go-ahead for the Polaris missile program was in November of
1956. Just 48 months later, U.S.S. George Washington, the first
Polaris missile submarine, goes out on its first patrol--4
years, something of the same degree of technical difficulty as
going to the moon.
We can do this. It is a matter of courage and commitment to
do it, and it takes a team effort. The four of us here at the
table cannot do it alone. We need a lot of help and
encouragement from Congress in that, and we certainly
appreciate it.
Senator Sessions. You do need congressional support and it
will not only bring the system on sooner, but save a lot of
money, I believe, in the process of building it. These delays
cannot do anything but run up costs.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for what you are doing and I
appreciate the services. I do believe the weapons like the JDAM
are critical and we need to make sure that our systems,
production systems, are bringing them on soon enough.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Senator Sessions.
Senator Bill Nelson.
Senator Bill Nelson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, I want to compliment you and your team on
the ways you are transforming the military, particularly what
has been represented in the very successful military operations
in Afghanistan. I have just returned from a second trip there
in 3 months and I find the troops continue to be pumped. They
know their cause is just. You are giving them the tools that
they need to be successful. They are absolutely intent on
prevailing.
There is one hiccup that I noted and that is the issue of
hot pursuit in an operation such as Anaconda, where some of the
enemy got away. It is like the old days of in the 1920s, Bonnie
and Clyde robbing the bank and racing for the state line, where
the local sheriff and the state police cannot cross the line.
This was a concern that was expressed to us, and in our
congressional delegation there at Bagram Airfield I raised this
particular issue.
From there we went on to meet with President Musharraf in
Islamabad and I raised the issue with him, and he did not say
no. Upon my return, I have been somewhat perplexed to see
contradictory comments being made in the press by both
Musharraf and some of our leadership. However, I full well
recognize that this is a matter of the most extreme delicacy,
given all of the political sensitivities in that part of the
world.
So if you cannot or do not want to address it directly,
which I would certainly understand, I clearly want to give my
encouragement to you to work it out with Pakistan. This is a
part of the terrain that in some places are only goat trails
going from one country to the other across those rugged
mountains. But we have to be able to pursue them into that
territory despite a political boundary.
Secretary Wolfowitz. Senator, with your agreement I would
prefer to actually get into the details with you in private.
But I think I can say confidently that we have had excellent
cooperation from President Musharraf and from the Pakistanis.
They do a terrific job on their side of the border. There are,
as you correctly noted, these potential seams, but I think it
is satisfactory and, for the reasons you properly noted,
probably the less we say about it here in a public session the
better.
You gave me an opportunity, though, if I might, to point
out that what General Franks and his people did in responding
so quickly is truly remarkable, for an organization that is
sometimes accused of being ponderous and slow. People comment
on how long we built up in the Persian Gulf. Just think about
these dates: General Franks got his orders to plan for
operations in Afghanistan on September 20. That is 9 days after
the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There
was no plan on the shelf.
Senator Reed, I am sure you would agree with me that if we
had come up here saying we needed extra money because of a
threat in Afghanistan, we would have thought we were silly and
you probably would have also. It hit us brand new. The
operations began barely 2 weeks later on October 7, and within
12 days of the start, on October 19, we had Special Operations
Forces on the ground in the north with General Dostum.
I have to tell you, at the time it seemed like an eternity
and I remember how impatient Secretary Rumsfeld was to get
those guys in. When you actually look at the dates, it is
amazing how fast we moved, and I think it is a tribute to the
way in which our military has changed, has recognized what it
can accomplish, and it is a tribute to Central Command and
their planning capability.
Senator Bill Nelson. It is a tribute to other agencies of
the government as well.
Secretary Wolfowitz. That is correct, yes, sir.
Senator Bill Nelson. Could you give us a report on the
commander in chief down in SOUTHCOM? What is your plan for
getting a four-star general in there?
Secretary Wolfowitz. We recognize it as an extremely
important job. Secretary Rumsfeld has been spending literally
hours over the last month or two in looking at all the senior
commands that have to be filled and that is clearly one of the
very important ones. I am sure we are going to have a very high
quality person to recommend shortly.
Senator Bill Nelson. Well, there is a fellow seated to your
right that can tell you a lot about that command and about the
need for someone that has all those silver stars like his on
his shoulder.
Secretary Wolfowitz. It may not surprise you to know that
he has told me that several times already, Senator.
Senator Bill Nelson. I thought he had.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Senator Nelson.
Senator Bunning.
Senator Bunning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Wolfowitz, given our current commitments, such as
Kosovo, Bosnia, homeland defense, Afghanistan, possible future
operations in other countries that need not be named, and our
extensive use of Reserves even before the global terrorism
began, at what point will the Department of Defense consider a
comprehensive increase in force structure?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Senator, each of the services has come
forward to Secretary Rumsfeld with proposals for increasing end
strength. The Secretary's reaction has been not to deny that
there are new requirements--there obviously are a lot of new
requirements--but to say that before we make that considerable
investment and long-term commitment to increasing our force
structure, let us make sure that, in addition to having new
requirements, that there are not some old requirements that we
could shed and that we have really looked and scrubbed
thoroughly to make sure that we are not doing things that we
should have stopped doing a long time ago.
I think that process is underway right now and I think each
of the services is taking a very hard look at where in fact
they might reduce some of their personnel requirements, because
it is very obvious that there are new ones that have to be
added.
Senator Bunning. You said reduce?
Secretary Wolfowitz. In some areas. It is well known that,
for example, the Secretary has been trying for a long time to
reduce our level of forces committed to the Sinai. Obviously,
people say this is a bad time to do that, but that would be an
example.
Senator Bunning. In other words, you are talking more about
moving personnel?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Well, also freeing up people from old
jobs that do not need to be done anymore, so that we have the
people available within our current force structure to meet
those new requirements. It is only after we go through that
very careful scrub that we would want to do the fairly
expensive decision to add force structure.
Senator Bunning. Well, I think your report and all the
studying that you have done should have taken that into
consideration a little more on top, rather than as an
afterthought.
I want to get back to what Senator Reed was talking about,
because I think he hit the nail on the head. The budget that
you have sent up here takes care of legacy defenses more than
anything else. Not much change. You are paying a lot more
dollars for a lot more weapons systems. You also are spending
certain amounts of money for old weapons systems that do not
seem to work very well.
I bring the V-22 Osprey up as one that you have not been
able to get on line. How long ago did you start that program?
Not you, but the Department of Defense.
Secretary Wolfowitz. It started about 10 or 15 years ago,
Senator.
Senator Bunning. Do you not think you ought to have it
worked out by now?
Secretary Wolfowitz. It is a revolutionary technology. It
has encountered some serious difficulties.
Senator Bunning. We are spending 1 point what billion in
the current budget that you requested? Almost $1.5, not quite
$1.5 billion?
Secretary Wolfowitz. We also are undertaking a very intense
review of whether it can in fact meet its technical goals.
Senator Bunning. But we also ordered 11 more, did we not?
Secretary Wolfowitz. That is basically to sustain a viable
production base in case we do decide to go ahead with it.
Senator Bunning. If you decide that, after all the studying
and things, it is a waste, will you pull the plug or will you
not?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Certainly if it is a waste, if it is a
system that cannot work, then we will, and then we will have to
look at an alternative for accomplishing that mission. It would
be an alternative that will be less transformational
technologically, but more reliable, more dependable.
Senator Bunning. I think, in looking at your proposed
budget for the year 2003, that more emphasis should have gone
into, rather than traditional legacy operations--I know we are
fighting a war, so I know that takes precedence and we have to
have the supplies and the technology and everything that our
fighting people need in the field. But if we are going to
upgrade the Department of Defense in an effective manner, we
have to get very forward-thinking, in not 10-year periods, but
1 or 2 or 3-year periods.
If you are talking about getting something operational in
15-plus years, that is unacceptable. I will not accept that and
I do not think too many people on this committee will accept
the fact that we have been trying to make operational a weapons
system that we have been dealing with for over 15 years. We
cannot afford to do that.
So if we are going to look at a $370 billion-plus budget, I
expect you and everybody in your Department to be a little more
forward-thinking, and I mean not 10 years forward-thinking.
Just looking at the request for the Navy, is that forward-
thinking, four ships? We do not even get the 10, which is what
is supposed to be the minimum that we are building.
Secretary Wolfowitz. As I mentioned in my testimony, we
have about $21 billion invested in this year's budget in
transformational programs. That is a very substantial amount.
At the same time, this budget has to cover large increases for
health care and retirement, large increases for pay raises,
large increases to cover the costs of the war.
Senator Bunning. We understand.
Secretary Wolfowitz. I think there is a lot of new
investment here.
Senator Bunning. We voted for those things. We understand
that cost.
Secretary Wolfowitz. The Navy made some decisions about
where its priorities were in light of the fact that our current
fleet is relatively young, relatively new. There is a lot of
money in the Navy budget, for example, for a brand new
capability which will be converting Trident submarines into
cruise missile carriers. I think the Navy has tried to strike a
balance between near-term versus long-term shipbuilding needs
and near-term versus long-term readiness needs.
Every place in this budget you will find difficult
decisions have to be made and difficult tradeoffs have to be
made. I think the services and we and OSD have done a very good
job of making those balances.
I would point out that Vice President Cheney, when he was
Secretary of Defense, tried to cancel the V-22 program.
Congress in its wisdom made us go ahead with it. We now have
some 10 years of investment in trying to get that capability to
work, and I think it is prudent to continue at least until we
are sure whether it works or not, and at that point we will
have to make a very clear decision.
Senator Bunning. Thank you.
My time has expired, but I would like to just add that we
want to spend the $370 billion on defense, but you are going to
have to sell it. You are going to have to sell it to the rest
of the Congress of the United States. This committee supports
you, but it is a tough sell right now.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Senator Bunning.
Senator Akaka.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I, too, want to add my welcome to the Secretary and his
team this morning. My questions will dwell around definitions
of budget, financial management, oversight, and measurement for
readiness. I also was interested in the statement by the
Secretary that transformation can mean using old things in new
ways. My question to you has to do with your very strict
definition of transformation.
You also discuss other items in the fiscal year 2003 budget
request that are considered by the Department to be
transformational, but do not meet that strict definition,
including funding for precision-guided missiles, C-17s, and F-
22s. Do you have a total figure at least for the fiscal year
2003 budget request for the programs that contribute to the
Department's process of transformation?
Secretary Wolfowitz. As I said in the testimony, in the
strictly transformational category it is about $21 billion in
2003 and $136 billion over the whole FYDP. In the
transformation-supporting category, it is roughly equal
numbers.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Secretary, you have discussed the
Department's intent to invest more than $136 billion in
transformational technologies and systems over the next 5
years, with $76 billion representing new investments, to
accelerate or start new transformation programs. The Readiness
and Management Support Subcommittee has held a hearing on
financial management, as well as a hearing on acquisition
reform. I am concerned about the Department's inability to
properly account for all of its funding and have held a hearing
on that.
With respect to the proposed investment in acceleration or
beginning of transformation programs, what kind of oversight
does the Department intend to implement regarding these
developing technologies to ensure that the appropriate progress
is being made in a manner consistent with the goals of the
transformation process?
Secretary Wolfowitz. By the way, Senator, on your previous
question, on page 7 of the prepared testimony I have both of
those figures. In the strict transformation category it is the
$21 billion in fiscal year 2003 and the $136 billion over the
course of the FYDP. In the transformation-supporting category,
the next paragraph, it is $25 billion in fiscal year 2003 and
$144 billion over the FYDP.
On your question about financial management, we agree very
strongly with you that that is a problem area that has to be
addressed on an urgent basis. Under Secretary-Comptroller
Zakheim is undertaking a whole effort to restructure the way we
do our financial accounting systems. I think we made some
significant progress in reducing this enormous and embarrassing
backlog of accounts that we have had difficulty keeping track
of, and we are looking at ways to introduce new technologies so
that we are operating off of a single enterprise system and we
can keep track of what we are doing in a way that is essential
if we are going to transform.
I know the efforts that you have made to encourage that
work and we look forward to working with you on it.
Senator Akaka. Thank you for mentioning that. This has been
a problem that we have been trying to resolve and I am glad
that we are making a move on this.
General Pace, I have heard you as well as the Secretary
mention the need for intergovernmental and inter-agency
meetings of the mind. One of the keys to the United States'
success in Operation Enduring Freedom has been the seamless
joint effort between the United States and its coalition
members. You have testified about joint operational concepts
and architectures and the necessity of forces operating in
coalitions.
What are the clearly defined goals regarding joint
operations in the process of transformation? How do you plan to
measure the readiness of troops to engage in these joint
operations?
General Pace. Senator, first with regard to your comment
about the mindset, I would say that the ability to experiment,
the opportunity to experiment and fail, has been key to the
progress we have made so far in the war in Afghanistan, and I
would say that that will be a key in the future.
I mentioned in other forums, I think, that one of the main
strengths Secretary Rumsfeld brings with him is the fact that
he has a background which makes him comfortable with
experimental failure, knowing that as we try we will find those
leap-ahead opportunities that only experimentation can foster.
That is one of the things that General Kernan's folks do very
well.
With regard to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, as
our country looks out and as we are given our defense planning
guidance from the Secretary for the types of capabilities that
we want to be able to develop and apply worldwide,
transformation can have a thread through all of that. What
capability do you want to apply, in what time frame? You can
then take current force and forward-base it or you can have
forward access, allowing you to move your forces forward from
the States, or you can have forward presence in the form of
naval forces, or, as I mentioned, you can just straight deploy
from the United States to the combat area depending upon the
time lines involved.
The transformation part goes to the things Admiral
Cebrowski was talking about. You might want to build more
airplanes or you might want to build a 50-, 60-, or 70-knot
ship that allows you to close that time line.
So as we look at the umbrella requirements and capability
requirements of the things we want to be able to do on foreign
battlefields and the umbrella operational concepts that tell us
how we can apply to resources to provide those capabilities, we
can then mix and match based on experimentation and experience
whether we are going to move the assets we currently have more
effectively or if we need to in fact seek a new solution,
either in the way that we apply them or in the way that we
build them.
I am not sure that that answers your question completely,
sir.
General Kernan. Can I just add onto that, Senator? The
analytical piece of experimentation is extremely important and
we recognize that. We have to take away as much subjectivity in
our analysis as possible. We are baselining ourselves
continually and applying metrics, so when we go and do an
experiment we use the instrumentation or some prescribed
methods to ascertain whether or not this is truly value added.
For instance, one of the things we are doing right now--
because there is a tremendous emphasis on command, control,
communications, and computers and downlinking and all the
collaborative tools necessary to conduct distributed
operations--is continually measuring bandwidth and seeing how
we can maximize the use of that bandwidth, and also recognize
when we are in surge capacity and what the impact may be on
other people's operations during that period of time.
So this is a very deliberate process. We have an assessment
and analysis branch put together, and as we move more toward
the integration of the instrumentation in the western training
areas I think we are going to get even more precise in our
analytical skills.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Levin. Thank you very much, Senator Akaka.
Just before I call on Senator Nelson, would you complete
for the record, Secretary Wolfowitz, your answer to Senator
Akaka relative to the investments that you are making in
transformation this year, next year, both directly and in
support of tranformation? You have numbers in your testimony,
you have given numbers here. Would you supply for the record
the list of the programs which make up those numbers both this
year, next year, and for the next 5 years? Would you give us
your definition as well for the record of what constitutes
transformation? Thank you.
[The information referred to follows:]
Investments Relative to Transformation
Transformation is a process or plan aimed at reducing future
security risks to America. Transformation will enable the Department of
Defense (DOD) to counter 21st century threats more effectively. It is
fundamentally about redefining war on U.S. terms by harnessing an
ongoing revolution in military affairs. Working with U.S. allies and
friends, transformation seeks to shape the changing nature of military
competition and cooperation. It uses new combinations of operational
concepts and capabilities, imaginative application of old and new
technologies, and new forms of organization. It seeks to exploit
America's advantages and protect our vulnerabilities. The goal is to
strengthen our Nation's strategic position, which helps underpin peace
and stability in the world.
Transformation is likely to result in fundamental changes in
military operations and, over time, a rebalancing of the U.S. portfolio
of capabilities and forces. For example, the portfolio of capabilities
will shift between manned and unmanned systems, short- and long-range
systems, stealthy and non-stealthy systems, and unprotected and
hardened systems.
The President's fiscal year 2003 budget included $21 billion in
transformation funding, as determined by DOD leaders. The budget was
based on plans that project transformation funding to total $136.6
billion for fiscal year 2003-2007.
Enclosed is a list of the programs DOD leaders identified as likely
to provide new kinds of military capabilities to the force and their
funding projected for fiscal year 2003-fiscal year 2007. This list will
change as DOD leaders learn more about the direction that
transformation will take and the technologies that will be needed to
support the transformation of the force. Some of this transformation
funding spans two or more program elements or is subsumed within larger
programs.
Chairman Levin. Senator Ben Nelson.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank you all for being here today. In February
when I visited the troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and
Pakistan, I found the morale very high--people committed to the
task, fully supported by the American people and by our friends
worldwide. I believe that continues and they are doing a
magnificent job.
I also found it to be a field where transformation was
underway as we tried new things, fighting a current war with
current technology. But it was pretty clear from many anecdotal
stories that old technology still works as well. So when we are
in this balance, trying to balance between new technology, old
technology, what works today, what might work tomorrow, we
ought not forget what worked yesterday, but we ought not rely
solely on that, otherwise we will be in a position where we can
only fight the last war.
I am struck by the challenge that you have and I do not
envy you, but I want to assist in any way that I can in
determining the technology, so that we are not looking at 10 to
15 years to develop something we cannot know whether it will be
successful. We should not, though, move away from trying to
think forward. Certainly we must do that.
But balancing the old and the new I think is going to be a
continuing challenge for all of you and for those who work with
you, whether you are looking at the kind of war that is being
fought in Afghanistan today or whether you are taking a closer
look, as we did in Colombia. General Pace, you were a gracious
host and provided a lot of information. Maybe a lot of the new
technology just is not appropriate for that kind of conflict.
So I think it is important that we prioritize the
challenges in technology. I hope that you are looking at it in
terms of prioritization, that maybe we cannot wait 10 or 15
years to decide if something does not look like it is going to
be successful, because we are going to be putting a great deal
of our asset structure, our resources, into that at a time when
maybe it ought to remain on the drawing board.
I just do not know how long we can go with a product, with
a project, with technology, research and development, before
you pull the plug. Your challenge is to keep Congress happy if
Congress wants a certain project, but I hope that as you do
this you will be in a position where you can come back and
deliver bad news and that there is no penalty for delivering
bad news when something did not work.
Secretary Wolfowitz. You are absolutely right, Senator. I
think it is what General Pace referred to earlier and Secretary
Rumsfeld refers to all the time. You want to try things,
recognizing that some of them will not work. In fact, in this
year's budget, I think for the first time ever, Under Secretary
Aldridge declared a program in breach of the Nunn-McCurdy rule,
which has normally been waived every time a program has come up
with those kind of cost overruns.
In fact, he has cancelled both the Navy Area Wide System
and the SBIRS Low System, though we hope to replace them with
other things that look to be working better.
We have said from the beginning, particularly in the area
of missile defense, where we are trying a lot of different
things, that some of them are not going to work. While you have
to reinforce success, you have to also be prepared to kill
failure.
Senator Ben Nelson. It is the old adage about not pouring
sand down a rat hole. You have to figure out whether it is a
rat hole or not. But the price to experiment and to try should
never be so high that you cannot admit failure along the way
or, if not failure, that the cost-benefit ratio is not
justified, because unlimited resources will permit you to
succeed, but it will also permit you to never have to admit
failure.
Secretary Wolfowitz. That would be a mistake.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you.
General Pace, do you have any thoughts on making our
transformation work for us, but not to the point of getting us
so far ahead with technology that we cannot go back and do the
traditional things that we still need to do? I do not know
whether we want to keep our stable of horses, on the one hand;
on the other hand, there may be occasion when that kind of
ancient technology fits into the equation.
General Pace. Sir, I agree. I think we have the opportunity
to dedicate a portion of our resources to the transformation
process, to the experimentation process. We have been
fortunate, thanks to many years of sustained bilateral support
in Congress, to have a military that is second to none, that
has no peer on the horizon. That is why we are being attacked
asymmetrically and that is why we will continue to be attacked
asymmetrically.
But in that time line where we have no peer competitor we
can afford to take part of our resources and apply them to
experimentation, to the trials and failures of looking beyond
our current capabilities to what we might be able to do in the
future. Again, this is filling out the specifics of the
overarching operational concepts.
But clearly, some of the things we have in our kit bag
right now are exceptionally versatile. The B-52 that the
Secretary mentioned before, it is 50 years old, give or take a
few years, and still now providing close air support because of
the transformational weapon that it is carrying to the
battlefield.
So I agree with you, sir.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you. I think you all agree that
successful transformation does require prioritization and a
determination that some things that looked pretty good 10 years
ago do not really fit into where we are today or where we are
going to go tomorrow.
Secretary Wolfowitz. Right. I agree also that one of the
most difficult pieces of balancing we have to do in this budget
is between the large investment that goes into sustaining the
current force and the actually smaller fraction that goes into
preparing that force of the future, and you have to keep the
balance.
One of the statistics I have heard about the German
transformation of the 20s and 30s is that only 10 or 15 percent
of the German army was in fact armored at the time that they
developed blitzkrieg. I do not know if arbitrary percentages
are a mistake, but certainly the goal is not to transform the
entire force. That would probably lead to a general collapse.
Senator Ben Nelson. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Levin. Thank you, Senator Nelson.
Secretary Wolfowitz, the members of our second panel have
reached different conclusions relative to the Army's Crusader
artillery system. One of our witnesses points out its utility
in a contingency such as a land war in Asia. The other witness
will point out the drawbacks to Crusader, including weight,
transportability on the C-130, and a shorter range than some of
the other Army strike systems. Secretary of the Army White is
reported to have described the Crusader as transformational.
I am wondering if you could give us a very quick assessment
of the Crusader.
Secretary Wolfowitz. I think one thing to say about
Crusader is that the Crusader of today is not the Crusader that
people were talking about some 2 years ago. The Army responded
to the appropriate criticism that it was much too heavy to move
anywhere by redesigning the vehicle and reducing it so that the
weight of the total system is down by about a third.
I think how you rank Crusader depends in part on whether
you compare it to current artillery, in which case there are
some technologies that are dramatic improvements over what we
have with the Paladin, or alternatively if you look at where we
might be able to go in the future with artillery systems that
in some ways substitute for artillery systems that are still
very much on the drawing boards, very much in the form of
briefing slides rather than actual capabilities, that might
allow us to really rethink the whole way in which we look at
artillery.
Clearly, one of the things that we want to do is invest as
much as possible in bringing forward those kinds of
capabilities, the capabilities that are in the Future Combat
System. A separate but important development is to accelerate
the development of very accurate artillery munitions,
particularly the Excalibur round. We saw with----
Chairman Levin. Given our time constraints, can you just
give us your summary as to where you are?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I think my summary is that Crusader is
a little bit in-between, and it is a system that brings us some
dramatic new capabilities, but if we can bring forward some of
the transformational capabilities more rapidly we might see
ways to put that Crusader technology into a different system.
Chairman Levin. Thank you.
I would like to ask you a question about the so-called $10
billion contingency in the fiscal year 2003 budget. Does the
Department support leaving that as a contingency to finance
increased operational costs to continue the global war against
terrorism, and that it not be diverted to other uses? Or have
you changed that position?
Secretary Wolfowitz. No, that is our position very
strongly. It is there as a contingency operating fund to allow
us to continue operations into fiscal year 2003 without having
to come immediately for a new supplemental on October 1st. We
do not know what those operations will be or what level it will
be at, but, as I think we have briefed in the past, that number
gets us about halfway into the year on the assumption that
operations are at their current level. It is impossible to
predict what level it will actually be at, obviously.
Chairman Levin. Thank you.
General Kernan, your formal statement today makes a
reference to the fact that our present joint forces are highly
capable, as recent operations demonstrated, but that they are
overdue for a recapitalization. When you were testifying before
the House Armed Services Committee on March 14, you also added
that ``they are overstretched.'' That created something of a
news article.
When you were asked about that, you said, ``we are busier
than we have ever been and we are stretched.'' Apparently,
according to The New York Times, the Secretary was upset when
he read about this testimony. I am wondering whether or not you
stand by that testimony, that you believe our troops are
stretched, because we need your own honest, unvarnished views
on this. So are they stretched and was it in any way suggested
to you that you modify your testimony as it appears in today's
printed version?
General Kernan. No, sir, nobody asked me to modify my
statement at all. I welcome this opportunity also to clarify
because, as you can appreciate, things are oftentimes taken out
of context. The dialogue between myself and the Congressman had
to do with manageable risk, and I believe what I said was that,
yes, we are stretched, but this is manageable.
