[Senate Hearing 115-853]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-853
RESHAPING THE UNITED STATES MILITARY
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 16, 2017
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://www.govinfo.gov/
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
41-967 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma, Chairman JACK REED, Rhode Island
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi BILL NELSON, Florida
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
TOM COTTON, Arkansas JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
JONI ERNST, Iowa RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
DAVID PERDUE, Georgia TIM KAINE, Virginia
TED CRUZ, Texas ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
BEN SASSE, Nebraska ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts
LUTHER STRANGE, Alabama GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
_________________________________________________________________
FEBRUARY 16, 2017
Page
Reshaping the United States Military............................. 1
Ochmanek, David A., Senior Defense Research Analyst, Rand 4
Corporation.
Thomas, James P., Principal, The Telemus Group................... 11
Thomas M. Donnelly, Resident Fellow and Co-Director of the 17
Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies, American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research.
Clark, Bryan, Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary 23
Assessments.
(iii)
RESHAPING THE UNITED STATES MILITARY
----------
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2017
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:33 a.m. in Room
SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator John McCain
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Committee Members present: Senators McCain, Inhofe, Wicker,
Fischer, Cotton, Rounds, Ernst, Tillis, Sullivan, Perdue,
Sasse, Strange, Reed, Nelson, McCaskill, Shaheen, Gillibrand,
Blumenthal, Donnelly, Hirono, Kaine, King, Heinrich, Warren,
and Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN McCAIN, CHAIRMAN
Chairman McCain. Well, good morning.
The Senate Armed Services Committee meets this morning to
receive testimony on reshaping the U.S. military and make
America great again.
I would like to thank our witnesses for appearing today:
David Ochmanek, Senior Defense Research Analyst at the RAND
Corporation; James Thomas, Principal at the Telemus Group;
Thomas Donnelly, Resident Fellow and Co-Director of the Marilyn
Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise
Institute; and Bryan Clark, Senior Fellow at the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
For the last 25 years, Americans have taken our Nation's
military superiority for granted. We watched as the Cold War
ended with the collapse of our only superpower rival and the
so-called ``end of history.'' We quickly grew accustomed to
military dominance. After all, no U.S. Navy ship has been sunk
in an active conflict since 1952. No member of American ground
forces has been killed by an enemy airstrike since 1953. No
American fighter aircraft has been shot down in an air-to-air
engagement since 1991. Every one of our Nation's recent
military conflicts resulted in a lopsided conventional military
victory from the Gulf War to Bosnia and Kosovo to the early
phases of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This confidence in our military is reflected in the
rhetoric of many or our Nation's civilian and military leaders
who reassure us that ours is the most capable fighting force on
the face of the earth, or that our defense budget is so much
larger than our competitors. These statements are undoubtedly
true, and to be very, very clear, any adversary that chooses
the path of aggression against the United States or its allies
would, indeed, pay a terrible price.
But ultimately such statements shed little light on the
most important question: whether our military can achieve the
mission assigned to it to deter and, if necessary, defeat
aggression and at what cost. The testimony of our military
leaders and the work of some of our foremost defense experts
leads me to believe there is real reason for concern.
For the last 20 years, our adversaries have gone to school
on the American way of war, and with focused determination,
they have invested in, developed, and/or fielded the
capabilities to counter it: long-range, accurate ballistic and
cruise missiles that can target our ground forces, ships,
military installations, and critical infrastructure; dense,
integrated air defenses that pose a threat to even our most
advanced aircraft; large numbers of modern fighter aircraft,
including some fifth generation platforms, armed with capable
air-to-air missiles that in some cases outrange our own; more
advanced surveillance and reconnaissance systems, resilient
command and control networks, electronic warfare capabilities,
and anti-satellite and cyber weapons that, taken together,
threaten our ability to achieve information dominance.
By expanding contested battlespace and exacerbating the
tyranny of distance, our adversaries are threatening our
military's ability to project power, upon which rests the
credibility of American deterrence. As they grow more capable,
our adversaries are increasingly emboldened to engage in acts
of provocation, coercion, and aggression that threaten our
interests and our allies.
Pick up this morning's paper and you will see how a Russian
ship is now operating off the east coast of the United States.
Here at home, we have only exacerbated the problem. In
recent years, preoccupied with the fight against terrorism,
hampered by a broken acquisition system, and shackled by the
budget cuts and fiscal uncertainty, our military has
prioritized near-term readiness at the expense of future
modernization, giving our adversaries a chance to close the
gap. Our military leaders have described this as, quote,
mortgaging the future. But it appears few realized how soon the
future would arrive.
What all these developments mean is that America's military
advantage is eroding and eroding fast. The wide margin for
error we once enjoyed is gone, and in some of the most
difficult scenarios our military may some day confront, we can
no longer take victory for granted. In short, we will now hear
from some of our witnesses today the risk is growing, that our
Nation's military could lose the next war it is called upon to
fight. If it does prevail, as I surely hope it would, success
could very well come at a cost in blood and treasure we as a
Nation have not paid since the Vietnam War.
The question now is what we must do to reverse these trends
and sustain and advance America's military advantage for the
21st Century.
Yes, we need to rebuild military capacity deliberately and
sustainably, particularly in areas like undersea warfare where
our Nation still maintains an advantage over our adversaries.
But there is still a lot of truth in the old adage that
quantity has a quality all its own. But adding capacity alone
is not the answer. More of the same is not just a bad
investment against increasingly advanced adversaries, it is
downright dangerous.
That means we have to reshape our military by investing in
the modern capabilities necessary for the new realities of
deterring conflict and competing with great powers that possess
advanced military forces: longer-range, more survivable
platforms and munitions; more autonomous systems; greater cyber
and space capabilities, among other new technologies.
It is not enough, however, just to acquire these new
technologies. We must also devise entirely new ways to employ
them. It would be a failure of imagination merely to conform
emerging defense technologies to how we operate and fight
today. Doing so would simply play into our adversaries' hands.
Ultimately, we must shape new ways of operating and fighting
around these new technologies.
The good news is that our civilian and military leaders at
the Department of Defense see this challenge clearly and are
developing solutions to address these issues. But the progress
they have made remains limited because of budget cuts and
fiscal uncertainty that prevent effective, long-term strategic
planning and investment. This is just one more reason why we
have to remove the shackles of the Budget Control Act from the
Department of Defense, and we have to do so immediately.
Rebuilding and reshaping our military will not happen quickly.
But the decisions we need to make to realize those goals are
upon us. The future is now.
In short, to sustain and advance America's military
advantage for the 21st Century, we must not only rebuild our
military, but we must rethink, re-imagine, and reshape it. This
will entail tough choices. But these are the choices we must
make to ensure that our military will be ready to deter and, if
necessary, fight and win our future wars.
Senator Reed?
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JACK REED
Senator Reed. Well, thank you, Senator McCain, for calling
this very, very important hearing.
Also, let me thank the witnesses for being here today.
Thank you, gentlemen, very much.
The United States has relied on our military's dominance in
every battle sphere since the end of the Cold War. We have not
had a near-peer competitor for decades, and that has allowed us
to take for granted certain fundamental aspects of projecting
power and deterring and defeating aggression.
Unfortunately, we are no longer in a position to assume our
air, land, naval, space, and cyber superiority against
potential adversaries. We are no longer able to assume that we
can project power from the United States instead of being
forward-based, and we can no longer assume that we have months
to mobilize and move forces uncontested to respond to
aggression.
It should also not be a surprise to anyone that 15 years of
fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq forced us to make
tradeoffs on long-term defense investment in order to support
near-term readiness and to pay the costly bills from these two
wars. During that time, other countries have modernized and
made technological advances. Now we must focus on what our
military needs to keep our competitive edge.
I would also like to emphasize the need to be clear-sighted
about our ability to predict conflicts and adversaries 15 to 20
years out. As Defense Secretary Gates told West Point cadets,
``When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our
next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been
perfect. We have never once gotten it right.'' If past is
prologue, it is very possible that 20 years from now we will be
facing adversaries and competitive environments that we did not
expect. Therefore, we must ensure that our military is, above
all, adaptable to the new crises that lurk unseen over the
horizon.
I hope that some of the technological innovations and
organizational concepts that are being explored by the Defense
Department will allow us to have a more effective, agile, and
adaptable military. But underlying all of these considerations
is, of course, the question, what will our national security
strategy look like? We should not advocate for substantially
higher investments that have a long spending tail unless and
until we have fully articulated the strategy that will drive
our budget. We also need to carefully examine the current
budgets and programs of the services and agencies to ensure
that they are aligned to meet the threats of the future in the
time frames that we need.
One additional point that cannot be overemphasized in my
view. Our national defense strategy has always assumed a strong
NATO alliance and an unwavering commitment to our allies in
Asia since the end of World War II. Any disruption to those
assumptions will require a fundamental rethinking of our
strategy. Our successes in recent operations are due in large
part to the allies and partners that stand shoulder to shoulder
with our troops. Our commitment to those partners and allies is
essential.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to the testimony.