The come-back statement was: `` I understand that the
troops are getting pretty worn out.'' My comment was: `` Yes,
they are tired, but the commanders are doing a good job in
rotating the forces through the theater of operation.''
So really, I guess the bottom line up front is, sure, this
is a challenge. Yes, we can manage it. But we are at war and we
are going to do what is necessary. We will ensure that we
maintain readiness and have the deployable packages our
combatant commanders need when and if they are required.
Chairman Levin. Thank you.
Senator Warner.
Senator Warner. Thank you very much.
Mr. Secretary, I offer an observation and a little bit of
advice. These programs successively come before Congress with
the best of intentions and then they are lost as the years go
on. You talk about the intransigence in the military
historically. It has been in Congress. We need look no further
than the base closure struggle that the Chairman and I and our
two counterparts in the House had in getting across the concept
to allow basic efficiency of management and savings. Anyway, it
is the law now.
I would hope that Admiral Cebrowski, as long as he is
willing to serve in this position, is given the authority to
keep working with Congress, because when these items come up
they are buried in massive documents. Somehow there ought to be
a red tag put on transformation so that when we make the
deliberations--do we take this program or that program or cut
this one or cut that one--we are conscious of what is an
integral part of your transformation. There is a certain
synergy between all the parts not unlike a chain, where due to
the weakest link the whole thing fails to serve the ultimate
goals that you have. If we let one or two pieces of it lapse
and the others go forward, then I think it would be less
effective.
So to get this through over the years to come, you have to
put emphasis on it and flag it when it comes up to Congress .
I also have a concern, and we certainly saw this in Kosovo
and have seen it in our Afghan operations, that we are so far
ahead of our allies. Can anyone say that other nations are
looking in a comparable way to their transformation? General
Kernan, do you see a lot of it? You are the CINC right out
there with our allies. What do you see? Do you see them working
on transformation in any measure comparable to what we are
trying to do?
General Kernan. Comparable to what we are doing, no,
Senator. Transformation, yes. The Secretary General of NATO,
Lord Robertson, has been emphasizing continually the need to
invest more in defense budgets so that the alliance would
modernize, and he established 58 defense capabilities
initiatives that he wanted us to focus on.
In my role as Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, we have
the lead for concept development and experimentation for the
alliance and bringing forward with General Ralston
recommendations for the military committee.
Senator Warner. I want to move on to a couple other points.
I simply say that coalition warfare is the key to the future.
Not only does it bring our allies in to share the burdens, but
also here at home I think the perception of the American people
is we cannot go it alone always, time after time. So I would
hope that our allies study these initiatives by the Secretary
of Defense and yourselves and that they begin to generate
within their own structures a comparable transition program.
Andy Marshall is a very celebrated and loyal public servant
I think he dates back to my ancient days in the Department. I
am not sure. I seem to have a recollection he was there.
Hopefully, some of his concepts have survived all of the layers
of review and so forth. Anyone wish to comment on that? Mr.
Secretary?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I think he dates back to 1973,
Senator.
Senator Warner. I was there, yes.
Secretary Wolfowitz. I think he has had a very significant
influence on the Department in general and I think played a
major role in, going back a few years, getting people to
appreciate that the transformations that are possible in this
era really could have a revolutionary quality to them. That
phrase ``revolution in military affairs'' was in many ways
misunderstood, but--
Senator Warner. Very well, I will accept your reply.
Secretary Wolfowitz. I can tell you also that Secretary
Rumsfeld talks to him regularly and values his guidance very
much.
Senator Warner. Thank you.
General Kernan, how will the new unified command here in
the continental United States--CINCNORTH, I believe that is the
designation--how will that impact on your responsibilities?
Will there be a transfer of some of your responsibilities to
that command? Is it coming along smoothly? I am hopeful that
that command can soon be designated, up and operative.
I continue to be worried about homeland defense I say this
to you and each of the witnesses with deep respect. Our
American public expects every action necessary to help that
situation and strengthen it quickly.
General Kernan. Yes, Senator, the plans are coming along
very well. Both Joint Forces Command and NORAD collectively
have worked together to form an implementation plan. When
directed, we will put together the transition team to allow
that CINC-dom to start standing up. In the interim, we will
maintain the responsibility to do the land and maritime
security of the homeland and NORAD the aerospace piece. It will
be a seamless transition to NORTHCOM when they are ready to
accept the mission.
Senator Warner. Let me close out. How quickly, Mr.
Secretary, do you anticipate the President and-or Secretary
Rumsfeld or yourself will be announcing the details of that, so
we can move forward?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I would hope fairly soon, Senator.
Senator Warner. Has the location been decided yet?
Secretary Wolfowitz. That is also being studied.
Senator Warner. Thank you.
Lastly, Mr. Chairman, the famous phrase ``skip a
generation'' was often used by Secretary Rumsfeld and others
when we began this process a long time ago. As I look through
your documentation, I think probably the DD-21 program is an
example of how we made a tough decision in moving on to another
generation. Are there other examples in here? Perhaps, given
that my time is up, you can just enumerate one or two and put
in for the record the others that could qualify for this
concept of skipping a generation.
Secretary Wolfowitz. To be honest, Senator, that is a
harder concept to apply in practice than it is to
conceptualize. You are absolutely right, the DD-21 is an
example of that. It is the one that comes most to my mind. I
will see if for the record we can provide you with others.
[The information referred to follows:]
While ``skipping a generation'' describes transformation activity
in many ways, simply put, it is representative of significant change.
It suggests a technological inflection point at which we forego
incremental improvements to existing systems and capabilities in favor
of those investments that potentially redefine the context of our
competivitve advantage. Most recently, Global Positioning System (GPS)
capabilities are representative of such a redefinition. Historically,
there are many other examples--the change from wind driven to steam
powered ships, naval aviation, the tank, the helicopter, submarine-
launched ballistic missiles, and night vision devices are just a few.
As a consequence of the change that it brings, ``skipping a
generation'' most importantly suggests an alteration in how we think,
from the policy level through the tactical. While accepting
modernization, it suggests that future forces are not necessarily a
linear extension of current capabilities that potentially ``skip a
generation'' include high-speed wavepiercing catamarans for both
strategic and intra-theater lift, underwater unmanned vehicles for mine
clearing operations, unmanned aerial vehicles for long-range precision
strike, and space-based sensors for persistent surveillance of the
battlespace.
Senator Warner. Well, we skipped back on the cavalry one
and I am all in favor of that. I think that is----
Chairman Levin. That is called skipping back a generation.
Senator Warner. Well, that is what I said. It is my phrase.
Do not steal it.
Secretary Wolfowitz. That is an interesting notion. We will
explore it.
Chairman Levin. Senator Warner said: That is called
skipping back a generation.
Senator Warner. That is right.
Secretary Wolfowitz. It worked.
Senator Warner. It worked.
Thank you.
Chairman Levin. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Thanks to the witnesses. I apologize for being so late. It
is one of those mornings that I had other commitments that kept
me from being here. But I am very interested in this subject. I
thank you for all you are doing to move us forward.
As I said to General Kernan a while ago, I feel as if
people in the Pentagon are really getting with the
transformation idea, but it is hard to bring it all together
and do everything else that all of you are being asked to do.
Senator Santorum and I saw this recently in our Airland
Subcommittee as we focused in on the Army and the difficulty
with the amount of money that they are being given, which has
been increased significantly in this year's proposed budget to
both maintain the legacy force, get to the interim force,
provide for an interim force, and then get to the objective
force.
It requires a lot of very tough decision-making all around
to make sure the transformation that I think we all want occurs
both as rapidly as possible and as jointly as possible.
Just a few questions. General Pace, I recall a few years
ago that Secretary Cohen and General Shelton talked about the
importance of having the JROC get involved in making decisions
about programs up front before the services made their
decisions as a way of making sure that transformation was being
expressed in the program decisions that were being made and
that there was a unity of purpose and that we were not
overlapping and wasting resources. I wonder if you could give
us a sense of the work of the JROC in that regard.
General Pace. Senator, I think my predecessors in the JROC
have in fact gotten the process to the point where now before a
major weapons system or a major concept is funded, it gets the
JROC stamp of approval on its forehead. But as I said in my
written statement, we are because of that currently in the
``grading somebody else's homework mode'' as opposed to being
proactive in our own right.
What we need to do in the JROC is take the defense planning
guidance that the Secretary puts out, seize on those two or
three or four major concepts, and drive the train for bringing
those concepts to fruition, taking a look at what capability we
want to deliver on the foreign battlefield, in what time line,
what are we capable of doing today, and where there is a gap,
filling that gap, either through asking a service to experiment
at the service level or Joint Forces Command to experiment at
the Joint Forces Command or, if there is a technology fix
already in place, getting a service to in fact take that on.
So we are not doing the part we should be doing as well as
we should as far as being proactive, sir.
Senator Lieberman. That is my concern. Do you have the
intention to get the JROC in exactly the posture you have
described up front?
General Pace. I do, sir. Quite candidly, I took this job on
1 October. We have been a little bit busy.
Senator Lieberman. Sure.
General Pace. I have since been through JROC 101 and JROC
102 in the last 6 months, and I am dangerous now. But in the
last month and a half we have gone through all 84 of the
products and processes that the JROC is currently concerned
with, and we have looked at each one to determine if we should
still be doing that. We have taken about one-third of those off
our plate because they are important, but not JROC business,
and we have cleared up space on our plate for the things that I
talked about, when the defense planning guidance comes out,
that we can take and drive, sir.
Senator Lieberman. Admiral Cebrowski, I want to give you a
chance to speak a little bit. I have benefited a lot from your
writing and thinking on all these issues. I know Secretary
Rumsfeld is fond of saying, and I agree with him, that
transformation is not just about new weapons, it is about new
ways of thinking and new ways of fighting.
I was heartened by your appointment. I wonder if you could
just talk for a little bit as to what you see as your priority
as the Secretary has defined it for you in your position.
Admiral Cebrowski. Thank you very much, Senator. What sits
at the top of my list is to assist the Department in moving
toward the information age. Moving from the industrial age to
the information age is the way to leverage the great power that
we have resident in America. Also it is in recognition of the
fact that the entire world is moving into the information age.
To the extent that we do not do it or do it poorly, we will be
at a decided disadvantage.
The next area of my thrust is to broaden the capabilities
base. To the extent that we focus very well on a few
capabilities and think in terms of depth or how much is enough,
we in fact aggravate our risk. Risk in this age is better
mitigated by addressing issues of breadth. So we need to
broaden the capabilities base, the technology base, as well as
our industrial base.
Senator Lieberman. Let me ask you this question about the
first two. Have you been given resources to carry out those two
very important missions, or are you an advocate within the
building?
Admiral Cebrowski. I am indeed an advocate, but I am also
meant to be a catalyst. I asked for enough money to run my
office and to catalyze experimentation and the development of
experimental articles or operational prototypes, because of my
conviction that change is most likely to be assisted if you can
put some real experimental articles in a person's hand, and
that is how you address the cultural issue.
I did not ask for a very large amount of money. As a matter
of fact, I turned it away because I would rather see myself
more as a venture capitalist, if you will. I do not want to
spend my time administering a budget. Yet I have been assured
that as ideas come forward the Comptroller will be responsive.
Senator Lieberman. Very good.
My time is up. Thank you all. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Levin. Senator Akaka.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I have just one question for General Kernan. I know that
your plate is full with the war that that we are waging now, as
well as transformation. I am particularly interested in
transformation, what is happening there. I know that in your
statement you have mentioned the need for integration and its
efforts between the local, State, and Federal Government
people, and you talked about the fusion of full intelligence
and information and the need for that.
In the process of transformation, how will the proposed
changes in the UCP, Unified Command Plan, impact the Joint
Forces Command in the process of transformation? For example,
do the proposed changes fortify the Joint Forces Command in the
execution of its mission to defend the homeland and provide
military support to civil authorities? That is my question,
with the civilian authorities and the civilians; how will the
proposed changes bring about this process of working with the
civilian authorities?
General Kernan. I do not envision any change in that at
all. What I do see is Joint Forces Command divesting its
responsibilities of land and maritime security to this new
command that will be called Northern Command. As far as I know,
there will be no changes to laws, no changes to the statutes
that will be affected whatsoever. Joint Forces Command will
still have the responsibility to provide trained and ready
forces for the homeland security and that would be, obviously,
under the command of Northern Command, who would have that
overarching responsibility for homeland defense.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I just
wanted to pick up for Senator Warner's question on the UCP.
Thank you.
Chairman Levin. Thank you very much, Senator Akaka.
Let me ask just one question because I think that probably
may make sense in terms of logic, but not reality. I just have
one question, Secretary Wolfowitz, for you. Section 1010 of our
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002
provided that $1.3 billion was authorized either for ballistic
missile R&D or for Department of Defense activities for
combatting terrorism and that these funds could be allocated
only by the President for either purpose.
Do you know if that allocation has been made?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I do not believe it has yet, Senator.
Chairman Levin. Would you find out if it has, because when
there is such an allocation, then of course the Secretary of
Defense would be required under that same section to submit to
our committee a report describing the allocation and the
Secretary's plan for the use by the Department of Defense of
funds that are made available pursuant to such allocation. So
if you could keep that in mind, to let us know whether that
allocation has been made or not.
Secretary Wolfowitz. Yes, thank you.
[The information referred to follows:]
Congress chose not to appropriate funds in a manner that would have
required the allocation contemplated by section 1010 of the National
Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002. Therefore, the
authorization has not been allocated.
Chairman Levin. That is the only question I have. Senator
Warner is all set.
Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Mr. Chairman, I think we should let this
panel have its liberty and go on to the next. I thank you. The
questions could go on all day. It is a great group which is
doing a wonderful job. I thank them and look forward to the
next occasion.
Chairman Levin. We thank you all for coming forward. We
thank you for your testimony. There will be some additional
questions for the record, along with a written statement from
Senator Thurmond. We will now move on to the second panel.
[The prepared statement of Senator Thurmond follows:]
Prepared Statement by Senator Strom Thurmond
Mr. Chairman, as we complete the hearing cycle on the President's
defense budget request for fiscal year 2003, it is appropriate that we
close this morning with a hearing on the policies and programs to
transform the Armed Forces. This transformation is the Department of
Defense's most important under taking of this young century. Its impact
on the Department will be equal to that of the 1948 restructuring of
the War Department into the Department of Defense and the Goldwater-
Nichols Act of the 1980s in regard to joint operations.
Although the transformation of our ``Cold War'' Armed Forces is
long overdue, it will not be done overnight. Rather, because of its
long term implications, it must be a deliberate process that fully
considers the ramifications on not only the Armed Services, but also on
the technologic base and industrial base. More important, the budget
must support it.
Mr. Chairman, last year's Quadrennial Review recommendations and
those of the various strategic reviews form a sound basis for the
transformation. These recommendations also created expectations that
the fiscal year 2003 budget would be a budget dedicated to the
transformation. Although the President's budget request provides
substantial seed money to initiate transformation, it is not the
radical budget many of us expected. I urge the committee to be more
proactive in funding the key transformation initiatives both in terms
of technology and weapons systems.
I want to welcome Secretary Wolfowitz, General Pace, and the other
distinguished panel members. I believe Chairman Levin has brought
together an outstanding group of experts on the issue of transformation
and I look forward to their testimony.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Wolfowitz. Thank you for your interest in the
subject.
[Pause.]
Chairman Levin. The committee will come back to order. We
welcome our second panel: Dr. Krepinevich and Dr. Thompson. I
have given brief introductions of both of you. Dr. Krepinevich,
why don't you begin.
STATEMENT OF ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, PH.D., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Dr. Krepinevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have prepared,
obviously, a written statement for the record and will
summarize my remarks.
Chairman Levin. Thank you for that and it will be made part
of the record.
Dr. Krepinevich. I would like to begin by complimenting the
committee for focusing on this important issue, which at its
core concerns how well we are preparing our military to meet
the very different challenges that are now emerging or will
likely emerge to our security over the next decade or so. I
would also like to applaud Secretary Rumsfeld's team, which has
provided us with a compelling answer to the question, why
should the world's best military transform itself?
As the administration has noted, our would-be adversaries
have an enormous incentive and, with rapidly diffusing
military-related technology, increasingly have the ability to
present us with very different kinds of threats than those we
encountered in recent years, whether it is the Gulf War or
operations as recent as Operation Allied Force. These emerging
challenges are set forth in the administration's QDR as
``critical operational goals for our military,'' which center
primarily around our ability to project power in the face of
anti-access and area denial threats and on our ability to
defend the American homeland.
In the interest of time, I will focus my summary on the
power projection issues, as the forces associated with them
dominate the administration's defense program. Anti-access is
simply the growing threat we face to our ability to access
forward bases for military operations, whether they are ports
or major airfields or air bases. We have seen this in recent
years in Operations Desert Fox and Allied Force, where
longstanding allies refused to allow us to conduct certain
operations out of their bases, thus significantly limiting our
military capability.
We have seen it in such places as Albania and Central Asia,
where we have been given access to bases, but where the bases
are so austere that our military forces have not been able to
really exploit them to realize their full capabilities.
But perhaps of greatest concern, with the proliferation of
ballistic and cruise missiles, is the fact that over time--and
it is occurring in places like Korea already--increasingly
these major ports, these major air bases, where we deploy our
forces to and sustain them from are going to be put in the
crosshairs of enemy missile forces. So if there is an Omaha
Beach or an Anzio of the 21st century, it will likely occur not
at beachheads, but at major ports and air bases.
As Secretary Wolfowitz recently testified, ``U.S. forces
depend on vulnerable foreign bases to operate, creating
incentives for adversaries to develop access denial
capabilities to keep us out of their neighborhoods.'' We must
therefore reduce our dependence on predictable and vulnerable
base structure by exploiting a number of technologies that
include longer-range aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles,
stealthy platforms, as well as reducing the amount of
logistical support needed by our ground forces.
The QDR adds to this in saying that these joint forces must
not only be capable of conducting distributed and dispersed
operations, the network-centric warfare that Admiral Cebrowski
talked about, but also able to force entry in anti-access or
area denial environments. They must have the ability to arrive
quickly at non-traditional points of debarkation.
Linked to this anti-access threat is the so-called area
denial threat. Basically what that speaks to is the fact that
the mission of our maritime forces will increasingly be
centered on the littoral, on seizing control of the green
waters near the shore, in terms of being able to support the
projection of forces ashore and their sustainment. As the anti-
access threat matures, we are going to need maritime forces to
provide early fire support and, quite frankly, fire support
over the period of the campaign, but also to quickly open up
the littoral for the sustainment through resupply of forces
based on land.
Admiral Johnson, once the Chief of Naval Operations, and
perhaps the first to see this threat, said: ``Over the past 10
years it has become evident that proliferating weapon and
information technologies will enable our foes to attack the
ports and airfields needed for the forward deployment of our
land-based forces. I anticipate that the next century will see
those foes striving to target concentrations of troops and
material ashore and attack our forces at sea and in the air.''
This is more than a sea denial threat or a Navy problem. It
is an area denial threat, whose defeat or negation will become
the single most crucial element in projecting and sustaining
U.S. power where it is needed.
Again, as our maritime forces move closer to the littoral,
essentially they come more and more within range of an enemy's
military capabilities, whether it is diesel submarines
operating in the littoral, coastal combatants that can move
with high speed and have stealth, anti-ship mines, or anti-ship
cruise missiles. At the same time they are moving in, they also
get less and less warning time because that protective bubble
that we can put around the battle group begins to collapse as
some of the picket ships reach shore.
Now, given these challenges, which the administration I
think has quite correctly identified, as well as others, while
the administration has provided a compelling reason to
transform the military to address these critical challenges, it
has done less well in terms of establishing a process to effect
that transformation.
In fact, it is somewhat remarkable that, despite setting
forth six new critical operational challenges, of which I have
mentioned only two, the fiscal year 2003 defense program and
budget envisions essentially the same force structure and
modernization strategy as provided for in the Clinton
administration's defense program. A key reason for this, it
seems to me, is the lack of a plausible point of departure
concept of how the military plans to meet these operational
goals.
I am not talking about a vision here like rapid, decisive
operations or network-centric warfare. I am talking about the
warfighter sitting down and saying: The commander in chief has
given us a new challenge to deal with; what is our best initial
guess about how we are going to deal with that challenge, how
we are going to defeat it?
For example, how do we plan to project power rapidly and
decisively if we have no access to forward operating bases? How
do we plan to quickly establish sea control of the littoral
against an area denial force? The missing link it seems to me
between identifying these threats and the defense program that
you are asked to pass judgment on is how do we plan to use
these tools, these new systems, these force structures, and so
on, to achieve these ends, defeating an anti-access, area
denial threat?
The missing link is the how, how are we going to do this.
This is essential not just for you, it is essential for the
officer corps. It is essential for the military so they
understand, at least as a point of departure, how they are
expected to accomplish this mission.
One of the problems institutionally, by the way, that you
run into when you begin to face this issue of a new concept of
operations is you begin to create winners and losers. Certain
capabilities, systems, and elements of the force structure
begin to look better and better. Certain systems, capabilities,
and elements of the force structure begin to look less and less
attractive.
Not only do we need these kinds of point of departure
concepts in operation, we need to refine them in war games and
in simulations. But ultimately we need a way of determining
whether these warfighting concepts can work in practice. That
is where service exercises and joint field exercises come into
plan. That is our high fidelity, good feedback laboratory for
determining whether we are on track with respect to
transformation.
Despite the QDR's declaration that such experiments and
such exercises are ``critical'' to validating the new war
concepts, the fact of the matter is that a joint national
training center, which was envisioned by the National Defense
Panel on which I served, is not established. There is no
provision made for a joint opposing force, despite the fact
that our services swear up and down about the value of such a
force, whether it is at Red Flag or at Top Gun or at the
National Training Center (NTC). There is no significant
increase in JFCOM's budget for exercises and experiments, and
in fact the tempo of these experiments and exercises remains
unchanged from that established under the previous
administration.
I would note parenthetically that the Israelis, who seem to
be a little bit stretched at the present, given the
circumstances in the Middle East, are greatly expanding upon
their urban warfare training center. It is something that the
National Defense Panel recommended. It is something that we
ought to seriously consider.
Again, once you begin to conduct these kinds of exercises,
especially in a joint environment where the services are forced
to compete with one another, once again you create the
opportunity for winners and losers, and that is a often times
difficult bureaucratic step to take.
I would argue that we need to do this before locking into
large-scale production runs of new weapons systems. In a sense,
if we fail to do that we are putting the procurement cost
before the strategy horse. We are filling up the CINC's tool
box without really having an understanding of how we are going
to do the job before us, dealing with these six critical
operational challenges.
To put it in a perspective that people in DC can
understand, it is akin to drafting players for a football team
without having scouted them and without knowing what kind of
offense or defensive schemes are going to be employed by the
coach.
Having said this, there are several systems now in the
defense program that seem such a poor fit and the alternatives
so promising that the Department of Defense should, to quote
President Bush, ``seize the opportunity to skip a generation in
weapons systems.'' These systems include a version of the Joint
Strike Fighter, an element of the restructured DDX program, and
the Crusader artillery system, again following the lead of
Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz and his outline in
previous testimony of the kinds of capabilities we ought to be
looking for.
I would argue that areas where we ought to consider
increased investment are accelerated development and fielding
of a range of UCAVs, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, not just
the current Air Force version, but an extended range version
that gets you around the problem of access to forward bases.
The systems that the Joint Strike Fighter, for example, is
anticipated to replace dropped only about 5 percent of the
ordnance in Afghanistan in this recent conflict. Over 70
percent was dropped by long-range bombers and another 25
percent by the maritime forces.
So not only an extended range version for the Air Force, a
maritime version, which this administration with the Navy has
initiated; and to take the Army's tactical UAV program and make
it a tactical UCAV program as well.
In terms of network-centric operations, these are really
the antidote to the anti-access area denial threat. That threat
basically focuses on key nodes that cannot move, ports and air
bases, or on large systems leading in early in the conflict.
The littoral combat ship that the Navy is now exploring--
and I think the CNO has a terrific idea here--that is a great
opportunity to experiment with network-centric warfare. Just as
destroyers used to screen the battle fleet, these ships can
screen the carrier battle groups and open up the littoral.
Secretary Wolfowitz mentioned UUVs which can be used to
help counter the mine threat. The Army's Objective Force, which
is really a network-centric operation, which right now is
underfunded at the expense of some other programs, I think is
another example of where network-centric operations can be
promoted.
In addition to what I mentioned in terms of range and
stealth, which Secretary Wolfowitz said was important, not only
should the administration proceed with converting the four
SSBNs that are coming out of service to SSGNs, but it should
also strongly consider reopening the B-2 production line, the
only immediate way we have of gaining long-range stealth in
terms of air strikes.
Support for Comanche, an extended range ATACMS. Army forces
can disperse the most. They also have great potential these
days to strike at extended ranges. Then perhaps one of the
orphans of this defense program will be a new means for
deployment and sustainment, which keep being emphasized by the
services in their war game, but which really are not
aggressively funded in this defense program, whether it is an
advanced technology transport, the high-speed vessels that
Admiral Cebrowski talked about--that is a good idea, and it
should be accelerated.
The Army recently put on the very back burner its future
transport rotor craft, which is key to its essential ability to
fight on a non-linear battlefield. General Jones recently
mentioned the possibility of resurrecting the mobile offshore
base, an idea of Admiral Owens, who is renowned for his
commitment to innovation and transformation.
In summary, I think we can say, to its credit, that this
administration has performed a great service in providing us
with a compelling set of reasons as to why we should transform
our military. Unfortunately, in terms of the process and in
terms of a program, I do not think we are quite there yet.
If the administration's diagnosis of these emerging threats
is correct and we fail to begin to transform our force, we risk
investing hundreds of billions of dollars in preparing our
military to fight yesterday's threats as opposed to tomorrow's.
Should that risk be realized, additional payments could be
exacted not only in terms of our national treasures, but also
in interests jeopardized and lives lost.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich follows:]
Prepared Statement by Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it is a great honor to
appear before you today to discuss the issue of military
transformation.
Today we face a challenge that is arguably unprecedented in the
Nation's history: transforming our Armed Forces into a very different
kind of military, while at the same time sustaining its ability to play
a very active role in supporting U.S. near-term efforts to defeat
terrorism and preserve global stability.
what is transformation?
Transformation can be thought of as innovation on a grand scale.
Transformation is undertaken by a military that believes major changes
are occurring in the character of conflict. Periods of military
transformation are typically associated with a revolution in military
affairs, or an RMA, in which a combination of technology, warfighting
concepts and organizational change combine to bring about a dramatic
leap in military effectiveness.
Militaries are motivated to transform most often because they
conclude either that very different operational challenges are arising
that will greatly reduce the effectiveness of existing forces, or
because they see an opportunity to develop new forms of operations
themselves that will yield great advantage in future military
competitions.
As important as it is to understand what transformation is, it is
just as important to understand what transformation is not.
Transformation is not a ``monopoly'' of the United
States military. The rise of anti-access/area-denial threats
and nontraditional forms of attack on our homeland, as well as
the prospect of counter-space operations and electronic strike,
are examples of emerging challenges to our military that did
not exist until relatively recently. In short, in the face of
U.S. military superiority, our existing and prospective
adversaries are adapting to present us with different kinds of
threats.
Transformation is not solely based on introducing new
technologies into the force. It also requires changes in the
way the force is employed through major changes in doctrine and
force structure.
Transformation is not about enhancing our efficiency
in existing warfighting operational concepts; rather, it is
about developing new warfighting concepts.
Transformation does not mean supplanting the entire
force with new systems and force structures. Today our
challenge is to identify what mix of existing and emerging
systems and capabilities is required to deal with the new
threat environment envisioned in our defense strategy, while
also exploiting our sources of greatest potential advantage.
why transform the world's best military?
The Bush administration, in its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR),
has articulated a persuasive case on the need to transform the U.S.
military. The heart of its argument is that the challenges and
opportunities that confront the U.S. military are quite different from
those they encountered during the Cold War and Operation Desert Storm,
or even during the 1990s, and that greater change is clearly on the
horizon. Consequently, merely improving upon today's capabilities will
not suffice to meet tomorrow's challenges. Moreover, the administration
argues that U.S. military also has the opportunity to make dramatic
qualitative improvements in its capabilities, regardless of the
threat's character. Finally, since the character of the threat is
changing, improvements in U.S. military capabilities must be linked to
addressing these changes.
The argument that the U.S. military needs to move beyond Cold War/
Operation Desert Storm era forms of conflict--and the two-major theater
war posture they spawned--to address new challenges to America's
security (and to exploit opportunities to improve its capabilities) is
outlined in the QDRs ``critical operational goals,'' which can be
summarized as:
Protecting critical bases of operation, at home and
abroad, and defeating CBRNE (chemical, biological,
radiological, nuclear, and high-explosive) weapons and their
delivery systems;
Prevailing in information warfare, both in offensive
and defensive operations;
Projecting and sustaining U.S. forces in an anti-
access/area-denial environment (A2/AD), and defeating A2/AD
threats;
Denying enemies sanctuary from U.S. attack;
Preserving the U.S. ability to operate effectively in
space; and
Leveraging information technologies and innovative
operational concepts to develop an interoperable, joint C\4\ISR
architecture.
What follows is a summary of what are, arguably, the two most
formidable emerging challenges to confront our military--homeland
defense and anti-access/area-denial.
homeland defense
An enduring source of competitive advantage for the United States
has been its geographic insularity. This has often enabled the United
States to devote the vast majority of its defense resources to
maintaining forces overseas in forward deployed positions, or to
organizing CONUS-based forces for expeditionary operations. However, in
recent years the global transportation network has made long-distance
travel increasingly routine. This, combined with the rapidly growing
access of small groups and even individuals to ever greater destructive
power, has eroded the value of America's geographic remoteness and
placed the U.S. homeland at much greater risk of significant attack,
either from hostile nonstate actors, or from states employing
nontraditional means of attack.
To be sure, the United States was, for much of the Cold War, under
the threat of a catastrophic attack from the nuclear forces of the
Soviet Union. However, a combination of faith in the U.S. nuclear
deterrent and realization that effective defense against large-scale
nuclear attack was not feasible led to a relatively modest effort on
active (e.g., ballistic missile defense) and passive (e.g., civil
defense) defenses. America now finds itself at risk of attack from a
range of enemies, both state and nonstate, as well as from an array of
new threats, to include the covert introduction of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and attacks on the national information
infrastructure. Moreover, the events of September 11 indicate that at
least some of these enemies cannot be deterred through traditional
means. The result is that now America must divert substantial resources
to the defense of the homeland. While in some respects this mission is
as old as the American Revolution itself, it is certainly new in both
its form and intensity. A national strategy for defending the homeland
has yet to be devised. Thus it is difficult to ascertain the role the
U.S. military will be asked to play, or to assess the Department of
Defense budget and program priorities with respect to Homeland Defense.
anti-access and area denial
Despite all the uncertainties the U.S. military must confront in
preparing for the future, two things seem certain. First, given the
United States current military dominance, the incentive is high for
would-be adversaries to present the American military with very
different challenges. Second, the diffusion of military technologies
and the rapid progression of military-related technologies will
increasingly offer such adversaries the means to achieve this goal.
This possibility is particularly true with respect to the
traditional form of U.S. power-projection operations. The United
States' ability to maintain stability in key regions around the globe
rests on its capacity to project power, rapidly and decisively, where
it is needed. However, the U.S. military's traditional method of
deploying and sustaining air and ground forces at or through major
ports and airfields is almost certain to be put at risk as a
consequence of major shifts in the geopolitical and military-technical
environment.
Unlike during the Cold War, it cannot be assumed that allies will
provide base access whenever it is needed. Instead ad hoc coalitions,
or ``coalitions of the willing,'' must be cobbled together depending on
the situation. For example, during Operation Desert Fox in 1998, both
Saudi Arabia and Turkey refused to allow U.S. air strikes on Iraq to
originate from bases on their soil. Similarly, in 1999, Greece,
America's long-term North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally,
refused to permit U.S. forces to operate from its bases during
Operation Allied Force. Most recently, the United States has found
unfettered forward base access difficult to come by in the war against
al Qaeda terrorist forces and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. States
in the region have, for the most part, either denied the U.S. military
access to bases, or placed severe restrictions on their use, especially
in the case of strike operations.
Nor can the U.S. military be confident that adequate basing
facilities will be available in any event. During the Cold War, the
United States developed modern base facilities to optimize the
military's ability to execute the strategy of containment of the Soviet
Union. Correspondingly, the U.S. military developed forces that became
dependent on these well-developed facilities in Western Europe and
Northeast Asia. But the Cold War is over, and the U.S. military has
confronted the harsh reality that basing facilities in many other parts
of the world--in places such as Somalia, Rwanda, Albania and
Afghanistan--are austere in the extreme compared to their Cold War era
counterparts. Indeed, the Army's current transformation efforts seem
driven, to a significant degree, by its recent inability to deploy
forces rapidly to the Albania-Kosovo border during the Balkan conflict.
Making matters worse, potential flash points, such as the Asian
Subcontinent, Spratly Islands and Taiwan Straits, lie in regions that
seem geographically bereft of even modest local basing facilities to
accommodate the U.S. military's short-range fighter aircraft and
medium/heavy ground forces.
Even more disconcerting is the growing proliferation of national
and commercial satellite services and missile technology. Increased
access to these satellite services will allow even regional rogue
states both to pre-target key fixed facilities and to monitor U.S.
deployments into forward bases. Unless one makes heroic assumptions
regarding advances in missile defense effectiveness, these facilities
can be held at risk through the employment of large numbers of
ballistic and cruise missiles. Senior U.S. military leaders have
already voiced strong concern over the ability to deal with such a
contingency. General Ronald Fogleman, when Air Force chief of staff,
observed that:
Saturation ballistic missile attacks against littoral forces,
ports, airfields, storage facilities, and staging areas could
make it extremely costly to project U.S. forces into a disputed
theater, much less carry out operations to defeat a well-armed
aggressor. Simply the threat of such enemy missile attacks
might deter U.S. and coalition partners from responding to
aggression in the first instance.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Bill Gertz, ``The Air Force and Missile Defense,'' Air Force
Magazine, February 1996, p. 72.
Admiral Jay Johnson, when chief of naval operations, expressed very
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similar concerns when he declared:
Over the past 10 years, it has become evident that
proliferating weapon and information technologies will enable
our foes to attack the ports and airfields needed for the
forward deployment of our land-based forces.
I anticipate that the next century will see those foes striving
to target concentrations of troops and materiel ashore and
attack our forces at sea and in the air. This is more than a
sea-denial threat or a Navy problem. It is an area-denial
threat whose defeat or negation will become the single most
crucial element in projecting and sustaining U.S. military
power where it is needed.\2\
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\2\ Admiral Jay Johnson, ``Anytime, Anywhere: A Navy for the 21st
Century,'' Proceedings, November 1997, p. 49.
Perhaps most revealing, however, are the comments of a retired
Indian brigadier general, who observed that future access to forward
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bases:
is by far the trickiest part of the American operational
problem. This is the proverbial ``Achilles heel.'' India needs
to study the vulnerabilities and create covert bodies to
develop plans and execute operations to degrade these
facilities in the run up to and after commencement of
hostilities. Scope exists for low cost options to significantly
reduce the combat potential of forces operating from these
facilities.\3\
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\3\ Brigadier V. K. Nair, War in the Gulf: Lessons for the Third
World (New Delhi, India: Lancer International, 1992), p. 230.
As Admiral Johnson observed, U.S. maritime forces will also
confront new challenges to their ability to project power. The Navy
will increasingly find itself operating in the littoral, for two
reasons. First, there are no navies that can challenge the U.S. fleet
on the high seas. Second, with forward bases coming under increased
risk of destruction from ballistic and cruise missile attack, the fleet
will have to move closer to shore to support efforts to defeat anti-
access forces and project power against other enemy forces ashore.
As this happens, the fleet will increasingly encounter so-called
area-denial forces in the form of sophisticated anti-ship mines,
coastal submarine flotillas, onshore high-speed anti-ship cruise
missiles and other enemy capabilities that may place the U.S. carrier-
centric fleet at significantly greater risk. In short, as the fleet
moves from Cold War era blue-water sea control to focus increasingly on
green-water littoral sea control, it will come within range of more and
more of the enemy's military capabilities. Making matters worse, the
screening elements that protect the carrier, the Navy's core strike
element, will begin to collapse back on the carrier as they encounter
the coastline.\4\ Thus, not only will maritime forces come within range
of more enemy systems, their warning time of attack will be reduced as
well. The diffusion of weapon systems, such as high-speed antiship
cruise missiles, will reduce warning time even further.\5\
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\4\ The anti-air warfare (AAW) and anti-submarine warfare (ASW)
ships that protect the carrier obviously cannot operate on land. As the
carrier maneuvers closer to shore in order to strike targets inland,
the protective ``bubble'' provided by these ships will begin to
collapse as they encounter the shoreline. It is important to note that
these escorts typically operate at great distances from the carrier
when in a warfighting environment. For the sake of example, if a
carrier were positioned in Washington, DC, anti-air escorts (such as
Aegis cruisers and destroyers) would be positioned as far away as
Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; and Norfolk, Virginia.
This example is taken from Admiral James D. Watkins, The Maritime
Strategy (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, January 1986), p.
13.
\5\ For a discussion of the area-denial threat, see VADM Arthur K.
Cebrowski and Captain Wayne P. Hughes (U.S.N, Ret.), ``Rebalancing the
Fleet,'' Proceedings, November 1999; and Captain Wayne P. Hughes
(U.S.N, Ret.), Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press, 2000), pp. 145-68.
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These concerns have not been lost on the Department of Defense
leadership. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld noted, ``[P]otential
adversaries . . . see that our ability to project force into the
distant corners of the world where they live depends, in some cases, on
vulnerable foreign bases.'' \6\ Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, in expanding on Secretary Rumsfeld's observation, stated
that:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Speech, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, The National
Defense University, Washington, DC, January 31, 2002.
U.S. forces depend on vulnerable foreign bases to operate--
creating incentives for adversaries to develop `access denial'
capabilities to keep us out of their neighborhoods. We must,
therefore, reduce our dependence on predictable and vulnerable
base structure, by exploiting a number of technologies that
include longer-range aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and
stealthy platforms, as well as reducing the amount of
logistical support needed by our ground forces.\7\
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\7\ Testimony, Paul D. Wolfowitz, House Budget Committee,
Washington, DC, February 12, 2002.
Their concerns are reflected in the QDR's critical operational
challenges, and also in the document's elaboration on the kinds of
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capabilities required to defeat the challenge:
These joint forces . . . must be lighter, more lethal and
maneuverable, survivable, and more readily deployed and
employed in and integrated fashion. They must be not only
capable of conducting distributed and dispersed operations, but
also able to force entry in anti-access or area-denial
environments.\8\
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\8\ Department of Defense, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review
(Washington, DC: DOD, September 2001), p. 32.
U.S. forces . . . must have the ability to arrive quickly at
non-traditional points of debarkation to mass fire against an
alerted enemy and to mask their own movements to deceive the
enemy and by pass its defenses.\9\
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\9\ Ibid., p. 43.
Thus would-be adversaries have strong incentives to adopt this
indirect approach to defeating, or deterring, U.S. power-projection
operations. The effort, as noted above, seems well under way. According
to a recent Defense Science Board (DSB) study, a regional power's
development of this kind of anti-access capability by 2010 is quite
plausible, even given relatively severe resource constraints.\10\ A
former commander in chief of U.S. forces in Korea declared that the
problem of forward base access is not a problem for the U.S. military
of 2010, but one has existed in embryonic form in Korea for much of the
1990s, and which will only worsen over time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ DSB, Final Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on
Globalization and Security (Washington, DC: Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, December 1999), p.
vi.
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Defeating the A2/AD threat promises to be a very challenging
proposition. States developing A2/AD forces are doing so in such as way
as to make them more difficult to target. To this end they are
emphasizing, or are likely to emphasize:
Mobility and dispersion (e.g., mobile launchers for
ballistic and cruise missiles);
Stealth (e.g., diesel submarines; low-observable
cruise missiles; mines);
Hardening of fixed targets (e.g., WMD production and
storage facilities; command centers; leadership facilities);
Deception (e.g., coastal combatants masquerading as
commercial vessels; terrorists posing as noncombatants);
``Hostages'' (e.g., positioning military forces in
noncombatant neighborhoods);
Geography (e.g., deploying forces far inland to stress
U.S. forces' range and targeting capabilities); and
Sanctuaries (e.g., neutral party space assets; the
threat of WMD attacks to create a national sanctuary;
positioning military forces in very close proximity to cultural
landmarks, hospitals, and related structures to create a local
sanctuary effect).
To the extent they must operate outside of the enemy's A2/AD
envelope, U.S. forces will find their reconnaissance, surveillance,
target acquisition (RSTA) timelines stretched, making destruction of
enemy critical mobile A2/AD targets an even more difficult proposition.
Indeed, a critical sub-competition of the A2/AD challenge involves
enemy efforts to stretch U.S. RSTA and engagement timelines versus U.S.
military attempts to compress its engagement cycle timelines. In
response, it appears we will have to place substantially greater
emphasis on long-range/long-dwell reconnaissance and strike
capabilities.
Of course, such timelines can be compressed, and the opportunities
for defeating the A2/AD threat enhanced, by U.S. forces operating
underneath the enemy's A2/AD umbrella. This will likely require forces
that can insert themselves in a distributed manner, and which can both
operate and sustain themselves in highly distributed, highly networked
manner. It also favors forces that further minimize their risk of
detection through various forms of stealth--to include signature
reduction; and cover, concealment and deception--as well as mobility.
In short, enemy asymmetric strategies--such as threatening
nontraditional attacks on the American homeland and anti-access/area-
denial--are designed to offset the U.S. military's dominance in
traditional forms of warfare. They also represent cost-imposing
strategies in that the U.S. military in general will likely incur
substantially greater costs to offset these asymmetric strategies than
America's enemies will incur to generate them.
needed: a transformation strategy
Transformation is not synonymous with a revolution in military
affairs. Rather, transformation is a process that a defense
establishment undertakes if it believes a military revolution is under
way, or is potentially under way. The Department of Defense therefore
needs a strategy for transformation. It is not a warfighting strategy
(although it would include a vision of what the transformed conflict
environment would be like). Rather, it is a strategy for large-scale
innovation, to include such major elements as changes in the personnel
management system, in the selection of senior leaders, in procurement
strategy, and in training--especially field exercises conducted at the
operational level of warfare.
A Vision of Future Warfare
While the Department of Defense rationale for transformation is
persuasive, its process for effecting transformation is more difficult
to discern and, hence, to evaluate. A transformation process is needed
to validate vision, to identify the best means for addressing critical
challenges, and to determine if opportunities can be realized (and how
soon, and to what degree). The process should enable feedback on
transformation initiatives (e.g., new operational concepts, doctrine,
systems, networks, force structures). This will enable senior Defense
leaders to gauge whether the transformation path being pursued is, in
fact, the correct path, or to make the appropriate adjustments if it is
not. Such a process can help inform choices about investments in future
capabilities--R&D, procurement, personnel and force structure--so as to
reduce uncertainty in a resource-constrained environment.
Regrettably, the current joint vision statement does not present
such a compelling vision. The Joint Chiefs of Staff's (JCS) vision, set
forth in Joint Vision 2010, and sustained in Joint Vision 2020, speaks
in general terms of the need to achieve positional advantage over an
adversary (``dominant maneuver''), engage the enemy effectively
(``precision engagement''), support such activities efficiently and
effectively (``focused logistics'') while protecting friendly forces
(``full-dimensional protection'').\11\ While these are desirable
qualities for the U.S. military to pursue, they offer little in the way
of guidance as to how its missions (i.e., the character of key military
competitions) might change over time (e.g., projecting power against an
A2/AD; defending against asymmetric attacks on the U.S. homeland).
Indeed, stripped of their adjectives, the characteristics of effective
``maneuver,'' ``engagement,'' ``logistics'' and ``protection'' would be
those desired by any military organization, in any era.
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\11\ JCS, Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: DOD, 2001), pp. 4-5,
13, 20-27. To be sure, Joint Vision 2020 notes the risks from changes
in the conflict environment brought about by adversaries pursuing
asymmetric strategies. The Joint Chiefs go on to say that such
strategies are ``perhaps the most serious danger the United States
faces,'' that asymmetric advantages may be pursued on any level of
warfare--strategic, operational or tactical--and that ``adversaries may
pursue a combination of asymmetries. . .'' The reader is further
instructed that ``asymmetric threats are dynamic and subject to change,
and the U.S. Armed Forces must maintain the capabilities necessary to
deter, defend against, and defeat any adversary who chooses such an
approach.'' Yet despite these general statements of concern there is
little in the way of detailed discussion as to what form (e.g., anti-
access, area denial) asymmetric threats might take.
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joint concepts of operation
The next step along the transformation path is to identify ``point-
of-departure'' concepts of operation that set forth, in significant
detail, how the services see themselves achieving critical operational
goals, to include their role as part of a Joint team. As Secretary
Rumsfeld rightly noted, ``Exploiting the revolution in military affairs
requires not only technological innovation but also development of
operational concepts. . .''
Why are such concepts of operation so important? Point-of-departure
concepts of operation describe the military's hypothesis regarding how
it intends to meet critical operational goals or exploit potential
opportunities.
Although each critical operational goal requires a concept of
operations, there are two in particular that merit attention, as the
others are subsumed in them. The first is how we intend to defend our
homeland from attack from ballistic and cruise missiles, the covert
introduction of WMD, electronic attack on the information
infrastructure, and terrorist attack.
The second concerns how the U.S. military is going to project power
against the (A2/AD) threat, and how power-projection operations will
deny an enemy sanctuary. These critical goals are interrelated, and are
also related to the other critical goals pertaining to information
operations, space control, and creating C\4\ISR architectures.
At present, there is no point-of-departure joint operational
warfighting concept for meeting these goals, either collectively (i.e.,
a grand integrated operational concept) or individually (e.g., an
operational concept for defeating the A2/AD challenge). To be sure, the
individual services have developed operational concepts (e.g., Global
Strike Task Force; Assured Access) that purport to address how they
would meet a single critical challenge (principally A2/AD). However,
they are rudimentary at best.
Absent plausible concepts of operation oriented on the critical
operational challenges, it is natural (indeed, perhaps inevitable) that
the services will gravitate toward existing doctrine and view
transformation essentially improving current methods of conducting
operations.
Thus until the U.S. military devises a plausible joint operational
concept (or, more precisely, concepts) for dealing with the critical
emerging challenges, it seems very likely that transformation will be
retarded. Moreover, absent such warfighting concepts and a process for
validating them, it will likely prove difficult, if not impossible, to
obtain a reasonably accurate measure of how the transformation process
is unfolding.\12\
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\12\ Note that concepts like ``rapid decisive operations'' (RDO)
and ``effects-based operations'' (EBO) do not, by themselves, inform us
in any significant detail as to how the six critical goals are to be
addressed. They might be more accurately described as visions, rather
than operational concepts.
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In short, to determine whether or not a new (or prospective)
capability is ``transformational,'' (and whether a ``legacy''
capability should be preserved, and at what level), you have to have
some sense of how you are going to address the critical operational
goals laid down in the QDR. Since such concepts have either not been
formulated, or are severely flawed, it is difficult to assess the
relative merit of DOD budget or investment priorities.
Leader Tenure
By its nature, dramatic change in large military organizations
almost inevitably involves a long-term process that spans a decade or
more. However, the U.S. military's institutional practices typically
find senior leaders rotated out of their assignments every 3 or 4
years. This rotation cycle may work well for leaders whose
responsibilities are near-term oriented (for example, the regional CINC
who is responsible for the immediate warfighting mission in his area of
operation). However, it is much less desirable in situations where a
senior leader is tasked with the mission of effecting transformation.
Recent history shows that military organizations that have
successfully transformed have almost always had a few key senior
leaders--who both understood the new vision of the future conflict
environment, and how to bring about change in large, complex military
organizations--serve an extended tour of duty. This tour often runs
double or even triple the length of a typical flag (i.e., general or
admiral) officer tour in today's U.S. military. During the German
army's transformation to blitzkrieg, for example, the head of its
shadow general staff, General Hans von Seeckt, served 7 years in that
position. The American Navy's exploitation of naval aviation was
shepherded by Vice Admiral William Moffett, who remained head of the
Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics for 12 consecutive years. The absence of
extended tours of service for transformation-minded senior U.S.
military leaders serving in key positions should give pause to those
who are concerned about the U.S. military's prospects for
transformation.
A New Modernization Strategy
Military revolutions complicate modernization strategies in that
they typically find the effectiveness of certain military systems in
rapid decline. The displacement of the battleship by the aircraft
carrier is but one example. However, it is far from clear in advance
which military systems, operational concepts, or new force structures
will work, and which will not. Put another way, not only does a
transformation strategy need to be initiated well in advance of the
actual fielding of the transformed force, it also must take into
account military-technical uncertainty. How might our modernization
strategy account for this?
For a start, the services will have to tap into rapidly advancing
technologies to develop new military systems that can be applied within
the framework of new operational concepts executed by new kinds of
military organizations. It is this combination of technology, emerging
military systems, new operational concepts and force restructuring that
often produces the discontinuous leap in military effectiveness
characteristic of military revolutions.
Given the above discussion, one would expect to see the DOD accord
greater emphasis on R&D efforts in support of ``wildcatting''--
experimenting with a limited (but operationally significant) number of
a wide variety of military systems, as well as operational concepts,
and force structures. The goal here is to identify those that are
capable of solving emerging strategic and operational problems, or
exploiting opportunities, while eliminating those that are not.
This reveals a second element of a successful modernization
strategy for transformation: to avoid being ``locked in.'' Lock-in
occurs when limited resources are spent to purchase a system in large
numbers. The result both narrows the range of options (as fewer types
of systems are procured) for dealing with emerging challenges, and
risks locking the force into the current state of technological
advancement. Resources that could have supported exploring a wider
range of systems and sustaining continued advances in technology are,
instead, locked into the existing force.
As noted above, the end result may be a happy one--if the U.S.
military ``guesses right'' (i.e., if the fielded force serendipitously
turns out to be the ``right'' force to meet the post-transformation
challenges), and if the rate of technological advance slows. If not,
the Department of Defense risks having committed itself to a single-
point solution in a very uncertain world. It will have either bought
the wrong systems, or the ``right'' systems prematurely--before the
rapidly advancing technologies that enable them have matured.
The U.S. Navy understood this well in the 1920s and 1930s, during
the transformation from a battle fleet centered around battleships to
one focused on fast carrier task forces. Early on it was unclear
whether naval aviation would be optimized by spreading it throughout
the fleet (e.g., having a few aircraft on every surface combatant), or
concentrated on aircraft carriers. Moreover, it was also unclear what
kind of carrier would be optimal. Consequently, the Navy created
options for itself by wildcatting. It invested in four different
classes of carriers, but only produced six carriers in all. It also
experimented with aircraft on carriers and on surface ships, and even
tried working with air ships.
Not only has wildcatting been an effective element of a
modernization transformation strategy within the services, but
increasingly among them as well. Thus the Army, Navy and Air Force each
had ballistic missile programs in the 1950s. The Air Force program led,
ultimately, to the Minuteman ICBM, a key element of the U.S. nuclear
strike mission force. The Army program was instrumental in the birth of
the space program (its Jupiter rocket was used in the Redstone
program), and the Navy program led to the Polaris submarine and the
nuclear ballistic missile submarine force, a cornerstone of U.S.
nuclear deterrence.
The end result of each of these wildcatting efforts was the
creation of strategic ``options'' on a range of military capabilities.
These options could be used both to dissuade prospective adversaries
from resuming a high level of military competition and, in the event
dissuasion or deterrence failed, exercising those options to prevail in
the conflict itself. It is important to note that creating such options
need not involve a defense budget ``train wreck.'' Recall that the U.S.
military developed the foundation for strategic aerial bombardment, the
carrier navy, modern amphibious warfare, and mechanized air-land
operations during the relatively lean budget years of the 1920s and
1930s. What it does imply, however, is visionary leaders, and a
different set of strategic--and budget--priorities.
Unfortunately, the Department of Defense modernization strategy
today remains much the same as it was during the Cold War era, with its
emphasis on large-scale, serial production of relatively few types of
military systems and capabilities. To the extent possible, we should
avoid premature large-scale production of new systems, be they legacy
or transformational, until they have clearly proven themselves helpful
in meeting critical operational goals. With respect to systems that are
characterized as transformational, it is important to avoid the
pitfalls of ``false starts'' and ``dead ends.''
False Starts. In periods of transformation, military organizations
run the risk avoid buying large quantities of a promising system too
early, and the U.S. military is no exception. The risk of committing to
a ``false start'' is demonstrated in the U.S. Navy's affection for its
first carrier designed from the keel up, the Ranger, which was
commissioned in 1934. Although some Navy leaders had pressed for
construction of 5 Ranger-class carriers, wargame analysis and fleet
problems soon indicated that, at roughly 14,000 tons, the Ranger was
far too small to meet many of the demands of future fleet operations.
As it turned out, the Essex-class carriers that formed the backbone of
the Navy's fast carrier task forces in World War II each displaced
nearly twice as much tonnage as the Ranger.
Dead Ends. Military systems or capabilities that appear promising,
or even revolutionary, sometimes fail to live up to expectations. In
this case, the challenge of those leading the transformation effort is
not to avoid buying them too early; rather, it is to avoid buying them
at all. The experience of the U.S. Navy during the development of naval
aviation in the interwar period again provides an example of how
rigorous experimentation and field exercises can help avoid dead ends.
In 1930 the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics proposed the construction of
eight 10,000-ton flying-deck (or flight-deck) cruisers. The ships--half
cruiser and half flight deck--were subjected to war game analysis at
the Naval War College and some experiments employing surrogates in the
fleet. Both painted a distinctly unfavorable picture of the hybrid
ship, and it quickly sank beneath the Navy's programmatic waves.
The Key Role of Field Exercises and Experimentation
Field exercises are especially beneficial during periods of high
uncertainty and rapid change, such as confronts us today. Military
field exercises that incorporate experimentation can play an important
role in reducing the uncertainty about the future conflict environment
and those capabilities, force elements and operational concepts that
will dominate that environment. In so doing, field exercises better
inform modernization strategies for transformation, such as the one
described above, thereby enhancing their ability to employ limited
resources more effectively. The QDR (quite correctly) declares, ``Field
exercises that incorporate experimentation--at both the joint and the
service levels--provide an indispensable means for solving emerging
challenges.'' Moreover, it states, ``Exercises and experiments are a
critical phase in developing new types of forces and operational
concepts that can respond to emerging operational challenges and
dominate opponents who effectively exploit aspects of the changing
security environment.''
The ultimate expression of such efforts will likely be the conduct
of service and joint exercises at the operational level of warfare.
This is because joint operations (i.e., operations involving two or
more of the military services) will almost certainly dominate future
military operations, and because the operational level of war is the
level at which military campaigns are conducted.\13\ Such exercises
offer the best opportunity to obtain high-fidelity feedback on the
likely value of new force designs, capabilities and operational
concepts.
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\13\ The Joint Chiefs of Staff have gone so far as to declare ``The
joint force, because of its flexibility and responsiveness, will remain
the key to operational success in the future. . . To build the most
effective force for 2020, we must be fully joint: Intellectually,
operationally, organizationally, doctrinally, and technically.'' JCS,
Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: DOD, 2001), p. 2.
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During the latter stages of the Cold War, the services invested in
a number of high-fidelity training facilities that greatly enhanced the
value of their field training. For example, the Army's National
Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, prepared brigade-size
units for combined arms mechanized warfare against a Soviet-style
adversary. Similarly, the Air Force and Navy put their pilots through
Red Flag and Top Gun air combat training, respectively.
In terms of a process for enabling transformation, the Department
has provided a great deal of verbal support for joint and service field
exercises and experimentation. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated,
``All the high-tech weapons in the world won't transform our Armed
Forces, unless we also transform the way we think, train, exercise and
fight.''
The QDR also notes ``the services invested in a number of high-
fidelity training facilities that greatly enhance the value of their
field training. Yet comparable facilities do not exist to support joint
high-fidelity field exercises and experiments.'' Moreover, ``joint and
service field exercises oriented on military transformation have
suffered from chronic resource shortages.''
However, despite these numerous statements attesting to the value
and importance of field exercises and experimentation to the
transformation process, and pledges to pursue (indeed, expand upon)
these activities aggressively, the fiscal year 2003 defense program and
budget submitted to Congress provide for no significant change from the
Clinton administration's policies, programs and funding levels.
Specifically:
A Joint National Training Center is not established;
nor is a joint opposing force;
Joint Forces Command has not had its exercise budget
increased significantly over the FYDP; and
The pace of joint exercises/experiments remains as
established by the previous administration.
Required Military Capabilities
To meet this critical operational goals, we will need to transform
our military into a fighting force that, relative to today's force--and
to the force that is currently envisioned in the QDR modernization
program--places substantially greater emphasis on the following
characteristics:
Mobility
Stealth (in all its forms, to include undersea forces)
Electronic protection
Highly dispersed, electronically networked combat
forces and supporting elements (e.g., logistics)
Highly distributed insertion through nontraditional
air and sea points of debarkation
Extended-range systems and strikes
Precision, electronic, and nonlethal forms of strike
Unmanned/automated systems
Compressed operational cycle rates
Transformation and DOD's Investment Portfolio: Skipping a Generation
During his candidacy for president, President Bush attracted a
great deal of attention when he declared that the United States should:
modernize some existing weapon systems and equipment necessary
for current tasks. But our relative peace allows us to do this
selectively. The real goal is to move beyond marginal
improvements--to replace existing programs with new
technologies and strategies: to skip a generation of technology
. . . I intend to force new thinking and hard choices.\14\
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\14\ George W. Bush, Speech on Defense Policy, The Citadel,
Charleston, SC, September 23, 1999.
The president's call to skip a generation of weapon systems in
order to both better prepare for newly emerging challenges to the
national security, and to exploit the potential of rapidly advancing
military-related technologies is consistent with a modernization
strategy during a period of military transformation.
Given this framework, what systems stand out as prime candidates
for ``skipping a generation? '' What ``leap-ahead'' systems or
capabilities are sufficiently attractive as to warrant such a move?
Finally, how might the administration hedge against the possibility
that in pursuing a leap-ahead capability, it may discover that the
alternative system or capability, however promising it may appear
today, cannot be realized in anticipated the time frame, or perhaps not
at all ? The following discussion presents three candidates for
``skipping'' a generation, and responds to the questions raised above.
The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) (conventional take-off and land (CTOL),
or Air Force, version) \15\
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\15\ With the awarding of the JSF contract, the aircraft has been
designated the F-35.
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The administration has decided to move ahead with the JSF program
established under the Clinton administration. The current plan is to
procure a total of 2,852 of these tactical fighters for the Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps, of which 1,763 would be Air Force CTOL fighters.
To be sure, the JSF represents a significant improvement over each
service's existing tactical aircraft. However, the buy of the JSF CTOL
version assumes the U.S. military will continue to enjoy unimpeded
access to forward air bases for the indefinite future. Yet, as both
senior defense civil and military leaders have stated, such access is
already problematic, and will likely worsen over time. Indeed,
developing new capabilities to defeat the anti-access/area-denial
threat is considered a critical operational goal.
Leap-Ahead System: Extended-range Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles,
or UCAVs. The role of unmanned systems has increased in recent U.S.
contingency operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Unmanned systems
are also engaged in supporting U.S. air patrols in Iraq (i.e.,
Operations Northern and Southern Watch). In Afghanistan the CIA
employed armed Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Hellfire
missiles. In effect, this made the Predator, which had been designed to
perform a reconnaissance mission, a UCAV.\16\ The Air Force has in
development a UCAV whose principal mission will be the suppression of
enemy air defenses (``SEAD''). The Navy has initiated a UCAV program of
its own.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ Building on the CIA's success, in the just-submitted fiscal
year 2003 budget, the Air Force proposes to procure 22 Predators
configured to carry Hellfire missiles.
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The opportunity exists to move much more aggressively in developing
a range of UCAVs. Since UCAVs are remotely piloted, they can utilize
the weight and space that would normally support the pilot for other
purposes, such as to increase range or payload. They might also be
designed to permit their launch and recovery from relatively austere
landing strips. A combination of extended-range (and perhaps stealthy)
Air Force UCAVs, sea-based Navy UCAVs, and distributed, land-based
``tactical'' UCAVs (for the Army and Marine Corps) would provide future
commanders with a range of options for addressing the A2/AD challenge.
Because they do not require pilots--or flight hours for pilot training
and extensive ground maintenance--UCAVs also promise to reduce
substantially manpower requirements, and operations and maintenance
costs. Finally, UCAVs are also projected to cost between one-third and
one-half the price of comparable manned combat aircraft.
Major Unknown Planning Factors: How many manned aircraft missions
can be accomplished effectively by UCAVs, and how soon? While UCAVs
have great promise, it is far from clear how many missions they can
assume from the manned combat air arm, or how quickly they can be made
to do so. It seems clear that UCAVs can almost certainly function as
``reusable Tomahawks''; i.e., they can fly to a fixed target, drop a
precision-guided munition (PGM), and return to base. As the Air Force
program indicates, UCAVs also show promise in performing the
suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) mission. Another promising
mission for UCAVs is the one they performed in Afghanistan: exploiting
their relatively long loiter time to play an important role in the
destruction of critical mobile targets (e.g., mobile missile launchers,
terrorists).
Hedge: The JSF is viewed primarily as an efficient deliverer of
precision munitions. But the U.S. military has many options for
delivering ordnance on targets over significant distances. The
Department of Defense can avoid locking in to a large JSF buy while
also hedging against a slower-than-anticipated development of UCAVs
with the following capabilities:
Reopening the B-2 production line to enable the Air
Force to redress the imbalance between its short- and long-
range manned strike platforms;
Increasing substantially the number of PGMs carried in
the long-range bomber fleet through accelerating programs
focused on small, smart munitions;
Accelerating Army deep-strike capabilities (e.g.,
Comanche, ATACMS Block IIA, in addition to a tactical UCAV) to
provide more survivable forward operating forces; and
Continuing ``bridge'' production of F-16 Block 60s
(Air Force) to address near-term tactical air fleet aging
issues (e.g., increased maintenance requirements).
Current Status: The new defense program essentially ratifies the
Clinton administration's position to proceed with developing the JSF
and purchasing 1,763 of the CTOL version for the Air Force.
The DD-21 Land-Attack Destroyer
The DD-21 Land-Attack Destroyer, with its large number of vertical
launch systems (VLS), represented the navy's effort to enhance its
capabilities to support the battle ashore. With the Soviet navy gone
(and the ``blue-water'' threat with it), the Navy has rightly shifted
its emphasis from open-ocean blue waters to littoral ``green'' waters.
As it does, the Navy will encounter a very different threat
environment. As noted above, the Department of Defense considers this
area-denial threat, in combination with the anti-access threat, a
critical operational challenge.
In this environment, the DD-21s, whose size seemed likely to
approach that of the first modern battleship (HMS Dreadnought), might
have been so few in number (32 were planned) and so costly to replace
that we would have been increasingly reluctant to deploy them into the
littoral until friendly sea control had been established.\17\ This made
the DD-21 a poor fit for a defense strategy that calls on the military
to ``deter forward'' and, in the event deterrence fails, be ``capable
of swiftly defeating attacks . . . from a forward deterrent posture.''
\18\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\17\ HMS Dreadnought displaced 17,900 tons. The DD-21 was projected
to displace roughly 12-14,000 tons.
\18\ QDR, pp. 20-21.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Skip a Generation Objective: The streetfighter concept employing
network centric warfare. The concept asserts that advanced information
technologies are an asymmetric U.S. advantage that can enable highly
integrated, yet highly distributed, maritime operations. An effort
should be made to explore the potential of squadrons of much smaller,
faster, stealthier and less expensive surface combatants. These
combatants could be more effective in supporting the campaign to seize
control of the littoral and strike targets ashore. Owing to their
substantially greater numbers and lower cost relative to the DD-21,
such combatants could be employed both earlier and more aggressively in
the littoral at far lower risk.\19\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\19\ For an overview of the network centric warfare and
streetfighter concepts, see Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal
Combat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), pp. 145-67; and
Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr.,
U.S.N (Ret.). ``Rebalancing the Fleet,'' U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings (November 1999). For a thoughtful opposing view of the
littoral area-denial challenge, see Arthur H. Barber III and Delwyn L.
Gilmore, ``Maritime Access: Do Defenders Hold All The Cards?,'' Defense
Horizons, October 2001.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major Unknown Planning Factors: Is it possible for information
technologies to create a ``distributed'' capital ship, and, if so, how
soon? The idea of violating the principal of mass to gain the advantage
of reduced vulnerability, while at the same time avoiding the penalty
of reduced military effectiveness brought on by dispersion, is
undeniably attractive. However, although the concept has been
percolating for a number of years, and has shown promise in some
wargames, the Department of Defense has yet to produce small combatant
prototypes that could be used to determine the potential of such a
force. Introducing a squadron of such ships into the Navy's Fleet
Battle Experiment (FBE) program could substantially increase DOD's
understanding of the Streetfighter Concept and its viability for future
maritime operations.
Hedge: As with the JSF, the DD-21 was viewed principally a strike
platform. As noted, the U.S. military has many different ways to
conduct strike operations. Two readily available near-term maritime
force hedges are:
Converting the four SSBNs coming out of the nuclear
deterrent force to SSGNs; and
Increasing the quantity of PGMs to support existing
surface combatant VLS tubes.
The Bush administration's defense program exploits both options.
Other strike hedges that should be pursued include those mentioned with
respect to the JSF (i.e., Army deep-strike assets; increasing the PGMs
aboard the bomber force; reopening the B-2 line, etc.).
Current Status: In November 2001 the Navy restructured the DD-21
program. In lieu of proceeding with the single DD-21 class of
destroyers, the Navy has decided to develop a ``family of advanced
technology surface combatants,'' comprising a land-attack destroyer
(DD-X), a guided-missile cruiser (CG-X), and a Littoral Combat Ship
(LCS). It is far from clear, however, that this restructuring
represents an effort to skip a generation in weapons development.
Indeed, under the Surface Combatant-21 (SC-21) program, undertaken in
1995, the Navy planned to build both a land-attack destroyer and a
cruiser variant. One potentially significant difference is the plan to
build a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), whose description generally
conforms to the streetfighter concept. At present, however, it remains
unclear how vigorously the Navy intends to pursue the LCS program, or
the role it envisions such combatants playing in addressing the anti-
access/area-denial challenge.
The Crusader Artillery System
The Crusader artillery system represents a major advance in
capabilities over the Army's current Paladin artillery system. As with
the Joint Strike Fighter and Land-Attack Destroyer, however, the issue
is not whether Crusader represents a major improvement over similar
systems currently in the U.S. military's inventory. Rather, it is
whether opportunities exist to field a significantly different kind of
capability that is more relevant for the new critical operational
challenges the Bush administration sees confronting the U.S. military.
Today's Army finds itself challenged to become more of a rapidly
deployable expeditionary force. Over the last decade the Army has had
to deploy forces rapidly to areas where the service had little in the
way of forward-deployed forces, such as in Africa, the Balkans and the
Persian Gulf. This has posed problems for the Army, as its heavy units
require enormous amounts of airlift to deploy quickly, in addition to
well-developed bases at their point of debarkation. Unfortunately,
strategic airlift is very costly and thus, hard to come by. It also is
in great demand by the Air Force. Moreover, less-developed regions of
the world typically have modest transportation infrastructures, to
include air base facilities.
This has led the Army to undertake an ambitious effort to transform
its force structure to enable it to deploy substantial combat power
quickly to a threatened region by air. A major effort is underway to
reduce the weight of Army formations (thus reducing the demand on
strategic lift) while retaining as much of their combat punch as
possible. Hence the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) initiative,
which, in part, hopes to displace systems like the 70-ton Abrams tank
with a 20-ton FCS.\20\
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\20\ The Abrams weighs roughly 70 tons with its depleted uranium
armor, and approximately 63 tons without it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beyond losing weight while retaining muscle, the Army must develop
the capability to project substantial land power rapidly, and sustain
it indefinitely, in the absence of access to forward bases and large,
fixed logistics centers, as called for in the QDR. This implies an
ability to effect a distributed insertion of Army forces into a
threatened area, as well as an ability to conduct highly distributed,
or dispersed operations, employing C\4\ISR systems to scout the
physical gaps between Army formations and extended-range fires to cover
them.
Furthermore, the Army also needs to exploit its advantages in
accessing joint C\4\ISR capabilities to conduct precision strikes at
extended ranges. In so doing it can minimize the vulnerability of
lighter forces by exploiting opportunities to outrange enemy ground
force strike systems (e.g., artillery, attack helicopters).
While few will contest that Crusader is a superior system to the
Paladin it is designed to replace, it is also true that:
Plans call for the Crusader to reach the field around
the same time the Army plans to field its new Future Combat
Systems--a variant of which is intended to replace the
Crusader. This begs the question of why the Army would not
pursue the FCS system more vigorously, especially given the
likely spin-off benefits for other FCS configurations.
The two Crusader vehicles are set to weigh about 80
tons, while the Paladin weighs 32 tons, and the FCS is planned
to weigh no more than 20 tons. Given the great lengths to which
the Army is going to enhance its forces' ability to deploy
rapidly, it seems odd indeed that it would pursue an artillery
system that weighed 150 percent more than the system it is
replacing, while at the same time designing a replacement for
the Abrams tank whose specifications call for a 70 percent
reduction in weight.
The greatest gain in Army artillery effectiveness will
likely come from the Excalibur precision artillery round, now
in development. But this munition can be fired from a Paladin
system, as well.
While it is true that the Crusader outranges the
Paladin, the fact remains that other Army strike systems--to
include the Army's multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS),
HIMARS, Apache and Comanche helicopters, and prospectively Army
UCAVs--outrange the Crusader. If greater emphasis on longer-
range fires is needed, the Army has ready-made options for
pursuing them other than Crusader.
Even at its reduced weight (the system was originally
designed at 110 tons), the Crusader will not fit on a C-130,
violating a key Army design metric for both the Interim and
Objective Forces.
At a price tag of $11 billion (with $2 billion already
having been invested), Crusader represents an enormous
opportunity cost for an Army that cannot fully fund key
elements of its Objective Force, to include support for
developing strategic and intra-theater lift options, C\4\ISR
capabilities, training facilities, and the Future Combat
System.
Skip a Generation Objective: Army Deep-Strike Brigades (DSBs). The
Army's challenge is less how to expand its traditional forms of fire
support and more on how to deploy such firepower rapidly in an anti-
access environment, and on how to exploit its unique potential among
all the world's armies to see and strike at extended ranges. This is
the direction the Army is headed in with respect to its vision for the
Objective Force. Consistent with that vision, an Army Deep-Strike
Brigade would emphasize long-range reconnaissance and strike assets.
Such capabilities could include tactical UAVs and scout helicopters
that can self-deploy and operate off of austere basing facilities;
remote unattended ground sensors; long-range reconnaissance patrols;
and support from sister service C\4\ISR systems such as satellites and
UAVs. As its name indicates, the DSB would also have the means to
strike at long ranges with such systems as tactical UCAVs, attack
helicopters and rocket artillery (e.g. HIMARS lightweight missile
launcher employing ATACMS munitions).\21\ Over the longer term, Future
Combat System vehicles could both screen the DSB from the close fight
and provide air defense. Among the programs that could be accelerated
with the cancellation of Crusader would be Army UAV and UCAV programs,
the Comanche helicopter, and development of extended-range versions of
ATACMS.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\21\ ATACMS stands for Army Tactical Missile System, while HIMARS
stands for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major Unknown Planning Factors: As noted above, it is not clear how
quickly UAVs and UCAVs will mature. Nor is it clear to what extent they
will be able to displace manned systems in performing the broad range
of reconnaissance and strike missions. The Army's potential to see deep
and to fight effectively at great range on a nonlinear battlefield has
yet to be demonstrated in field exercises against an opposing force
possessing the kinds of capabilities that might be encountered over the
next decade in conflict against prospective adversaries.
Hedge: The Army can hedge against these uncertainties by upgrading
or replacing its Paladin self-propelled howitzers with systems produced
by our allies, such as the German PzH 2000. More importantly, perhaps,
the Army can accelerate the procurement of the Excalibur smart
artillery round.\22\ As the experience of the last decade has shown, in
terms of generating combat capability and military effectiveness,
platforms are generally declining in importance relative to precision-
guided munitions and to their ability to tap into the information
provided by C\4\ISR networks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\22\ The Excalibur, or XM982, is a family of precision-guided 155mm
artillery munitions. Like other precision-guided munitions, the
Excalibur is far more accurate than traditional (or ``dumb'') artillery
munitions. Just as PGMs have greatly enhanced the strike capability of
aircraft, so too do artillery PGMs offer the promise of greatly
enhancing the effectiveness of existing artillery systems. See the U.S.
Army 2001 Weapon Systems Handbook at http://www.defensedaily.com.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Status: The administration's defense program retains the
Crusader buy as outlined by the Clinton administration.
Skipping ``Skipping A Generation''?
To sum up, the Department of Defense should heed President's
guidance and seize the opportunity to skip a generation in military
capability. Such an approach offers the following advantages:
Options can be created for dealing with an uncertain
future--and the risk of putting too many eggs in the short-
range tactical aviation, large surface combatant, or heavy
field artillery baskets--can be avoided;
If successful, skip-a-generation capabilities outlined
above promise to be far more effective in meeting the QDR's
critical operational challenge of maintaining the U.S. ability
to project decisive military power to areas of vital interest
in the face of the growing A2/AD threat;
Would-be adversaries' knowledge that the United States
is already moving to develop access to advanced military
capabilities may serve as a powerful deterrent to their
willingness to enter into a military competition with America--
in short, skipping a generation can be a key element in the
administration's dissuasion strategy; and, finally
Relatively low-cost hedges can be put in place that
guard against the uncertainty that the ``leap-ahead''
capabilities may not materialize as soon as forecast, or be as
effective as anticipated.
the price of failure
The United States military must transform itself, and it must begin
now. As Secretary Rumsfeld has said, ``Transformation is not a goal for
tomorrow, but an endeavor that must be embraced in earnest today. The
challenges the Nation faces to not loom in the distant future, but are
here now.''
To its credit, the Bush administration has both clearly defined
what transformation is, and provided a persuasive case as to why the
world's best military needs to transform. Unfortunately, it has not yet
developed either a transformation strategy or a process to ensure that
transformation will come about. This is most clearly demonstrated in
the absence of plausible service and joint warfighting concepts for
addressing the new emerging critical operational goals, and finds its
ultimate expression in the administration's program and budget
priorities, which for the most part sustain the course set by the
Clinton administration.
If we remain on this course--if the Department of Defense fails to
seize the opportunity to transform our military--we run a very real
risk of investing a substantial sum of our national treasure in
preparing our military to meet the challenges of today, and yesterday,
rather than those of tomorrow. Should that occur, payment could be
exacted not only in lost treasure, but also in interests jeopardized
and in lives lost.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to present my thoughts
on this important issue before your committee.
Chairman Levin. Thank you so much for your very succinct
and direct testimony.
Dr. Thompson.
STATEMENT OF DR. LOREN B. THOMPSON, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER,
THE LEXINGTON INSTITUTE
Dr. Thompson. Thank you. Mr. Chairman and members of the
committee, thank you very much for inviting me to offer my
assessment of military transformation.
``Transformation'' is a tricky term. The current popularity
of the word within the Pentagon suggests that it means
different things to different people. For some it is a way of
rescuing threatened ideas and institutions. For others it is a
way of sweeping those ideas and institutions away. For many, it
is a ritual incantation, the latest buzzword used to bless
business as usual.
However, there is one point at which all of the various
meanings seem to converge, and that is the potential impact of
new technology on the way in which we wage war. The term first
emerged from the uncertainty following the collapse of
communism, when the threat that had driven America's defensive
preparations for the last two generations was suddenly swept
away by itself. With little clarity as to future dangers,
policymakers turned to recent advances in technology for clues
as to how the military could maintain its edge.
Not surprisingly, they got swept up in the enthusiasm for
new information technologies that were then captivating popular
culture and the financial markets. Thus it became fashionable
to say that the military was pursuing a capabilities-based
posture rather than a threat-based one, because we did not know
what threats we would be facing, but we thought we knew which
technologies would be decisive.
Experts such as Dr. Krepinevich correctly insisted that the
technology would only be decisive if it were wedded to
appropriate operational concepts and organizational changes.
Nonetheless, there is little doubt that the concept of
transformation the military is pursuing today is driven first
and foremost by enthusiasm for emerging information
technologies. All of the gains that military planners foresee
in global awareness and precision and agility and survivability
trace their origins in one way or another to these new
technologies.
Now, I have no basic quarrel with the claims being made for
military transformation. But because you have already heard
what is so promising about transformation, I would like to
focus in the remainder of my remarks on some of the concerns I
have about its implementation. I have distilled those concerns
to five points.
Point 1: The most important military lesson of September 11
is that we have little idea of what is coming next. During the
Cold War we convinced ourselves that the threat was stable and
predictable, but a review of recent history reveals that at
least there was one major strategic surprise every decade. From
Pearl Harbor in the 1940s to the North Korean invasion of the
South in the 1950s to the Tet offensive in the 1960s to the
fall of the Shah in the 1970s, then the collapse of communism
in the late 1980s, we have a remarkable record for getting the
future wrong.
Like the atrocities of September 11, all of these surprises
looked predictable once we adjusted our way of thinking. The
problem is that that happened after the fact. So any concept of
transformation that proposes sweeping programmatic changes
based on presumed understandings of future challenges is doomed
to failure. There are simply too many possible threats and the
very act of preparing for some of them reduces the likelihood
that those are the ones that we will face.
I give the Bush administration high marks for acknowledging
this uncertainty in its transformation plans. That is the
reason why weapons that looked like candidates for
cancellation, such as Crusader, survived the administration's
strategic review, because once policymakers understood its
capabilities they could not dismiss its utility in a range of
plausible contingencies.
Just last week an Air Force general was explaining to me
how the presence of a system like Crusader in Afghanistan would
have enabled his service to deploy its bombers more
effectively. I guarantee you that a year ago that general was
not anticipating a land war in Asia any time in the near
future.
Point 2: The lessons of the past are seldom obvious.
Proponents of particular approaches to transformation
frequently refer to history in making their case, but the
inference that they draw for our own preparations cannot be
proven. For example, a favorite case study is the German
success in adapting new technologies such as radio, air power,
and tanks to overrun France in a few weeks during 1940. But
Germany was facing a long-time enemy, an enemy whose terrain,
whose strategy, whose formations were well understood. That is
not the situation that we are facing today.
Moreover, the French strategy of static fortifications was
a response to the failure of its offensive strategy in the
previous war. In other words, the French were trying to learn
from their own history. Unfortunately, they learned the wrong
lessons. We have to be careful that in implementing
transformation we do not do the same.
Point 3: Our future adversaries will not always be fools.
Every enemy we have faced since the end of the Cold War has
been less capable than the one that came before. Iraq was less
capable than Russia, Serbia was less capable than Iraq, the
Taliban was less capable than Serbia. The incompetence of our
adversaries has given us an exaggerated idea of how much
progress we have made in transforming our forces.
Now, U.S. forces exhibited impressive synergy in Operation
Enduring Freedom, but that should not be hard to achieve
against a primitive nation with no intact air defenses and deep
ethnic divisions. If we try to fight a unified and capable
adversary using 40 year old bombers, unprotected aerial
vehicles, and free-roaming Special Forces, we will probably
have our head handed to us.
Even if we believe that future adversaries will be marginal
in their military capabilities, we ought to be asking ourselves
how Operation Enduring Freedom would have fared in a country
that was covered with jungles or with cities in which our enemy
could have mingled with noncombatants. It is essential that our
transformation efforts include realistic training and realistic
experimentation that exposes new warfighting concepts to the
rigors of combat with truly resourceful enemies, not the crew
that we have been facing lately.
Point 4: Because our adversaries will not be fools, we need
to understand the weaknesses of our new technology. At the
rollout of the Navy's new Hawkeye 2000 early warning aircraft
last fall, Rear Admiral Philip Balisle made a startling
admission. He said that once the fleet transitions to network-
centric concepts of operation, loss of access to the network
could actually make it more vulnerable than it is today.
That is not the only instance in which new technology
potentially brings new problems. The satellite-guided munitions
that provide our pinpoint accuracy rely on weak signals from
thousands of miles away that in some circumstances can be
jammed with only 20 watts of power. The networks that
facilitate next generation naval warfare will have no hardening
against electromagnetic pulse because the Navy has written that
requirement out of its architectures, which makes asymmetric
attacks using nuclear weapons a very potent threat to fleet
effectiveness. The on-board logic of unmanned combat aerial
vehicles will not begin to approach the computational capacity
of human brains, making those vehicles highly vulnerable to
attacks by manned aircraft.
So before we get rid of all the laser-guided bombs because
they cannot see through clouds or begin dumbing down our
platforms because they are networked, we need to understand how
clever adversaries might exploit weaknesses in new technology.
Here again, the need for realistic training and experimentation
is obvious.
My final point is that realizing the potential of military
transformation requires a greater commitment to procurement.
The level of procurement that the administration proposes for
2003 is only two-thirds of what the Joint Chiefs estimated is
needed every year to sustain existing forces. Since 1990 the
average age of Air Force planes has increased from 13 to 22
years. There is not a single year since 1993 that the Navy has
bought the number of warships it must buy every year to support
a 300-ship fleet. The Army is buying less than 20 percent of
the helicopters it needs to maintain its military edge.
I have for the record two tables reflecting how decrepit
our air fleets have become. It is too soon to criticize the
Bush administration for underinvesting in new technology
because it inherited a raft of readiness and personnel problems
that had to be addressed immediately. But if it does not stick
to its plan to raise procurement spending in the future years,
the resulting erosion in military capabilities will undercut
any claim of transformation.
Thank you.
[The information referred to follows:]
Chairman Levin. Dr. Thompson, thank you. Both of you have
really given us a lot to think about and a lot to chew on. I
want to thank you both for the very thoughtful, very thorough
presentations. They are extremely helpful to this committee. We
will make sure that each of our members actually gets a copy of
it as delivered, as well as the prepared testimony. I thought
it was extraordinarily useful testimony for this committee and
we are grateful for it.
Senator Warner. Mr. Chairman, could I associate myself with
your remarks. I followed the testimony very carefully and I
share your views. I intend to follow up on one or two of these
issues and ask the Secretary of Defense what his comments are
on them.
Chairman Levin. Let me start with you, Dr. Thompson. You
have given us very thoughtful limits on some of the hopes for
transformation and some of the realities that we ought to think
about and worry about. What changes would you make in the
current transformation direction to address some of the
challenges that you have outlined for us? In other words, how
would you change our current course to take into account those
challenges, those problems?
Dr. Thompson. Andy and I had the opportunity to help the
Department in shaping the process to some degree, the Defense
Planning Guidance (DPG) and the other factors supposed to drive
transformation. I guess I am a little troubled by this notion
that transformation is a journey and not a destination. If you
do not know where you are going, it is a little hard to sort
out when you are headed in the right direction.
I think that one of the ways in which this process could be
made more rigorous and more goal-oriented is if the services
were given some quantitative goals. I mean, if I look at the
list of major goals that they have, protecting critical bases
of operations, denying enemy sanctuary, projecting power in
denied areas, the only numbers I see associated with those
goals are the increases in the budget. I would like to see some
performance goals, some quantitative metrics that tell the
services what they are expected to be able to achieve.
If I take the Crusader as an example, which frankly I do
not know that much about, but the Army claims the Crusader is a
300 percent increase in capability over Paladin in one of the
key performance parameters. I would like to see the office of
the Secretary of Defense (OSD) establish some clear performance
goals that are denominated numerically, rather than in words,
that the services have to try to achieve, rather than simply
saying, you are headed in the right direction.
Chairman Levin. Is there anything that you would do
legislatively to try to address some of the problems that you
have outlined for us this morning?
Dr. Thompson. Probably not at this point. The reason why is
because, although----
Chairman Levin. Excuse me for interrupting. When I say
legislatively, I am including dollars as well as concepts and
programs and requirements and reports.
Dr. Thompson. Andy may have better suggestions on that than
I do. I personally think that if there are dollars that need to
be added they are in the procurement account, because that is
where I think we are falling short. But as far as
transformation is concerned, one point I would like to make as
to why I do not think it is necessary at this point to second-
guess the administration on where it is putting the money on
transformation is that, notwithstanding a lot of the political
rhetoric, there is a remarkable degree of continuity between
what the new administration is doing and what its predecessors
did in terms of fostering and pursuing transformation.
The concept of future threats is similar. The processes
that they are adopting, the goals they would like to undertake,
it is all very similar. I would like to see them have a little
more time at the Pentagon to see where they are going before
they start being second-guessed.
Chairman Levin. Dr. Krepinevich, let me pick up right
there, because your testimony also suggested that the
administration's programs and budget priorities sustain the
course of the last administration, which is what Dr. Thompson
just stated. What changes in course, if any, would you
recommend at this time specifically in our transformation
program? Prioritize those for us, because there were a lot of
them. You gave us a lot of suggestions.
Dr. Krepinevich. All right. I think first of all there has
to be some sense that you do not get in Joint Vision 2010 and
the service vision documents, of how we plan to conduct
operations in the future. The officer corps needs that, the
people who are establishing defense priorities in the Pentagon
need that, you need that. There is no joint warfighting concept
right now. We have a vision that talks about precision
engagement and other pillars, but no sense of how we are going
to operate.
I think it is essential in terms of getting validation and
fidelity to establish a joint national training center, and
maybe the linking of the western training ranges, as Secretary
Wolfowitz said, is on the path of that. But I think we need at
the joint level an analogue to what we have at the service
level, which is a training center. We need a joint opposing
force.
We need regular exercises. Loren knows my fondness for
history. Our Navy conducted a major fleet exercise every year
between 1921 and 1941 and what they learned won World War II.
Our Marine Corps was doing the same thing along that time
frame.
We need an opposing force. Right now what we do in the way
of exercises at the joint level--and I have been told this by
people at JFCOM--is essentially we do demonstrations. We do not
do experiments. How do we expect to find out whether we are
failing or not failing when in fact we do not go up against
anybody?
So as a way of beginning to get people to think about how
we are going to fight, how we are going to deal, let us create
that joint opposing force that has the ability to present that
anti-access threat, that area denial threat. If you have a
joint urban warfare training center--as Loren said, what if in
Afghanistan we had had to go into urban areas? Certainly the
Army has confronted this problem in its war games. That is a
different kettle of fish. How would we perform?
In terms of our own homeland defense, an urban warfare
training center would also, I think, give us an enormous
opportunity to bring together not just the military forces, but
other elements--local, State, Federal elements--to work
together to deal with how would we confront a non-traditional
threat to an American city and deal with the consequences if we
failed to deter or defeat that threat before it was able to
exercise an attack.
So I think in that area that is the area of greatest
opportunity and greatest need, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Levin. Let me just finish my own role here,
because I am going to have to leave and turn this over to
Senator Warner. I would like to follow Senator Warner's
suggestion here and ask staff to do two things relative to your
testimony: to extract the specific suggestions that you have
made both in your prepared testimony and here; and to ask the
Department of Defense for their reaction to those suggestions.
I think Senator Warner is really on target here. In a way,
it would have been better to have this testimony as the first
panel. It would have been interesting.
Senator Warner. We should have kept them seated.
Chairman Levin. We would have had perhaps an opportunity
then for our first panel to react to it. But we cannot do it
both ways and this is the way we chose.
But I think what we will do is follow that suggestion of
Senator Warner and ask our staff to extract from your testimony
the specific suggestions, and there are many of them, and ask
the first panel to react to those suggestions as well as to
send along the entire testimony.
With that, I thank Senator Warner and turn it over to him.
Thank you both.
Senator Warner [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We
will do that jointly.
I think we fail here in Congress to avail ourselves of the
enormous amount of work going on in, as I call it, the quasi-
public-private sector. You are neither one. You are out there
as individuals and organizations trying to do a conscientious
job guiding America, that is Congress and the Executive Branch,
in new directions. You are doing the introspective thinking and
analytical reflection on history and using history as a rear
view mirror to guide us today as we go into the future.
I want to pick up, Dr. Krepinevich, on your statement about
homeland security. This is my major concern, major major. There
is not a day that goes by that I do not reflect on where I was
and what I was able to do just as one person on September 11. I
just fear that comparable--maybe not comparable, but other
incidents could strike this Nation, and are we taking the right
steps here at home to prevent such incidents.
I would like to see more of a balance between expenditures
and the efforts to protect us here at home, our cities, in
particular our ports and our military installations and forego
maybe some of the most extraordinary high tech, far-reaching
concepts of the military programs that we have to be employed
elsewhere.
Dr. Krepinevich. Senator, I would say right now,
unfortunately, there are many more questions than there are
answers. I think the administration is bringing together what
it needs to do to develop a comprehensive strategy for how we
plan to go about defending homeland. Hopefully, a lot of those
questions will be asked.
For example, as you point out, there are a number of ways
to threaten our homeland. There are the traditional ways we
have worried about, ballistic and cruise missile defense.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz will tell you that those
are two different problems and in fact focusing on ballistic
missile defense only gets you part of the way in that area.
There is the concern about non-traditional forms of attack
by weapons of mass destruction, the growing proliferation of
access to chemical or biological agents, radiological agents.
Other novel forms of attack such as we saw on September 11.
I think we need to get some answers. The administration, as
I understand it, is supposed to produce its strategy some time
in early summer.
As you point out, what is the weight? How much weight do we
put on actively or passively trying to erect defenses here
versus going out and conducting preemptive strikes? I think for
myself the most remarkable statement in the President's State
of the Union was not about the axis of evil, but the statement
that time is not on our side. If you think time is not on our
side once these people begin to move to attack you, then you
have to be able to go out and hit them before they get to this
country.
What is the weight of emphasis between the various threats
to this country? What is the role of the military? Does the
military, for example, even have a major role in defending the
national information infrastructure when so much of the
commercial sector is reluctant to share that information with
government?
Then there are issues with respect to the force structure,
because there is going to be a homeland defense tax on this
defense budget. As a number of people have said here, we have
really not had to invest very much in defending our homeland.
How much is that going to take away from our ability to project
power overseas?
I think we are going to find that because of this we need
our allies more at the very time that they are investing less
and less in defense.
Senator Warner. I agree with that statement wholeheartedly.
Coalition warfare is essential, not only from the standpoint of
bringing them to an accountability for incidents overseas which
affect them as much as they do the United States, but also to
get the support here at home.
Dr. Thompson. Senator, I drive home every night from
Arlington to Alexandria and it is a rare night when I am
driving by the city and looking across the river----
Senator Warner. Looking at what?
Dr. Thompson. When I am driving down that road in the
evening, and I look across the river and I see the city. It is
a rare time that I do not imagine this city gone. It is very
believable to me that a generation from now it will not be here
or it will be substantially different than it is now. I think
we are in great danger and I do not think we have our act
together on homeland defense at all.
If you just look at the arrangements that we have today,
ATF and Customs are in the Treasury Department, INS and FBI are
in the Justice Department, Coast Guard and FAA are in the
Department of Transportation. We are really not postured for
the threat. Now, culturally it would be very difficult for us
to adapt. It will take more attacks before we get the point
that we are in great danger.
But even on an organizational and administrative level, I
think we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what we
need to do. I think you are entirely right.
However, I would offer one word of caution. I am not
certain that the Department of Defense has a big role to play
in homeland defense. I think we need a division of labor here.
We already have dozens of organizations that are involved in
homeland defense. We only have one organization that is
mandated to do forward defense against the sources of the
danger to our homeland. I would not want to see our Active-Duty
Force diverted from that critical mission when there are so
many other people in the Federal Government who are supposed to
be responsible for securing our homeland.
Senator Warner. But there is an extent to which our Nation
can foot the bill of these conflicts. From Bosnia to Kosovo to
Afghanistan, it was our airlift, it was the smart weaponry. I
do not mean to demean in any way the courage of the men and
women in uniform of other nations, but their central
governments simply have not kept pace with the necessary
investments to modernize them. We are paying the bill.
Now all of a sudden here at home we experience on September
11 a catastrophe that none of us could have envisioned, in the
magnitude of the devastation of loss.
Dr. Thompson. I think the nicest thing we can say about the
situation in which we find ourselves today that before we were
paying the bill for their defense, now we are paying the bill
for ours.
Senator Warner. Well, I hope that is true.
Yes?
Dr. Krepinevich. Senator, I was about to say that I was
fortunate to accompany Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman on
the delegation to Europe for the Wehrkunde Conference. If you
had been there your concerns would have been magnified, because
after Operation Allied Force in 1999 there seemed to be this
resolve among a lot of our European allies that, by golly, we
are going to get serious now. This time around, it was an air
of resignation: We made the try and we realized that we are not
going to be able to do anything near what we had hoped to be
able to do even to try and keep pace with the Americans.
So again, at least I think for the short term there is much
to be concerned about in terms of the direction of our allied
involvement.
The other point I will make is, since Andy Marshall's name
was mentioned, he has a phrase that he calls ``cost-imposing
strategies,'' things that your enemies can do at relatively low
cost to impose enormous costs on you. I think if you look at
this administration's list of these critical operational
challenges, what you see is a series of cost-imposing
strategies.
How much did it cost al Qaeda to conduct the attacks it
conducted on September 11, how much did it cost whoever it was
to develop that form of anthrax, versus how much have we spent
just since then to try and recover from that? How much will it
cost an enemy who fabricates hundreds of ballistic and cruise
missiles to threaten our forward ports and air bases versus how
much will it cost us if we proceed to stick with some of these
programs that are at high risk in that kind of environment to
create a different kind of capability?
We have to deal with this cost-imposing strategy problem.
Otherwise, as you say, we are just not going--well, we just do
not have the resources to pursue a rich man's strategy in every
possible area where we are threatened.
Dr. Thompson. The answer to that challenge is not not to
defend our homeland. We have to do that. The real answer,
though, is to go and to find them and to kill them, and that is
what the military is there for. We have been complaining as
long as I can remember about the inadequacies of our allies,
but if they were not willing to step up to the Soviet threat
they are sure not going to step up to this one.
I am told that the leftists in France today cannot even win
an election without the Moslem vote. If that is the case, we
are going to have to do this pretty much all for ourselves.
Senator Warner. Well, gentlemen, we will close out on that
note. I did want to ask you a question on shipbuilding, though,
Dr. Thompson, which is a matter that I have had a keen interest
in for many years. So many people say we are not building
enough ships. It is always the numbers. When I was privileged
to be in the Department of the Navy, we were at 800 to 900
ships. Today we are bordering a little above 300 or a little
below 300 and teetering around in that area.
Of course we recognize that a ship today, certainly a
modern ship, has capabilities far above what we had in
yesteryear. Is there a better formulation than just the number
of ships that is needed to have a convincing and effective
maritime force projection credibility?
Dr. Thompson. Well, if not the number, then the modernity
of the ships, the currency of the technology that is on them. I
was rather distressed by something my friend Gordon England
said in his testimony introducing the 2003 budget proposal. He
said that the current distribution of the ship population was
nearly ideal because it was 16 years old and that is the middle
of the average service age. I could not believe he said that.
There are things other than corrosion or fatigue life of
metal that are better ways of judging how old you want your
ships to be. Imagine how many generations of technology in
computers and fiber have come and gone in the last 16 years.
Yet we are getting ready to keep our cruisers at sea for 40
years. The Navy is not only looking at extending the Los
Angeles class to 33 years, but maybe to 40 years in terms of
refueling, far beyond their intended design life.
If we are not going to be concerned with whether it is 600
or 300 ships, we ought to at least be concerned with the
currency of the ships we are buying.
Senator, if I could say one other thing about that. Some
internal Navy charts were shared with me a couple of months ago
at a briefing by an admiral and what they showed is if you make
a series of ahistorical, optimistic assessments of how long the
fleet is going to last--in other words, things that are
radically inconsistent with past experience--we can keep
ourselves at 300 ships with the existing shipbuilding program.
But if you use the past as a guide as to where we are really
headed, we are down to less than 60 major surface combatants
within a decade, because the ships simply retire at a faster
rate than we are able to keep up.
I think what is going on with shipbuilding is a scandal. I
mean, fortunately it is a bipartisan scandal, but it is a
scandal. If we do not get our act together soon, we are not
going to be able to cover the world with the latest technology
even by the standards of the British or the Germans.
Senator Warner. Well, you do not see a lot of active
shipbuilding in those nations as far as I am concerned.
Dr. Thompson. Well, that is certainly true. But of course
our missions----
Senator Warner. The Royal Navy is now----
Dr. Thompson. You are right, but our missions and our
responsibilities are so much greater.
Senator Warner. Beg your pardon?
Dr. Thompson. Our responsibilities are so much greater than
theirs are. I mean, where would we have been if we had not had
carriers in the Indian Ocean early on?
Senator Warner. I doubt if we could have operated the
Afghan campaign as we did.
Dr. Krepinevich. Senator, if I could just add a couple of
things to what Dr. Thompson said. I think you made an excellent
point about the ships we have today being far more capable than
those that were in the fleet even 15 or 20 years ago, and all
the reasons why.
One of the things that is characteristic of a period of
military revolution or transformation is the metrics by which
you gauge performance change. For example, if we had judged
aircraft carriers according to battleship standards, we would
still have battleships, because it was not the volume of fire,
it was the range that made all the difference.
If you are looking, for example, at strike today, the Navy
has done a terrific job in proliferating its strike
capabilities. It is astounding to think that submarines can now
strike targets in Afghanistan, incredible.
So in a sense you could say, well, that should bring the
number perhaps in the fleet down, because the ships are more
capable. On the other hand, you have Admiral Cebrowski saying
network-centric warfare, we have to get into the littoral
quickly, we need a class of combatants that can do that. Maybe
it is Admiral Clark's littoral combat ship class, which would
drive the numbers back up again.
A lot of it has to be linked to what the threat is, what
the competition is, and how you are going to beat that
competition. One of the metrics being used by the Navy staff
right now is they are looking at this issue of helipad space
because of what is called the naval NORAD, the ability to
intercept ships on the high seas that we think might be
carrying damaging cargo to the United States.
With respect to foreign shipbuilding, it is niche, but it
is very impressive in some respects. The Navy right now is
experimenting with a joint venture, this high-speed vessel that
was built in Australia and is showing a great deal of promise.
The Marines are using another version out in the Pacific. The
Swedes, whom Andy Marshall has been in contact with, are
building a class of coastal combatants called the VSBE, which
are highly stealthy ships.
Now, these may not be the kind of ships that we want as
combatants, but they may be the kind of ships that our Navy
confronts in 10 or 15 years in large numbers. So important to
keep an eye on what the other guy is doing as well.
Senator Warner. I think our record should reflect a little
bit about your organizations, how they were brought to being,
where the sources of income are to support then. I think that
it is necessary that we have that in the record, because you
have well-known distinguished organizations which you are
representing today. So if each of you would put a half a page
in the record, we would appreciate it.
[The information referred to follows:]
Dr. Krepinevich. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
is an independent, policy research institute established to promote
innovative thinking about defense planning and investment strategies
for the 21st century. CSBA's analytic-based research makes clear the
inextricable link between defense strategies and budgets in fostering a
more effective and efficient defense, and the need to transform the
U.S. military in light of an emerging military revolution.
CSBA provides timely, objective and credible information to
policymakers, opinion leaders, the media, analysts and others in the
United States and abroad. CSBA's outreach includes an aggressive
research and publishing program, seminar activities for senior policy
officials and other decisionmakers, briefings for congressional staff,
the media and industry executives, and lectures before academic, civic,
and other professional groups nationwide.
CSBA funding comes from a wide range of sources, ensuring
impartiality and independence. The majority of funding comes from a
diverse group of charitable foundations to support CSBA's academic and
education programs. Further financial support comes from directed
government contracts, primarily focusing on preparing studies and
sponsoring targeted meetings. CSBA on occasion will provide
academically rigorous and independent programs for defense industry.
______
Dr. Thompson. The Lexington Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan
public policy research organization headquartered in Arlington,
Virginia. It was established in 1998. Its Chief Executive Officer is
Merrick Carey, a former congressional aide to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) and
Rep. Jim Courter (R-NJ). Its Chief Operating Officer is Dr. Loren
Thompson, former deputy director of Georgetown University's Security
Studies Program. The institute has a staff of 12 people and an annual
budget of about $2 million. Lexington's revenues are drawn from four
sources: foundations, corporations, private individuals and the Federal
Government.
The Institute sustains a diverse research and education effort
focusing on five major areas: national security, education policy, tax
reform, international business, and regulatory policy. Its largest
program is national security, which is concerned mainly with issues of
strategy, resources, and technology bearing upon the capacity of the
United States to defend its homeland, allies, and vital interests. In
general, the institute seeks to further a public policy agenda based on
limited government, scientific merit and the furtherance of freedom.
Chairman Warner. The hearing is concluded.
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator Carl Levin
science and technology
1. Senator Levin. Secretary Wolfowitz, the Department's science and
technology (S&T) programs are one of the engines of military
transformation. The Defense Science Board and the Secretary of Defense
have embraced a goal of 3 percent of the Department's total budget
being invested in S&T programs. The current budget request only
requests 2.6 percent of the budget for S&T, and reduces this percentage
each year out until 2007, when it falls to 2.3 percent. How is this
reduction in the commitment to S&T consistent with the goals and
visions of accelerating the transformation of the military?
Secretary Wolfowitz. It remains our goal to gradually increase
funding for science and technology (S&T) programs to a level of 3
percent of the Department's total budget. However, we also need to
ensure that the funding levels of the various components in the
Department's total budget are balanced based on our assessment of the
most urgent requirements at any given time. The fiscal year 2003
request for S&T is $9.9 billion; which includes $9.7 billion of base
S&T programs and $213 million in Defense Emergency Response Funds for
combating terrorism technology. This is a 12.5 percent increase over
the fiscal year 2002 S&T request of $.8 billion. However, because of
the significant increase in the Department's total funding in fiscal
year 2003 and the need to add dollars to fully fund acquisition
programs and health care etc. the percentage of the budget request
devoted to S&T is less than 3 percent. The fiscal year 2003 budget
request begins transformation by including funds for classified space
S&T programs, along with a substantial increase in funding for
combating terrorism technology.
arsenal ship
2. Senator Levin. Admiral Cebrowski, in his campaign speech at The
Citadel on September 23, 1999, candidate George W. Bush stated that
``On the seas, we need to pursue promising ideas like the arsenal
ship--a stealthy ship packed with long-range missiles to destroy
targets from great distances.'' What has happened with the arsenal ship
idea?
Admiral Cebrowski. The arsenal ship idea was exactly that--an idea.
The concept evolved from a fairly narrowly defined answer into a range
of very important questions about what a family of future surface
combatants might look like. The idea of a family of ships is an
alternative that offers the potential to broaden our capabilities base
and technology base. The Navy should be very much larger than it is if
you consider only numbers of ships. However, the economics suggest that
the Navy must explore transformational ways to embrace the future.
Changes underway in warfare also allows us to examine the implications
of shifts in key relationships such as the cost of speed and increased
payload fractions from smaller displacement hulls.
krepinevich proposals
3. Senator Levin. (Also on behalf of Senator John Warner) Secretary
Wolfowitz, on pages 14 to 21 of his prepared statement, Dr. Krepinevich
discussed transformation in the context of ``skipping'' a generation of
technology. He proposed three candidates for ``skipping'' a generation;
the ``leap-ahead'' systems or capabilities that would warrant such a
move; and how the Department might hedge against any of the proposed
``leap-ahead'' systems not working out. Could you provide the
Department's views on each of Dr. Krepinevich's proposed candidates?
Secretary Wolfowitz. The Department's position on the three
candidates for ``skipping'' a generation (DD(X), JSF, and Crusader) is
provided in attachments 1, 2, and 3.
Attachment 1
The DD(X) destroyer is being designed specifically to establish and
maintain maritime dominance in the operationally complex littoral
battlespace--a capability that Dr. Krepinevich suggests will be
fundamental to meeting 21st century warfighting requirements. The DD(X)
technologies will create new capabilities while optimizing crew size
and yielding significant combat advantage. DD(X) is part of a family of
surface combatants that includes a future cruiser (CG(X)) and littoral
combat ship (LOS), and will offer a balanced set of warfighting
capabilities to meet the national security requirements in the 21st
century. The DD(X), CG(X), and LCS will operate as a networked,
distributed force achieving the network centric warfare construct Dr.
Krepinevich identifies in his ``skip a generation objective.''
To ensure DD(X)'s ability to perform littoral missions, the ship
will incorporate advances in stealth and survivability. The first:
surface combatant with multi-spectral signature reduction, DD(X) will
possess significantly reduced radar cross-section, infrared, magnetic
and acoustic signatures compared to the DDG 51 class and make the ship
much less susceptible to mine and cruise missile attack: in the
littoral environment. In addition, the hull is being designed to reduce
the effects of weapons detonation, and the automatic containment and
damage suppression systems will improve the recoverability of the ship
from a casualty event.
Dr. Krepinevich states that converted SSGNs and/or increasing the
inventory of precision guided munitions would provide an effective
``hedge'' for DD(X). While either of those assets would provide
additional Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells, only DD(X) will fully
meet the Marine Corps' requirements for naval surface fire support.
DD(X) will have the capacity to carry the variety and volume of
offensive, precise, all-weather firepower that will enable our Marine
Corps and light mobile Army forces to complete their littoral missions.
Lastly, DD(X) is completely aligned with the, ``Required Military
Capabilities'' needed to transform our military, which Dr. Krepinevich
emphasizes on page 14, as detailed below:
Mobility: DD(X) will have the range, speed and
sustainability to be forward deployed for extended periods and
operate with carrier battlegroups and expeditionary strike
forces. In addition, DD(X) will employ in-stride mine
avoidance, which will enable the ship to operate in the
littorals.
Stealth: The advanced technology employed by DD(X)
will reduce the ship's signature to that of a fishing boat with
quieting nearing that of a submarine. These attributes will
better enable DD(X) to survive in the littorals.
Electronic Protection: DD(X)'s reduced signatures will
enable electronic protection and deception technologies to be
markedly more effective.
Extended-Range Systems and Strikes: The DD(X) advanced
gun system range of 100nm provides extended-range as compared
to 13nm achieved today. Most importantly, DD(X) features
responsive and all-weather strike capability with ``on-
station'' sustainment facilitated by underway replenishment
capability.
Precision, Electronic and Non-lethal Forms of Strike:
The DD(X) strike weapons include both gun launched and vertical
launched ordnance whose guidance systems enable very precise
targeting for long-range interdiction.
Unmanned/Automated Systems: DD(X) makes extensive use
of advanced automation to reduce workload and improve
survivability. DD(X) is expected to significantly reduce the
crew size, possibly to one-third the crew of a DDG 51 resulting
in significant life cycle cost savings. Automated damage
control and command and control data fusion are just a few
examples of functions that will be automated on DD(X). In
addition, DD(X) will be capable of launching, recovering and
servicing unmanned air, surface, and underwater vehicles.
Compressed Operational Cycle Rates: In support of
improved readiness, DD(X) is being designed to meet an
operational requirement for a 3-year deployment. This will be
achieved in part through the application of systems and
materials requiring limited maintenance. In addition, the
automation of resupply and the ability for underway
replenishment on DD(X) are expected to facilitate increased
``on-station'' availability compared to existing fleet assets.
Attachment 2
From a broad perspective, the Department must reconcile the
competing demands of modernization and current operations. We must
modernize smartly and maintain readiness to address threats to our
country's national interests, today and in the future. In the aftermath
of the September 11, 2001 attacks on our homeland, Operation Enduring
Freedom, and the current tension in the Middle East, this balance has
become particularly difficult. We must consider fiscal realities. We
face a major challenge in modernizing our aging aircraft fleet because
many current aircraft were built at high rates during the 1980s, when
spending levels were at their Cold War peak, and because most of the
aircraft planned for the future feature more costly, improved
capabilities to meet projected threats. With the constraints of threats
and fiscal realities in mind, the Department recently conducted
detailed analyses to ensure that we recommended the best force mix
possible. These analyses, which included B-2s, F-16s, and UCAVs, as
well as other alternatives, formed the analytic basis for an affordable
and balanced force structure modernization plan.
From a more specific perspective, the Department has thoughtfully
considered the options presented by Dr. Krepinevich and found them less
attractive in both the near and long term. First, additional B-2s would
provide more technology from the 1980s, at a very high cost. Our
analysis suggests that unless the budget were dramatically increased,
our money would better be spent on the current modernization plan.
While B-2s do offer stealth, with impressive range and payloads, we
have enough of these aircraft to do the job that they were designed to
accomplish. In addition, the Department has funded a program designed
to increase the ``smart munitions'' carriage capability of our existing
B-2 fleet as suggested. Dr. Krepinevich's paper also indicates that ``.
. . the JSF CTOL version assumes the U.S. military will continue to
enjoy unimpeded access to forward air bases for the indefinite
future.'' In fact, the JSF combat range was designed to be
substantially longer than legacy fighters and clearly supports even the
most stressing proposed threat scenarios. Air refueling tankers extend
that range even farther.
Similarly, F-16 Block 60 aircraft were not included in our
modernization plan because, in part, our vision is to transform into an
all-stealth fighter fleet in the years to come. Purchase of new F-16s,
even with advanced avionics, extends the life of the less-capable,
less-survivable legacy aircraft well into the future at the expense of
a faster transformation.
UCAVs do offer incredible potential, and the Department has
embraced the concept with the funding necessary to develop it as
quickly as possible. Dr. Krepinevich indicated that ``[t]he opportunity
exists to move much more aggressively in developing a range of UCAVs.''
In fact, this program is already on an aggressive schedule and
technical glide path. Examples of technical difficulties include the
ability to automatically identify and target in the ``fog of war,''
overcoming bandwidth and line-of-sight communications issues, and re-
targeting flexibility. The UCAV offers the potential to transform the
Air Force and Navy further, but it remains experimental. The Department
will attempt to develop the UCAVs capabilities, but it would be unwise
to wager our country's ability to dominate in the air until we better
understand what is feasible, in terms of schedule, cost, and
capability.
The services and the Department continue to reevaluate force
structure requirements. Our in-depth review and analysis suggest that
the Department's proposed plan is more effective and affordable than
the alternatives that Dr. Krepinevich has offered.
Attachment 3
When the Secretary of Defense announced the decision on May 8,
2002, to recommend to Congress that the funds for Crusader be
redirected, the Army will be foregoing their next-generation, 155mm,
self-propelled howitzer. The Army has, literally, skipped a generation
of self-propelled howitzers and is focusing on the Objective Force
indirect fire variant of the Future Combat System.
On May 13, the USD(AT&L) issued direction to the Secretary of the
Army to take all necessary and prudent actions to implement this
decision, and to only obligate additional funds for Crusader after
consulting with him. The Army is working toward an orderly termination
of the program as directed by the Secretary of Defense. The contract
will soon be terminated and a settlement will be negotiated with the
contractor concurrently, a budget amendment for fiscal year 2003 has
been submitted to reflect the Secretary's decision. The Department is
studying alternative investments in the indirect fire missile area to
accomplish the transformation desired by the Secretary.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Bill Nelson
transformation of military space
4. Senator Bill Nelson. Admiral Cebrowski, recent issues of
Aviation Week and Space Technology magazines feature excellent articles
on ``MILSPACE'' highlighting the important role space systems played in
Afghanistan enabling the collection, processing, and dissemination of
time-critical information to help combat forces find and destroy
terrorists. We have also recently heard Under Secretary of Defense Pete
Aldridge testify that getting space-borne capabilities to our
warfighters provides them with the best communication coverage.
Currently, the National Security Space Architect is conducting a study
to provide us and the military space community with an integrated
roadmap of deliverable transformational communication capability. In
light of the significant advantages gained from the employment of space
technology, how will these pertinent findings be incorporated into the
transformation process?
Admiral Cebrowski. One of the things we've learned well from the
conflict in Afghanistan, is that while the intelligence collection
capabilities have been excellent, we need to add persistence to the
equation. That is to say, satellites in low-Earth orbit circumnavigate
the globe about every 97 minutes, but operationally you'd like to have
longer dwell time over likely targets. You'd like to be able to have a
focused view of hot spots on the face of the Earth that is not
intermittent, but more continuous, in order to achieve universal
situational awareness. Universal has a temporal component; you'd like
to know all the time what's going on around the globe. One way to
achieve that is with more satellites in stationary orbit--a very
expensive solution, or--a more transformational way--develop new
technology which allows us to have excellent collection capabilities
through a triad approach of space-based systems and sub-orbital
platforms.
5. Senator Bill Nelson. Admiral Cebrowski, how will you ensure that
these results will be shared across the military services and DOD
agencies?
Admiral Cebrowski. To ensure we share results across Services and
DOD agencies, and to make sharing of results smoother and transparent
for national and military customers, many of the recommendations of the
Space Commission have been implemented.
With respect to better integration of space, a new office has been
created, the Directorate of National Security Space Integration. This
office is tasked to exploit the best practices of the military space
and the NRO communities to make the world's best space forces even
better.
support for space programs
6. Senator Bill Nelson. Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski,
the Department of Defense budget request indicates a range of support
for increased or improved capabilities in space to support military
operations-particularly in intelligence, geo-location, and
communications. This is clearly a ``payload-centric'' view of military
space. Yet there is significant risk to assured access to space given
available technology and the cost of space lift. What is the role of
space lift in military transformation?
Secretary Wolfowitz. The Department is addressing the assured
access to space risk through the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle
(EELV) program coupled with developing a joint technology development/
demonstration effort with NASA for reusable launch vehicles. The EELV
with the two launch service providers provides the Department and the
Nation assured access to space. In addition, the EELV program is
reducing the costs associated with space launch by 25-30 percent over
current U.S. capabilities. Space lift provides the means with which to
achieve the Department's transformational goals and objectives while
maintaining assured access to space for critical national security
payloads that support current and future military operations.
Admiral Cebrowski. The United States must have assured and
affordable access to space in order to expand or even sustain space
operations. Assured access to space is crucial to military
transformation for many reasons: to enable future innovative ways to
support combat forces; to counter threats from unfriendly space-capable
nations; and to create the conditions for a commercial market that may
ultimately support and drive rapidly evolving space technologies. This
means being able to place useful payloads in all relevant Earth orbits
with high probability of launch success and operation-on-orbit within
hours--instead of months or years. It also means the ability to operate
flexibly in and through space to accomplish both manned and unmanned
missions in support of U.S. national and military objectives.
Any alternative architecture of space lift and sub-orbital and on-
orbit vehicle capabilities, that truly enables military transformation,
must allow the Nation to: Perform new missions in space; provide a
responsive and resilient space lift/operations capability that is
increasingly acknowledged as militarily essential; permit an escape
from the current vicious cycle of cost-weight-size-complexity-risk-
delay that frustrates the current development process for space
systems; offer the potential for future commercial exploitation that
not only would result in vast new commercial opportunities, but would
also drive development of even better space system capabilities.
7. Senator Bill Nelson. Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski,
what role will greater DOD-NASA cooperation and costs sharing play in
achieving this transformation?
Secretary Wolfowitz. The Department is currently cooperating with
NASA in a number of critical space technology areas to include
environmental sensing, hypersonics, rocket propulsion, etc. These
continued cooperative efforts, which include cost sharing, will enable
the transformational technological advances to be achieved in a more
timely manner. This is done through the use of the two organizations'
strengths in a manner that maximizes the technological advancement
achieved while minimizing the cost and time associated with developing
new capabilities.
Admiral Cebrowski. DOD and NASA are forging an important
partnership in the development of a new reusable launch vehicle
program, the Space Launch Initiative (SLI). No national vehicle can or
should be developed without factoring in military needs, mission models
and rapid launch capabilities for national security. The rapid access
to space typified by military launch needs could have a direct bearing
on future follow-on vehicles that could have commercial cargo-carrying
capabilities.
An integrated technology plan between the Air Force and NASA will
help spur the development of a second generation reusable launcher. As
DOD's executive agent for space, the Air Force will take a lead role
for partnering with NASA in the SLI program. A fully reusable vehicle
would have a significant role in both military space applications as
well as civil human space flight missions. This makes a partnership and
cost-sharing arrangement between DOD and NASA a good fit.
field exercises/resourcing
8. Senator Bill Nelson. Dr. Krepinevich, in your organization's
report titled: ``Lighting the Path Ahead: Field Exercises and
Transformation'', you highlight the critical role that field exercises
and experiments contribute towards evaluating military innovations
during the transformation process. Of specific interest is your
assessment in that report of the shortage of facilities to support
comparable joint field exercises that enable experimentation in support
of transformation. Could you please highlight your concerns and the
impacts that you have identified as a result of your study and provide
some recommendations?
Dr. Krepinevich. During the latter stages of the Cold War, the U.S.
military invested in a number of high-fidelity training facilities that
greatly enhanced the value of its field training. For example, the
Army's NTC prepared brigade-size units for combined arms mechanized
warfare against a Soviet-style adversary. Similarly, the Air Force and
Navy put their pilots through Red Flag and Top Gun training,
respectively.
Comparable facilities do not yet exist to support high-fidelity
field exercises focused on the anti-access/area-denial threat discussed
in this report. A Joint National Training Center (JNTC) is needed to
enable both service and joint transformation field exercises. In 1997,
the National Defense Panel (NDP) recommended that this facility be
established as part of its transformation strategy. The recently
completed Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) promises to ``explore the
need'' for such a center.
A principal barrier to creating a JNTC involves acquiring a sizable
expanse of land along the U.S. littoral. Current efforts to train at
the operational level find Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and the
services attempting to link together various individual training
centers (e.g., the western training ranges in Millennium Challenge
2002) along with computer simulations. Even if such a tract of land
could be made available, the U.S. military would likely experience
restrictions on its ability to radiate along the radio frequency
spectrum, due to the potential for disrupting commercial electronic
activity.
Several potential concerns arise from the absence of training
facilities capable of supporting field exercises focused on preparing
U.S. forces for emerging challenges at the operational level of
warfare. One is that it promotes emphasis on training at the tactical
level of warfare. To be sure, such training is both necessary and
desirable. But that training should be strongly informed by the
warfighting concepts that are developed based on what is learned while
training at the operational level of warfare. Absent significant
training at the operational level-especially in a period of
transformation--there exists the danger that tactical-level training
will suffer.
A second concern rests with the U.S. military's ability to
determine the feasibility of operational concepts in which information
architectures play a major role. If the military is precluded from
exercising its command, control, communications, computers,
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C\4\ISR) architectures
at the operational level of warfare, it may prove difficult to
determine, with any great degree of confidence, the progress being made
(or not made) in realizing such critical concepts as NCW or in
campaigns against threats that involve C\4\ISR efforts spread over
large areas (e.g., extended-range strikes against critical mobile
targets). Nevertheless, there is some cause for optimism. The Commander
in Chief (CINC) of JFCOM's efforts to link the western training ranges
together to support field exercises and experimentation may represent
the first step toward creating a JNTC.
As for urban operations, current training centers, such as the
Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, offer
facilities more characteristic of the terrain found in small towns.
They possess neither the size encountered when operating in an urban
environment, nor many of its unique terrain features (e.g., high-rise
buildings, sewer and subway systems, etc.). A Joint Urban Warfare
Training Center (JUWTC) should be created along the lines called for by
the NDP. Such a center could also be employed to conduct high-fidelity
exercises to prepare a wide range of government and non-government
organizations to deal effectively with terrorist attacks on U.S. urban
centers, especially those involving the covert use of chemical,
biological or radiological weapons.
It will also be desirable to conduct transformation field exercises
that address the growing challenge of maintaining space control or
defending against an attack at the strategic level on the U.S. national
information infrastructure. Yet it is far from clear how this might be
accomplished. There seems to be no comparable training infrastructure
for these missions that might provide the kind of high-fidelity
training for anti-access/area-denial and urban operations that could be
available at a JNTC or JUWTC, respectively. Enabling these kinds of
field exercises represents another major challenge for the U.S.
military's transformation effort.
9. Senator Bill Nelson. Dr. Krepinevich, how important in your view
is joint simulation?
Dr. Krepinevich. Early in the transformation process, joint war
gaming and simulations can be excellent means for identifying new
systems and force elements and developing new operational concepts as
well as weeding out those that have serious flaws. For example, the war
games conducted at the Naval War College in the early 1920s proved
extremely useful in developing promising operational concepts for the
use of naval air power, as well as the associated measures of
effectiveness. Given the perennial environment of limited time and
resources under which military organizations must operate, well-
designed and executed joint war games and simulations can provide an
invaluable service to those charged with developing a program of field
exercises as part of a larger transformation strategy.
space transformation/field exercises
10. Senator Bill Nelson. Admiral Cebrowski, for non-space systems,
the military regularly trains the way it expects to fight. That same
adage has to apply to space. How do you intend to incorporate military
space systems into the transformational training exercises and the
joint operational battlefield exercises?
Admiral Cebrowski. As a result of the recommendations of the Space
Commission and the Secretary of Defense's memorandum directing the
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff to promulgate guidance directing
CINCJFCOM to establish a Space Applications Experimentation Cell at
JFCOM, CINCJFCOM has created a Space Applications Experimentation Cell
with the goal of overseeing the innovative experimentation of space
programs with joint applications. Further, both JFCOM and U.S. Space
Command routinely include space systems in the conduct of training
exercises and joint operational battlefield exercises.
To support joint battlefield training exercises and
transformational training exercises, the Department must explore a
variety of methodologies that employ modeling and simulation tools
based on measures of merit and effectiveness that will help quantify
the effects of space-based capabilities. The military currently uses a
variety of tools to simulate space environments in support of
exercises, experiments and wargames. These tools must be modernized to
take into account the missions and tasks that space systems can
perform. Robust modeling and simulation tools can help military
commanders learn how to cope with the loss or temporary interruption of
key space capabilities, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS),
satellite communications, remote sensing or missile warning
information.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Strom Thurmond
rapid transformation of armed forces
11. Senator Thurmond. Secretary Wolfowitz, last fall, in your
opening statement for the hearing on Quadrennial Defense Review, you
indicated that: `` To meet the challenges over the horizon, we must
transform our Armed Forces more rapidly, more creatively, and even more
radically than we had previously planned.'' The current thinking
appears to be that the transformation is a long-term process. Do you
still believe that transformation must be done quickly? If not, what
has changed since last fall?
Secretary Wolfowitz. In addition to the thinking articulated in DPG
2003 and the QDR last fall, it was clear that the tragic events of
September 11th would provide additional momentum for the transformation
of our military forces. Those imperatives for transformation suggested
by the strategic environment remain in force today, and compel our
sense of urgency. However, we recognize today as we did last fall that
transformation will not occur overnight. Transformation is a continuum
and not a discrete event or envisioned end state. As indicated by the
actions of our forces in Afghanistan, we have clearly made progress
toward transformation. However, the effort to prepare our forces for
the future remains a long-term endeavor. The capabilities demonstrated
in Afghanistan are just a glimpse of how far we still can go.
Transformation of the U.S. military is not just a single
transformation, but a host of transformations that, measured in the
aggregate, will radically alter the size, shape, and capabilities of
our forces over an extended period of time.
scope of transformation
12. Senator Thurmond. Secretary Wolfowitz, although the focus of
transformation is on the military capabilities, we must also consider
the transformation of the technology base and industrial base to
support the transformation. What is the Department doing to address the
transformation of the technology base and industrial base?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Our defense transformation clearly requires a
strong and innovative technology base; and a healthy, competitive, and
efficient industrial base.
We must continue our commitment to science and technology (S&T)
programs which generate leading edge technologies. We are aligning our
S&T investments with the desired capabilities stated in the Secretary's
Quadrennial Defense Review. Our objective will be to stimulate more
innovative thinking on ``war winning'' technologies and concepts, and
transitioning these to the warfighter. Funding issues notwithstanding,
the challenge in maintaining the technology base is the balance between
a program that takes the long-view with broad investments and a program
that remains responsive to immediate needs such as combating terrorism
technologies.
As we improve the network-centric warfighting capabilities needed
for the 21st century, DOD needs to attract a broader industrial base--
particularly those grounded in information technology and
telecommunications and networking--to our business. We also must
continue to evaluate key industry sectors and subsectors to identify
capabilities needed to meet current and future defense requirements. We
will continue to work with industry to explore and promote improvements
to policy and procedures. We will continue to implement business
practices that result in more effective and efficient government/
industry collaboration.
eliminating duplications
13. Senator Thurmond. Admiral Cebrowski, our military forces are
based on historical precedences. Today, if a nation were building an
army from scratch, there probably would not be four distinct military
services each supported by distinct medical, logistical, and
intelligence groups. Admiral Owens, our former Vice Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggests that combining the medical, logistical,
and intelligence groups should be the first step in transforming our
military service. What are your views regarding the consolidation of
the support services?
Admiral Cebrowski. I believe there are significant organizational
implications to be examined as the Department implements transformation
initiatives. As the Department transitions to information age
operations it is no longer clear what constitutes support functions
versus combat functions. Those lines are increasingly blurring to such
an extent that traditional support roles of intelligence and logistics
can no longer be divorced from pure combat operations. All of these
elements are increasingly interrelated. This change is being driven by
the robust networking of the force and the resultant high level of
shared awareness that will increasingly characterize information-age
operations. This is an area amenable to additional research and
examination to understand the implications that Network Centric Warfare
offers to traditional tenets of warfare. From this research effort will
likely follow new organizational constructs we cannot now envision.
cultural change
14. Senator Thurmond. Admiral Cebrowski, as you indicate in your
statement, the most difficult challenge to transformation is to change
the culture in an organization. Historically, we have used education as
the focal point to implement change, but as you indicate it takes a
long time. What changes, if any, are you advocating to the military
education system to begin the change in the mindset of our future
military leaders?
Admiral Cebrowski. A number of changes are planned to transform the
Department's military education and training system. First, the CJCS,
the Commanders of Combat Commands, and services will develop an initial
set of joint core competencies linked to service core competencies.
Second, the Joint Staff, National Defense University, USJFCOM,
services, and senior service colleges will develop a core curriculum
for Joint Military Leader Development and begin distribution of those
courses on line. Third, the CJCS, USD (P&R), and the services will
establish service requirements to track joint education, training, and
operational experiences of military personnel. Fourth, USD (P&R), USD
(AT&L), ASD (C\3\I), the CJCS, USJFCOM, and DOD components will develop
a common operational architecture that provides interoperability of
live, virtual, and constructive training systems across the Department,
leading to the creation of a joint national training capability
environment that meets service, interoperability, and Commander of
Combat Commands training needs. This will include accelerated
development of common standards, implementation guidelines, and digital
libraries for Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) and Job Performance
Technologies, as well as methods to adapt distributed training to
multi-language and multi-cultural environments. Fifth, USD (Policy),
the CJCS, USJFCOM, and USD (P&R) will develop a common set of
interagency, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational
``Joint'' Mission Essential Tasks. Military education and training are
an integral part of the DOD transformation initiative. In order to
respond efficiently and effectively to the emerging dynamic,
capabilities-based environment, education and training form the
foundation for the long-range transformation process by changing the
culture of DOD.
institutional mindset
15. Senator Thurmond. General Pace, a frequent criticism of the
Department of Defense is that each of the military departments focuses
on its service and not on jointness. If the Department truly wants to
transform the manner in which it operates, it must overcome this
institutional mindset. In your view, have the services abandoned their
parochial view on the modernization and transformation of the
Department of Defense? What are examples of this change?
General Pace. The institutional mindset of the services is not
necessarily something that is entirely bad or that must be abandoned in
order to facilitate transformation. Each service has the responsibility
to develop and maintain distinct capabilities in support of our
National Security and National Military Strategies. These distinct
capabilities help to ensure that the United States remains dominant
across the full spectrum of military operations anywhere on the globe.
Elimination of these service unique core competencies should not be
the goal, rather their integration into a fully interoperable joint
force. To do this, we need to develop a new mindset with respect to the
way we operate. In the past, we compartmentalized the battle area into
sea, air and land sections and then proceeded to fight as though each
section belonged exclusively to a specific service. We now need to
think in terms of a joint battle space. This joint battle space will be
populated by systems from each service that are designed to operate
seamlessly--based on shared joint operational concepts.
The work we have been doing with the Joint Requirements Oversight
Council (JROC) over the last 2 years is one example of how we are
balancing the services' need to create and maintain unique capabilities
with the Department's need to advance joint warfighting. For years, the
JROC validated individual service requirements without the benefit of
an overarching concept it could use to help fit the pieces together. As
a result, systems were designed, built, and modernized to optimize
individual service needs. The ability of these systems to operate
efficiently in a joint environment was not always the up front
priority. Consequently, we've had to back into system interoperability
and ``jointness.''
We are transforming the military by changing the mindset that the
best solution is the one that always optimizes individual service
requirements. We are changing the mindset by advancing joint
capabilities and assessing all systems against a set of ``joint''
standards for interoperability at the front end of the requirements
generation process. The JROC is working to advance DOD transformation
by shifting its focus from merely validating individual systems to
developing joint operational concepts and architectures that establish
objective standards for assessing system interoperability. These
standards will facilitate realization of joint capabilities over
service-centric solutions.
role of the jroc
16. Senator Thurmond. General Pace, as the Vice Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, you also chair the Joint Requirements Oversight
Council (JROC). In my view, the JROC plays a critical role in
determining the pace of transformation in terms of enhancing our
military capabilities. What general area of the technology
transformation do you consider the most critical to improving our long-
term warfighting capability and how can the JROC influence this effort?
General Pace. In his annual Posture Statement to Congress, General
Myers stated that: The area offering the greatest promise for
significant transformation in the near term is information sharing. The
U.S. military is an ``information intensive'' force. Much of the
military superiority we currently enjoy rests in our ability to achieve
and maintain a decisive advantage in accessing, gathering, exploiting,
and acting on information. Our ability to arrive at and implement
better decisions, faster than an opponent can react, rests on the
accumulation, processing, and understanding of vast quantities of
operational and tactical information.
We have taken the first steps toward fully integrating our
capabilities to find and strike targets of all types, using networks of
sensors and shooters to achieve desired effects. Our goal is to allow
dispersed forces to collaborate on operations and give our warfighters
the ability to achieve effects rapidly and decisively--with a speed and
accuracy that will overwhelm an adversary's ability to respond. This
goal is achievable if we creatively use existing and planned
information technologies.
The JROC is working to achieve this goal by supporting the
Chairman's priorities to address shortfalls in joint command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance (C\4\ISR). Although we have made significant recent
improvements, current deficiencies in joint C\4\ISR result in gaps and
seams between the combatant commands and between the services, which
must be eliminated. Integrated C\4\ISR will give our Joint Task Force
Commanders the necessary tools to fully integrate their combat power.
One of the concepts we are exploring to help work this issue is the
idea of a Standing Joint Force Headquarters (SJFH). This operational
level headquarters unit will serve as a tool to help push greater
interoperability. It will have a robust C\4\I architecture that all
future weapons platforms or communications systems, and any upgrades to
existing systems would have to plug into. The JROC is currently working
to establish these architectures, which it will use to drive the
development of joint interoperable systems as well as integration of
current (legacy) systems. An example of one materiel solution the JROC
is currently working to support the SJFH concept is the Deployable
Joint Command and Control (DJC2) program. DJC2 is an acquisition plan
to field a command and control headquarters in support of the joint
commander's need for a scalable, modular, rapidly deployable (air/sea)
command post with reach-back capability, and protection from chemical
and biological agents. These types of solutions are designed to advance
the joint capabilities of our forces by enhancing our ability to gather
and process information required to support better, more timely
decisions.
legacy forces
17. Senator Thurmond. General Kernan, you state that we need to
update legacy systems to continue to fight today and to bridge our
modernization gap as we move forward with transformation. Since funding
is already a constraining factor in the transformation effort, what
legacy systems would you update to provide us the most critical
capabilities while we transform to the next generation of weapons
systems or technology?
General Kernan. The interoperability and integration of prioritized
legacy fielded capabilities is critical to joint, coalition, and allied
operations and we work closely with all ClNCs/Services/Agencies (C/S/A)
to ensure critical warfighting deficiencies are identified and
prioritized for JROC endorsement and resolution. Currently,
identification and comprehensive solutions to resolve critical JTF C2
Legacy interoperability shortfalls is a priority. Specifically, system
improvements which would enhance situational awareness, intelligence
processing and distribution, combat identification, shared common
operational picture, Information Management/Information Assurance and
Joint Data Network are examples of specific areas of required legacy
improvements. Furthermore, to support transformation these improvements
must be accomplished within the command and control concept and
framework of the Standing Joint Force Headquarters command and control
concept and infrastructure to ensure near term improvements align with
future warfighting initiatives.
maneuver areas
18. Senator Thurmond. General Kernan, your proposed joint training
exercise, Millennium Challenge 2002, which is a major milestone toward
transformation, calls for using a broad array of land and ocean
training areas. What constraints in terms of population and
environmental encroachment are you facing in planning this exercise?
General Kernan. Encroachment constraints limiting our Joint
exercise are those that impact our host military installations on a
daily basis. For example, various encroachment factors on the 17 miles
of beach front at Camp Pendleton restrict the number of simultaneous
landings to only three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) transports,
which is half the number required. As a result, we must land the
remaining force administratively and later combine them at a nearby
boat basin. This limits our scope of operations and minimizes the
realism necessary for effective tactical training.
Another major constraint impacts the southern corridor at Fort
Irwin. This area is designated as critical habitat for the Desert
Tortoise and cannot be used for maneuver training. Maneuver training is
restricted to the central corridor, which is not large enough to
provide realistic training and reduces the amount of training that can
be conducted at Fort Irwin. Fort Irwin will also be constrained by air
quality restrictions and by the reduced number of radio frequencies.
Air quality restrictions prohibit training with graphite smoke and the
particulate matter standards restrict the amount of smoke that we can
generate via other methods. These restrictions have a direct impact on
training realism. The loss of radio frequencies, due to the proximity
of Los Angeles and other larger cities in Mexico, also impacts the
ability of the forces to freely communicate with one another.
Restrictions on the use of the Navy's important Anti-Submarine
Warfare (ASW) sensor prevented us from being able to demonstrate the
contribution of this system toward improving ASW proficiency in
littoral waters, a key to providing Joint Force access to denied areas
and for assisting in Navy transformation efforts.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator John McCain
cornerstone of transformation
19. Senator McCain. Secretary Wolfowitz, I realize that
transformation means different things to different people and is not
only measured in modernization of weapon systems. Given President
Bush's promise to transform our military, what in your opinion, is the
cornerstone of transformation in the President's 2003 defense budget?
What specific program stands out in your mind as one that best
exemplifies transformation?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Transformation and modernization are not
either or choices. We must do both. One cannot neglect either
modernization or transformation. The lion's share of Department budgets
will still be spent on operations and modernization in coming years and
not transformation. The fraction to be spent on transformation will be
very small in comparison but equally significant. That said we have to
rebalance the investments being made in critical areas. Investments in
information must increase. Our networking capability must go up, our
sensor capabilities must increase. Additional funding could be used to
accelerate unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned combat air vehicle
programs as well as unmanned undersea sensor efforts. The Department is
in the midst of a massive transformation into the information age so
there must be a wholesale rebalancing of investments. What will become
highly prized are those capabilities that improve positioning, sensing
and networking. Systems or capabilities that are big, slow and
ponderous will hold less and less value for the future military.
research and development
20. Senator McCain. Admiral Cebrowski, would you agree that
military transformation requires some level of experimentation in both
strategic thinking and weapons development?
Admiral Cebrowski. Experimentation is essential for defense
transformation. The emerging security environment presents many
uncertainties and strategic issues. Each issue involves alternative
concepts for addressing that issue and each concept calls for
particular capabilities. A variety of combinations of operational
arrangements and weapons also may be used to provide the requisite
capabilities. Only through experimentation will we learn and gain
enough experience to understand what approaches comprise the best way
to allow U.S. Armed Forces to extend and broaden their competitive
advantage and rapidly adapt to the uncertainties inherent in
information age warfare.
Experimentation should be widespread, planned and executed in a
decentralized manner, guided by principles of competition and
cooperation in the information age. One aspect of force transformation
is to embed a culture of experimentation throughout the defense
establishment. Every organization should adopt a culture of examining
and reexamining its practices and experimenting with new approaches to
extend its capabilities at every opportunity. Operators, technologists,
and systems integrators should work in teams, rapidly prototyping
technology and co-evolving organizational and procedural change to
achieve desired capabilities. Spiral transformation that significantly
improves operational capabilities is possible in months, rather than
decades, by transforming current acquisition approaches and the
development of joint mission capabilities.
21. Senator McCain. Admiral Cebrowski, do you feel that the level
of research and development (R&D) funding in the 2003 defense budget is
adequate to propel our military into the 21st century?
Admiral Cebrowski. The fiscal year 2003 defense budget request of
$369 billion, balances the immediate threats to our national security
with the long-term process of military transformation. The fiscal year
2003 defense budget request contains a significant increase of $12
billion in R&D funding over fiscal year 2001. It includes a substantial
investment of $9.9 billion for S&T programs. If approved, the requested
R&D funding will provide the needed funds intended to begin yielding
the desired transformational effects necessary to propel our military
into the 21st century. Examples of such transformational effects are
major leaps in military capabilities that are likely to occur in the
discovery and development of new technologies funded in S&T programs.
22. Senator McCain. Admiral Cebrowski, with respect to the Navy's
amphibious warfare capability, it seems to me that the proposed LHD-9
is not a very transformational program especially considering that it
is the exact same hull of the current LHA class that is based on a
1950s design. It seems to me that if the LHA(R) class ship is built to
have a lifespan of 50 years with no further R&D invested, then LHD-9
will be a 100-year-old design when it is decommissioned in the 2050
timeframe. The Navy would not develop an aircraft carrier (CVN),
destroyer (DD), or submarine (SSN) without a robust R&D effort, so
where is the R&D funding for a major amphibious ship like LHA(R)? Is
the amphibious Navy being relegated to non-transformational status?
Admiral Cebrowski. The major transformational impact in
expeditionary warfare will be a function of the modular capabilities,
which will change the nature of the battle space for the expeditionary
forces. Transformational capabilities in sensing and networking
relevant operational information will allow agile effects based
operations leveraging joint mission capabilities originating both
within and outside the littoral region. Manned and unmanned sensors and
countermeasures will produce an asymmetric information advantage for
U.S. and coalition forces. It can be anticipated that the systems and
maneuver elements that deploy from the amphibious ship will be changed
repeatedly during the planned 40-year service life of the LHA(R).
Exciting developments in hull forms, power and propulsion systems are
being explored which appear to have unique applicability to littoral
operations. The most beneficial application of all of these
transformational concept/technologies will be as a complement to the
LHA class of amphibious ships, which can be thought of as one of the
containers expeditionary warfare comes in. An equally valid alternative
view is that high speed vessel technology could be further exploited as
a means to broaden the capabilities base and as a means of delivering
ground force combat power. After this approach, as older ships left the
inventory, a different capability could be substituted or added
yielding a broader mix of capabilities. This is a fruitful area for
further study.
joint operations
23. Senator McCain. General Kernan, our military's performance in
Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom has been remarkable. The
ability of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps to work
seamlessly together has been key to that performance. Obviously, joint
operations are going to be critical to success in the future. Can you
give me some specific examples of programs in the President's budget
that are directly related to help our Armed Forces work together?
General Kernan. Operation Enduring Freedom demonstrated many joint
military capabilities and successful cases of transformational efforts
that typify our Armed Forces working together. Specific examples of
programs in the fiscal year 2003 President's Budget include:
1. The Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) has been used
extensively in Afghanistan. This joint munition is deliverable by
multiple models of Navy and Air Force aircraft. The Joint Direct Attack
Munitions does not replace any existing weapon system; rather, we take
a low cost weapon and couple it with a high tech kit to make a weapon
with high accuracy, all-weather, autonomous, conventional bombing
capability
2. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) made a significant operational
impact and promise even greater advantages in the future. As you are
aware we have had stellar success with UAVs in finding hostiles in
Afghanistan and creating increased situational awareness for commanders
and troops in the field without placing additional personnel at risk in
the air or on the ground.
3. Deployable Joint Command and Control--a program for new land-
and sea-based joint command and control centers that can be easily
relocated as tactical situations require--is under development by the
Navy. Deployable Joint Command and Control is aligned with Joint Forces
Command's development of the Standing Joint Force Headquarters, the
Chairman of the Joint Chief's priority transformation initiative. Taken
together, these two initiatives exploit new operational and
organizational concepts and technology to reduce the ad-hoc nature of
current joint operations and planning times. These capabilities will
significantly enhance integration, interoperability and operational
execution.
4. Joint Multi-TADIL School (JMTS) located at Ft. McPherson, GA
provided critical joint tactical data link (TADIL) training to the
Joint Interface Control Officers (JICO). JICC-D personnel redesigned
the existing Operations Southern Watch data link architecture and added
the new architecture for Operation Enduring Freedom.
5. Joint Communications Support Element (JCSE) based at MacDill AFB
provided rapidly deployable, robust operational communications suites
to the CINCs, and the joint task force commanders. The JCSE team
configured and modified their high-speed multiplexers in order to feed
Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) data to the major
HQs in theater.
6. Joint Warfighting Analysis Center located in Dahlgren, VA has
been a vital asset in current Enduring Freedom operations. Joint
Warfighting Analysis Center capabilities are intrinsically linked to
the way we plan and fight across all spectrums of conflict with nodal
analysis of effects-based precision targeting options for our combatant
commanders.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Bob Smith
training and education
24. Senator Smith. Secretary Wolfowitz, as I understand it, the
transformation process is a multi-pronged approach to change the way we
fight. You need to change the organizational structure, change the way
it thinks about national defense and warfighting and change the
institutional or cultural mindset. To date, we have seen changes in DOD
organizations--changing BMDO to MDA; changes in DOD guidance
documents--the Defense Review, Defense Planning Guidance, and the
Nuclear Posture Review; and changes in some technologies and weapons.
These all seem to be steering the DOD complex in the direction of
``transformation.''
It seems to me that people need more and more time to get
operationally proficient in a more complex world, a more complex
operational arena, and a more lethal world. Once you have done this, I
believe you will have made significant progress in changing the mindset
of the institution. What is being done to change the training and
education and subsequent employment and rotation of the people within
the DOD to keep up with the increasingly rapid pace of combat
operations?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Training and education transformation will
enable the overarching DOD transformation. The Department's vision for
training transformation is significantly different from those used to
conduct training today. The approach outlined in the Strategic Plan for
Transforming DOD Training (March 1, 2002) emphasizes the mission
requirements of the combatant commanders focused in terms of the
training needed to support the Combatant Commanders requirements,
missions, and capabilities, while preserving the ability of services to
train on their core competencies. The focus of training transformation
is to better enable joint operations in the future. Joint has a broader
context than the traditional military definition of the term. Joint
training includes training, education, and job-performance.
Strategic goals for training transformation include: comprehensive
and systematic joint training focused on the operational requirements
of the Combatant Commanders and linked to readiness assessment; robust,
networked, live, virtual, and constructive training and mission
rehearsal environment that enables DOD to build unparalleled military
capabilities; and acquisition and other supporting processes that
identify interfaces and integrates between training systems and
acquisition, logistics, personnel, military education, and command and
control processes.
As the Department increases emphasis on the training requirements
of combatant commanders, the services' training commands, in meeting
their Title 10 obligations, must find ways to maintain a balance
between training for near-term operations and those in the future. In
addition to supporting service core competencies, transformed training
must be coherent and applicable across the full spectrum of joint,
interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational operations.
review structures
25. Senator Smith. Secretary Wolfowitz, it seems to me a critical
component of a transformation of the Department's weapons programs is a
rethinking of the review structures and processes that are used to
forge and define the programs. Recently the Department has announced a
new development paradigm, spiral or evolutionary acquisition, and a
revised review structure for the missile defense program, a move that I
fully support, and a new structure that I believe better characterizes
the proper method of development. Yet, the new paradigm and structures
have come under considerable criticism, both from within the Department
itself and from some in Congress. It seems there are those who are
comfortable with the onerous review structures of years past that do
not want to see real change. What is being done to ensure the
``transformation message'' is driven down into the Department through
the bureaucracy to the program manager in the field ?
Secretary Wolfowitz. DOD is committed to transforming our
capabilities to suit the unique demands of the 21st century threat and
we recognize we must also transform our processes and policies to
support these changes. Of course, if our policies are not communicated
to the work force, they will be of little value. Evolutionary
acquisition, the key to speeding the acquisition of transformational
capabilities to our warfighter, is a good example of how this policy
was communicated to the community. First, we defined evolutionary
acquisition in our acquisition policy document as the preferred
approach. Second, the Department's leadership is committed to
supporting evolutionary acquisition and that is apparent in various
speeches, conferences, and fora to the workforce. Third, we also
communicate via electronic and paper publications. Finally, we use
training to reinforce our message. The use of evolutionary acquisition
policies have been thoroughly integrated into every aspect of the
Defense Acquisition University curriculum and we are developing
distance learning training to ensure the information is available on
the desktop of every member of our community.
26. Senator Smith. Secretary Wolfowitz, is the entire development/
review structure being redefined to allow all Department programs to
utilize the approach being used on missile defense?
Secretary Wolfowitz. No. The special nature of missile defense
calls for a non-standard approach to acquisition. The Secretary of
Defense has approved a streamlined executive oversight and reporting
process in order to substantially reduce decision times for missile
defense.
27. Senator Smith. Admiral Cebrowski, as I'm sure you will agree,
the trick here is not only to accomplish a ``one-time-good-deal''
transformation of the Department but to establish a paradigm of
continuous review and change for the better. Part S&T and technology
efforts within the Department with an eye toward taking the promising
ideas and concepts and maturing them using the evolutionary development
process to quickly get them into the hands of the warfighter.
I have heard countless times from my constituents that such a
review process either doesn't exist or is badly broken with respect to
the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) efforts. Innovative
concepts that are awarded SBIR contracts are taken only so far along
the development path, and at some point the service or component that
would ultimately utilize the concept should take over the final stages
of development and fielding into the operational forces. Apparently,
there is no structured review process to ensure the operational arms of
the services have insight into the SBIR efforts, provide resources in
the Future Years Defense Plan, and revise concepts of operation to
integrate the efforts into doctrine. Are you aware of this deficiency?
If so, what is being done to ensure the Department gets the most ``
bang for its S&T buck'' and uses promising innovative concepts?
Admiral Cebrowski. The Office of Force Transformation is working on
a new process to enable the co-evolution of concepts and technologies
and consequently catalyze relevant innovation. Technology search
throughout the national and defense laboratories, academia and the
commercial sector will be coordinated with conceptual thought for the
transformed DOD. Where concepts and technologies are a potential match,
we will embark on a process of development of transformation articles,
``prototype-like capabilities'' to be iteratively investigated in
operational or limited objective experimentation. This will enable us
to explore the ramifications of the new concept/technology and provide
a metric for assessing fitness for the future Through this initiative
we will provide a customer for an S&T community whose most advanced
products have often been forced to queue-up behind ongoing acquisition
programs until our technological head-start is gone. We can also
pressurize the pipes in the operational experimentation process, which
needs surrogate future capabilities to enable evaluation of new
concepts. With these tools we can build our own future.
The Office of Force Transformation is exploring strengthening
relationships with angel investors and venture capitalists to help
bridge the SBIR-FYDP funding gap and to get warfighters early access to
technologies being developed in start-ups. Essential to closing this
funding gap will be getting new technologies into the hands of
operators through the transformation articles. The key leverage
imparted is that they will help people see the range of possibilities
for performing operations in truly new ways that abstract discourses on
innovative ideas cannot.
There are currently several programs also trying to bridge the
SBIR-FYDP gap. The Air Force's Warfighter Rapid Acquisition Process and
the Army's Rapid Acquisition Process bridge the gap to allow for a
smoother development process for the most promising of technologies.
The Navy SBIR program concludes with a forum bringing together the
small businesses and public and private investors and customers. Also,
the fiscal year 2002 Defense Appropriations Bill directed the creation
of a non-profit Army venture capital corporation.
space systems
28. Senator Smith. Secretary Wolfowitz, it is clear that the
Department is becoming more and more dependent on space systems in the
prosecution of its wars. Indeed, the U.S. economy is also increasingly
dependent on space systems. I applaud the Department for adopting many
of the recommendations of the Space Commission, which includes dual-
hatting the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Peter Teets, as both the
Under Secretary and the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office,
and also making him the Milestone Decision Authority for Space. I have
met Mr. Teets and believe he is the right person for the job at an
incredibly important time. Given the vast increase of space system
requirements, as well as the cost and complexities of space systems,
all now under the Air Force, why does the Department still allocate
funding to the services in a roughly equivalent percentage?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Fiscal guidance provided to the DOD Components
is provided in such a way as to meet the direction provided in the
Defense Planning Guidance. Final decisions on the final allocation of
resources to the DOD Components is made by the Secretary of Defense
following Defense Resource Board deliberations. Necessary changes to
the DOD Component budgets to meet the DPG are provided as a result of
DRB deliberations.
29. Senator Smith. Secretary Wolfowitz, I have data from 1995
forward that shows the three services get roughly 25-30 percent of the
DOD budget. Shouldn't the Air Force be provided higher funding amounts
to take into consideration its shouldering much of the burden of space
programs?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I am confident that the Air Force is getting
sufficient funding to handle its responsibilities for space programs.
Thousands of factors determine the funding shares of each service in
any given year. Changes in the Air Force's space program funding--this
year or in future years--would not necessarily produce a corresponding
change in its budget share.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Rick Santorum
encouraging change
30. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, Admiral Cebrowski, and
Dr. Krepinevich, it has been argued that for military transformation to
take place, there needs to be an organizational climate that encourages
vigorous debate regarding the ways in which war may change and the
impact of those changes on the military organization in question. That
is, you need a climate that encourages change, wants the organization's
future to be different from its past, and that welcomes change.
Historically, this has been rare in the both the military and the
business world. How best can we stimulate or prod the services into
updating their core competencies?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Under the oversight of the Senior Executive
Council (SEC) and the Business Initiative Council (BIC), we have
directed the services and Department agencies to review their core and
non-core competencies. To aid in this analysis we are using a decision
tree methodology that helps us determine our core competencies and
explore the possibility of outsourcing non-core competencies and
explore the possibility of outsourcing non-core competencies. We have
emphasized several important themes throughout this analysis:
(1) Transfer military personnel performing business functions to
warfighter jobs.
(2) When outsourcing decisions are made, consider A-76 and
alternatives to A-76.
We are working with the Office of Management and Budget to identify
Pioneer Projects as prototype processes for A-76 alternatives.
Admiral Cebrowski. Researchers have written that because
institutional culture is usually the last thing to change, it is the
first effort that must be undertaken in any organizational
transformation. That effort begins and ends with leadership. Effective
transformation leadership encourages innovation and intelligent risk
taking. Leadership must own the vision for transformation.
Additionally, we must incentivize those activities of discovery--
operational concept development, experimentation, and operational
prototyping, to name a few--that will allow us to create the future
from the unknown.
Dr. Krepinevich. There are a number of ways to promote a climate
that encourages and welcomes change. Permit me to elaborate on two.
A Critical Mass of Senior Leaders: Military transformation requires
a critical mass of support from senior military and civilian leaders
who are, themselves, advocates of change. I have yet to find a single
case of military transformation that was effected without this kind of
critical mass. Moreover, by its nature, dramatic change in large
military organizations almost inevitably involve, a long-term process
that spans a decade or more. However, the U.S. military's institutional
practices typically find senior leaders rotated out of their
assignments every 3 or 4 years. While this rotation cycle may work well
for leaders whose responsibilities are near term oriented (for example,
the regional CINC who is responsible for the immediate warfighting
mission in his area of operation), the transformation mission is one
that can be accomplished only over a relatively long period of time.
It is not surprising, then, that military organizations that have
successfully transformed have almost always had a few key senior
leaders serve an extended tour of duty, often double or even triple the
length of a typical flag (i.e., general or admiral) officer tour in
today's U.S. military. During the German army's transformation to
blitzkrieg, for example, the head of its shadow general staff, General
Hans von Seeckt, served 7 years in that position. The American Navy's
exploitation of naval aviation was shepherded by Vice Admiral William
Moffett, who remained head of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics for 12
consecutive years. On the other hand, the tour of duty for the CINC
JFCOM remains the same as those for CINCs who are primarily responsible
for meeting immediate warfighting requirements. The absence of extended
tours of service for transformation-minded senior U.S. military leaders
serving in key positions (e.g., CINC JFCOM) should give pause to those
who are concerned about joint transformation field exercises in
particular and the prospects for transformation in general.
Joint Field Exercises: One reason why military transformations
typically require a decade or so to bring about is that they must
overcome the resistance of large organizations to major change.
This is especially true with respect to the U.S. military, which
must contend with the additional burden of its remarkable success, and
which today is undisputedly the world's premier fighting force. Thus,
aside from convincing the U.S. military that transformation is
necessary, its members, especially the officer corps, must also be
convinced that transformation is possible, and that the military is
proceeding down the right transformation path. Properly structured
field exercises, involving actual forces in an environment that is as
close to actual operations as possible, are arguably unsurpassed in
their ability to generate support, and even enthusiasm, for
transformation within the officer corps. History shows that such
maneuvers are important in convincing the officer corps-in a way that
no war game or simulation ever could have-that they were onto something
special, that a dramatically new and more effective way of conducting
military operations was indeed possible. In short, past exercises have
helped to sustain momentum for transformation and to institutionalize
it within the military services.
experimentation
31. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, Admiral Cebrowski, and
Dr. Krepinevich, what role does experimentation play in this process?
That is, to what extent do the services need to experiment, discover,
learn, test, and demonstrate new concepts, technologies, and
applications?
Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski. Experimentation is
essential. Results provide critical feedback to refine and ascertain
feasibility of concepts, processes, organizations, and technology. This
process provides for a frequent and continuous cycle of events where
spiral learning can occur and be rapidly incorporated into joint force
capabilities and operations. Concept-based experimentation in wargames
and field exercises yields new ways to accomplish critical operations,
missions and tasks. Transformation occurs most rapidly and effectively
when military personnel and system developers work side-by-side on
emerging concepts and operational challenges. A process of rapid spiral
transformation employs experimentation to reach beyond current
capabilities and learn what actions must be taken to reach the next
step in achieving desired joint mission capabilities.
Dr. Krepinevich. Field exercises, and the experiments they make
possible, play a critical role in enabling military innovation and
transformation, which can be defined as innovation on a grand scale or
on a scale sufficient to bring about a change in warfare regimes (i.e.,
a military revolution). Properly undertaken, field exercises are a
source of great competitive advantage. Their benefits include:
Reducing uncertainty concerning how best to meet
emerging threats;
Determining the proper mix of emerging and legacy
systems in the future force;
Enabling militaries to develop and evaluate a wide
range of military capabilities and forms of operation, which
can be fully and rapidly developed if and when a threat
emerges;
Crenerating successes that inspire enthusiasm for, and
sustain the momentum of, military transformation and
innovation;
Complicating the planning of would-be enemies;
Identifying intra-regime shifts--major shifts in the
military competition that, while they do not require large-
scale transformation, do require the military to effect
significant innovation;
Helping to avoid premature, large-scale production of
emerging systems that may appear promising but that actually
offer little in terms of military capability; and
Identifying and solving the practical problems
inherent in developing new operations, force structures and
systems that cannot be determined through wargames and
simulations.
spiral development
32. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, the Bush administration
touts the concept of ``spiral development'' as a way to accelerate
capabilities and get technologies and platforms in the hands of the
warfighters faster. The idea, in concept, is to field a platform or
device, allow the users to become proficient in the use of the system,
and then add capabilities as they mature. How does this concept differ
from traditional ``block modification'' processes where technological
advances are added to an existing platform as part of technology
``refresher'' or insertion?
Secretary Wolfowitz. While evolutionary acquisition/spiral
development is similar to the traditional ``block modification''
process you described in your question, it differs in several ways and
provides significant advantages. In the past, ``block modifications''
were applied to fully capable systems which met all stated
requirements. With spiral development, each spiral will incrementally
provide greater capability approaching the satisfaction of all stated
requirements. Evolutionary acquisition and spiral development are
focused on providing the warfighter with an initial capability which
may be less than the full requirement as a trade-off for earlier
delivery. This offers greater reduction in our cycle time, not only
speeding the delivery of advanced capability to our warfighters, but
also allows fielding demonstrated technologies for both hardware and
software in more manageable pieces.
interim force
33. Senator Santorum. Dr. Krepinevich, under the leadership of Army
Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, the Army has initiated a bold
transformation strategy to better align the service to counter 21st
century threats. A central element of this initiative is to make the
service lighter and more easily deployed to a particular conflict. The
Army has elected to undertake a phased approach to this transformation
initiative by pursuing an ``interim force'' and by investing in
technologies to support an ``objective force.'' In your opinion, does
it make sense to invest in this interim force, thereby diverting
critical resources away from the fielding of the objective force?
Dr. Krepinevich. The Army plans to field the first of six (or
perhaps seven) medium-weight brigades--or Interim Brigade Combat Teams
(IBCTs)--in January 2003, with the first brigade ready for combat by
May 2003.
Several issues come to mind in considering the IBCTs' function as a
bridge to the Army's Objective Force. One is that, the first four
brigades to be reformed into the IBCT configuration are light
formations. In short, if it succeeds in executing its conversions to
IBCTs as planned, by the end of this decade the Army will be a heavier
force than it is today.
In depicting these new formations the Army states that ``The IBCTs
two core qualities are high mobility . . . and its ability to achieve
decisive action through dismounted Infantry assault.'' While the first
quality would seem to conform to the Army's concept for the Objective
Force, the second seems quite at odds with the Army Training and
Doctrine Command's (TRADOCs) concept of a force that exploits its
ability to ``see first, understand first, act first, and finish
decisively.'' Why would an IBCT close with the enemy through infantry
assault, save as a last resort? There are also concerns over the IBCTs'
lack of organic air-defense support. If these formations are to deploy
early in an anti-access/area-denial environment, it would seem
essential that they be provided with air and missile defense assets.
TRADOCs operational concept for the Objective Force states that
``Objective Forces must have the organic capability to conduct vertical
envelopment and tactical air assault . . .'' This capability seems
consistent with the concept's emphasis on a non-linear battlefield and
highly mobile forces capable of executing rapid maneuver to achieve
positional advantage. The Army today relies on the AH-64 Apache attack
helicopter, UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior Scout
helicopter, and CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter. The RAH-66
Comanche helicopter is supposed to be fielded in 2008. However, there
are no organic air assault assets in the IBCTs, although one of their
principal purposes is to serve as a bridge to the Objective Force.
Given the IBCT deployment timelines and relative paucity of high-speed
air and sea-lift assets, if these formations do not have organic
aviation assets, it is difficult to see how they will be provided with
such assets early in a campaign.
Finally, in periods of transformation, military organizations run
the risk of buying large quantities of a promising system too early,
and the Army is no exception. The risk of committing to a ``false
start'' is demonstrated in the U.S. Navy's affection for its first
carrier designed from the keel up, the Ranger, which was commissioned
in 1934. Although some Navy leaders had pressed for construction of
five Ranger-class carriers, wargame analysis and fleet problems soon
indicated that, at roughly 14,000 tons, the Ranger was far too small to
meet many of the demands of future fleet operations. As it turned out,
the Essex-class carriers that formed the backbone of the Navy's fast
carrier task forces in World War II each displaced nearly twice as much
tonnage as the Ranger. The Army is running the risk that, should the
Future Combat System (FCS) develop as hoped for, its Stryker IAVs--over
2,000 systems--could represent a very expensive ``false start.''
short run risk
34. Senator Santorum. Dr. Krepinevich, obtaining the resources to
finance the Army's transformation has been difficult for the service.
This resource shortfall has forced the Army to terminate a wide variety
of weapons systems and recapitalization efforts. How much risk do you
believe the Army can incur in the short run to achieve its
transformational goals?
Dr. Krepinevich. Senior defense decision-makers always confront the
challenge of developing a strategy to minimize the overall--near-term
and long-term--risks to our security. Those resources devoted to
minimizing the immediate risk to our security risk cannot fund
initiatives that promise to reduce the dangers we are likely to
confront over the longer term, and vice versa. Since no one can predict
the future, in the end, his or her judgment as to the appropriate
balance between near and long-term risk is ultimately subjective.
Given the description of the current and emerging threat
environment set down in the Department of Defense QDR, it is my
judgment that the Army can accept some additional near-term risk over
and above what is currently called for in the defense program. Put
another way, some near term risk can be accepted to ensure the service
can transform to achieve the six critical operational goals set forth
in the QDR, thereby substantially reducing long-term risk.
35. Senator Santorum. Dr. Krepinevich, are you aware of similar
efforts by the Navy/Marine Corps or Air Force to pursue a phased
approach to transformation?
Dr. Krepinevich. Transformation is, by its nature, a ``phased''
process in that it typically occurs over a number of years, often a
decade or more. I am not, however, aware of efforts by the Navy/Marine
Corps or the Air Force that would be comparable to the Army's plans to
field an Interim Force.
investment in science and technology
36. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, recognizing that the
Army's objective force will be significantly different that the current
force, are you convinced the Army is making the investments in S&T
programs that will allow our warfighters to realize ``leap-ahead''
capabilities? That is, what type of investment are we making into
enabling technologies such as engine and propulsion technologies--to
include hybrid, batteries, power cells, etc.?
Secretary Wolfowitz. I am convinced that the Army is committed to
pursuing many critical enabling technologies that will provide our
future warfighters with awesome capabilities. In particular, the Army
has been investing and will continue to invest in electric and hybrid
electric vehicle technology and the requisite component technology
development. The goal of the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is to
provide a system of systems that is deployable, lethal, survivable and
sustainable within this decade. Electric and hybrid electric vehicles
will play a significant role in future military systems. In fiscal year
2002 the Army will spend more than $18 million on development of the
FCS engine, lithium ion high energy batteries, high power silicon and
silicon carbide switches, electronic controllers/motors, and fuel
cells/reformers. In fiscal year 2003 the planned investment will be
more than $40 million in this area.
uav sensors
37. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski,
Senate Report 106-292, to accompany S. 2549, the National Defense
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001, set a goal that within 10 years
one-third of U.S. military operational deep strike aircraft will be
unmanned and within 15 years one-third of all U.S. military ground
combat vehicles will also be unmanned. Recently, Air Force Secretary
Jim Roche and Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper stated that
they want more companies to compete in the UAV sensor market to achieve
significant price reductions. They asserted that sensor costs are
soaring due to growing demand and a shortage of competition. Sensors,
according to Secretary Roche, are starting to dominate the cost of the
vehicle. What steps can the Department of Defense take to encourage the
development of new UAV sensors?
Secretary Wolfowitz. UAVs have proven their military worth in
recent operations, especially in their capability to loiter for
extended periods over the battlefield. A major focus now is to improve
the reconnaissance performance of these systems to enhance operational
requirements and extend capabilities. This improves UAV system
flexibility, but also increases cost for these upgraded sensor systems.
Many sensor systems require state-of-the-art components in critical
areas, and often these components have no corresponding equivalent in
the commercial market. Cost control is a significant challenge for our
highest performing sensor systems, such as those used on the U-2 and
Global Hawk, due to limited competition and procurement quantities.
Historically, sensor quantities have been insufficient to maintain a
robust, competitive market for these systems and components. As an
example, the Air Force is procuring only six new multi-spectral EO/IR
U-2 sensors (SYERS 2). The multi-spectral focal plane array in this
system has no commercial equivalent, and including spares, the total
focal plane buy is only nine units. As part of our UAV Roadmap update
activity, we are reviewing the current sensor technology development
efforts for our UAV and UAV support activities, looking for areas where
these critical components might be used by multiple sensor systems,
both manned and unmanned. The Predator UAV sensor ball upgrade used
this strategy, sharing development and production with a Navy
helicopter upgrade. The Department will continue to encourage the
incorporation of commercial technologies and standards, allowing
increased competition, and reduced time to fielding. Encouraging
competition will also open other potential operational capabilities for
UAVs, and further extend their use to the warfighter.
Admiral Cebrowski. An important difference in the concept of
operations which will pertain to emergent unmanned systems will be the
emphasis on more proximate sensors and effectors integrated into the
scheme of maneuver of the operational forces. The distributed
capability envisioned will break the paradigm of Low Density High
Demand (LDHD) ISR/EW assets and supplement them with an array of the
``the small, the cheap, and the many.'' Distributed elements employed
as part of an expeditionary grid will incorporate inexpensive modular
sensors/effectors which will exploit the asymmetric advantage of their
unmanned nature to penetrate and position themselves close to potential
adversaries in areas and times of operational interest. The sensor and
effector packages will be simplified and exhibit great reductions in
size and required power. The effects possible from their advantaged
locations will be dramatically different from what can be achieved from
stand-off ranges.
In addition, using the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
program, DOD is working to develop affordable, advanced sensor
technology that can be applied to both commercial and military space
and manned/unmanned airborne systems. These technologies, which range
from devices to complete systems, must also have other commercial
applications, such as imaging, surveying, telecommunications and
medical. Research and development for providing intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance sensing capabilities for UAVs that
sustain a ``continued presence'' are also a priority. Sensors need not
be considered as large system. A multiplicity of smaller netted sensors
leveraging the power of the collective and expeditionary in nature
warrant further research.
Complementary air and space sensors with differences in field-of-
regard, range, textural fidelity and latency are needed to give a
complete and timely picture of the battle space, enable a timely
precision response and enhance the warfighter's survivability. Areas to
be focused on include:
Space-based and manned/unmanned airborne radars with
advanced antenna designs and low-cost digital receivers
Active and passive electro-optical systems with multi-
spectral and hyper-spectral sensors and multi-function laser
radars
Navigation aids with inertial navigation components
and satellite-based global positioning
Automatic target recognition and sensor data fusion
office of force transformation
38. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski,
does the Office of Force Transformation have the ability to apply funds
to a particular transformational process/technology/application it
deems worthy of financial support?
Secretary Wolfowitz and Admiral Cebrowski. Yes. The OFT will use
funds to seek prospects for differences in kind and for new operational
concepts that could generate leaps in relative military effectiveness.
By way of example, OFT will use funds to assess transformational
implications in the conflict in Afghanistan. Specifically, some funds
will be used for research, information gathering, and analysis to flesh
out the transformational implications of the extensive and effective
use of ground observation and target designation. The operational mode
demonstrated in Afghanistan highlights the possibility of extraordinary
precision and timeliness of air responses. Further analysis may provide
evidence that we are approaching a ``tipping'' point where the
effective use of ground observation and target designation posit
significant differences in kind and point to a much-expanded form of
the operational concept demonstrated in Afghanistan. A specific example
of how the office has provided funds is to transformational initiative
is with PACOM. Resources were provided to catalyze a Combatant Commands
experimentation effort. This is in keeping with our efforts to create a
broader, more robust, experimentation base. A decentralized approach
vice centralized.
private research and development
39. Senator Santorum. Admiral Cebrowski, while the Federal
Government has the most funding to contribute to the development of new
military capabilities, clearly the private sector can contribute
resources (manpower and funding) to help speed this process along. What
efforts can the Department of Defense initiate to encourage more
independent R&D by private industry?
Admiral Cebrowski. Research and development efforts leading to
discoveries in government and private laboratories are likely to be a
leading source of future technological development. The Department is
exploring two initiatives to encourage more independent R&D by private
industry. The first one deals with the issue of intellectual property.
Many private companies do not believe that adequate safeguards to
protect intellectual property exist as part of doing business with the
Federal Government. Private industry needs to be assured that their
technological discoveries and intellectual property will be adequately
protected. Hence, the Department must work on creative ways to protect
intellectual property and creating a greater incentive for industry to
not only do business with the Federal Government, but also increase the
likelihood of their investing their own resources in conjunction with
government sponsored and funded research programs. Therefore, the
Department is working on ways and means to enhance the protection of
intellectual property via government contracting and education of the
acquisition workforce.
Second, the Department is addressing the challenges and barriers
associated with inserting leading-edge technologies into defense
systems later in the acquisition cycle. As structured today, cost,
schedule, and performance, as established goals at contract award, are
put at risk if the program office is asked to integrate new
developments not previously planned for--after the design baseline is
established. If we can devise structural and program incentives to more
easily permit technological insertion, even during the production
phases, it would potentially offer some advantages. Not only would it
result in earlier fielding of more advances systems and capabilities,
but it would possibly create an earlier market demand for new
developments coming out of private industry R&D laboratories.
40. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, recently, Admiral Vernon
Clark, Chief of Naval Operations, stated that the Navy needed a more
effective partnership with industry. Admiral Clark stated that, ``I am
concerned about the industrial base and I am concerned about investment
strategies that look like sine-cosine curves. I just don't know how
anybody can make that work.'' Do you share Admiral Clark's concerns?
Are his concerns just limited to the Navy or are the other services and
the Office of the Secretary of Defense just as vulnerable to this
situation?
Mr. Wolfowitz. The Department does share Admiral Clark's concern
over fluctuations in all Defense budget categories. DOD and all the
services have long recognized that budget variations from year to year
cause extensive disruptions in the planning, execution, and cost of our
programs, both in the Department and services, and particularly at our
contractors. Annual budget fluctuations are one of the most significant
causes of the cost growth at our contractors, who are ultimately the
ones who have to implement the costly processes associated with
layoffs, rehiring, and retraining employees to accommodate such
variations. With this comes inefficiencies in development and
manufacturing processes, difficulties sustaining or developing sources
for components or services, component price changes, and both short-
and long-term variations in overhead costs. Often hidden, but very
significant impacts of budget fluctuations are the adverse affects on
our contractors' ability to retain key employees, and to attract key
suppliers at the sub-tier level, many of whom seek a higher level of
stability than that offered by defense budgets.
History is clear that the most affordable way to maintain a healthy
industrial base to develop and produce our systems at the lowest
possible total program cost is to maintain a stable pace. The
Department and the services work extensively to assess, reduce and
control the effects of such fluctuations, both in our budget
preparations and, to the extent we can, in subsequent appropriations.
basic research
41. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, with the exception of
the fiscal years 2001 and 2002 funding spike, funding for Department of
Defense basic research has been consistently underfunded. Congress
shares some of this blame as it has taken funds from these crucial
accounts and used them to pay for the near-term modernization or
procurement needs of today's military.
I am concerned with the level of basic research funding in the
United States. Without increased investment in Department of Defense
basic research, the number of graduate student opportunities to pursue
Department of Defense research cannot increase. A decline in the pool
of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and skilled technicians will
prevent the Department of Defense from achieving success in the pursuit
of ``leap-ahead'' technologies. Could you address the importance of DOD
basic research (and S&T programs) in realizing ``leap-ahead'' advances
in military capabilities? In addition, please address how funding
levels for DOD basic research impact not only military capabilities,
but also the pool of skilled scientists and engineers who will drive
innovation and change.
Secretary Wolfowitz. DOD-sponsored basic research is a wellspring
of new knowledge and understanding that underpins the development of
future military capabilities. Prior basic research enabled the
generation of today's revolutionary military capabilities, including
the Global Positioning System, stealth, night vision, and precision
strike. We expect equally important new capabilities to emerge over the
long term from today's investments in basic research in areas such as
those relevant to nanotechnology, smart materials and structures,
information technology, human-centered systems, compact power, and
biomimetics. Our support for basic research today will help to give
future leaders the technological edge they need to deter potential
adversaries and, if necessary, conduct military operations, much as we
reap benefits from prior defense research in the current Operation
Enduring Freedom.
Basic research has an additional long-term benefit to the DOD
because universities are the predominant performers of basic research
in this country and university research is inextricably linked with the
training of scientists and engineers in fields important to national
defense. DOD-supported basic research thereby helps to ensure the
future availability of talent needed for defense research and
development.
42. Senator Santorum. Secretary Wolfowitz, do you believe that the
levels of S&T funding requested by the administration for fiscal year
2003 are adequate to propel transformation throughout the services?
Secretary Wolfowitz. Yes, I believe our fiscal year 2003 request
for S&T funding is adequate to support our transformation initiative.
We increased the DOD S&T funding request from the previously planned
$7.8 billion for DOD S&T to $8.8 billion in the amended fiscal year
2002 President's budget request. Our fiscal year 2003 S&T budget
request is for $9.7 billion: plus an additional $213 million in Defense
Emergency Response Funds for combating terrorism technology. This
addition of $213 million increases the total fiscal year 2003 budget
request for DOD S&T to $9.9 billion. However, because of the
significant increase in the Department's total funding in fiscal year
2003 and the need to add dollars to fully fund acquisition programs and
health care etc. the percentage of the budget request devoted to S&T is
less than 3 percent.
[Whereupon, at 12:31 p.m., the committee adjourned.]