Chairman McCain. I thank the witnesses for being here. We
will begin with you, Mr. Ochmanek.
STATEMENT OF DAVID A. OCHMANEK, SENIOR DEFENSE RESEARCH
ANALYST, RAND CORPORATION
Mr. Ochmanek. Thank you, Chairman McCain, Ranking Member
Reed, members of the committee, and staff. I appreciate the
opportunity to share insights that my colleagues and I have
gained from our analysis of future military operations. Our war
games and simulations, as the chairman suggested, point to the
conclusion that U.S. Forces could fare poorly in the next war
they are called upon to fight. As you requested, I will focus
my remarks on what might be done to change these sobering
projections.
Specifically, I would like to highlight investment options
that have the potential to address three important operational
challenges facing the U.S. Forces. These are: one, threats
posed by long-range strike systems; two, threats posed by
advanced air defenses; and three, the simple tyranny of
distance that we face when we try to project power overseas.
So, number one, long-range strike systems. Because our
adversaries are fielding large numbers of accurate ballistic
and cruise missiles, our land and sea bases today are subject
to attack as never before. There is no single silver bullet
solution to this problem. Currently available ballistic missile
defense systems are expensive and can be overwhelmed by modest-
sized missile salvos, and hunting down mobile ballistic
missiles deployed deep in enemy territory is not a promising
solution.
Our wargaming, however, points to a number of ways in which
we can increase the resiliency of forward bases and allow them
to generate sustained combat power even in the face of these
kinds of threats. Chief among these are: one, dispersing our
forces across more bases, not concentrating them; two, creating
uncertainty about the location of our forces by deploying them
in redundant low-cost shelters, moving them frequently, and
using decoys and deception measures; three, disrupting enemy
reconnaissance capabilities; and four, making the bases
themselves more resilient, more difficult to attack and
suppress often through prosaic measures like rapid runway
repair materials, fuel bladders, and fuel pumping facilities
that are more survivable than the things we have today.
Analysis also shows that active defenses against cruise
missiles can be a very promising way to protect our forces
abroad. The Army's short-range air defense system, the IFPC-2,
seems particularly well suited to defeating even large salvos
of cruise missiles.
Another part of the solution will be to rely more heavily
on long-range bombers and submarines. Repeatedly in our war
games, our bombers operate relatively unscathed by missile
attacks, but fail to make decisive contributions to the defense
because they run out of suitable munitions. U.S. Forces could
get much more capability from the existing bomber fleet by
expanding inventories of weapons like the JASSM-ER cruise
missile, the MALD, miniature air-launched decoy, and
accelerating the development of new weapons such as anti-ship
cruise missiles and swarming unmanned aerial vehicles that the
bombers could deliver.
Similarly, the Virginia-class submarine has unparalleled
stealth capabilities and can fight from areas off the coast of
adversary states, but it has limited weapons carrying capacity.
The Virginia payload module boosts this capacity, and other
promising concepts such as unmanned underwater vehicles that
are being developed.
Challenge two is overcoming advanced air defenses. Russia
and China are fielding air defenses of such density and
sophistication that our forces will not have time to
comprehensively suppress them before going after the invading
forces that they need to attack. Therefore, our forces need to
find ways to reach into the air defense zone to find and strike
targets of highest priority from the outset of the campaign.
Three types of capabilities are called for to achieve this
capability.
One is sensors that can survive in contested environments
and allow us to see the battlefield from space, from airborne
platforms, and from land-based sensors or surface-based
sensors. The idea is to spread these sensor networks across a
number of different platform types and domains so that some
portion of them will be available at all times.
Second is communication links that can effectively connect
sensors, control centers, and shooters even in the presence of
heavy jamming threats. Again, robustness will be achieved here
through versatility and redundancy.
Three, distributed networks of delivery platforms and
weapons that can strike key targets both within and beyond the
contested area. Examples of these include the sort of standoff
attack missiles that I spoke of earlier for the bomber and
submarine forces, but also swarms of inexpensive autonomous
weapons and specialized weapons for attacking armored vehicles,
ships, and surface-to-air missile systems.
Finally, the tyranny of distance. A big part of the problem
we face in NATO today can be remedied simply by putting
appropriate forces, munitions, and support assets back into
Europe. Russia's armed forces are not superior to ours in most
dimensions, but they have geographical advantages. They can
amass ground forces on NATO's borders far more quickly than we
can respond. Last year's European Reassurance Initiative, which
funded the deployment of Army ground forces into Europe, is a
step in the right direction, but our analysis suggests that
more is necessary, and our allies have shown that they are
willing to do their part.
I have included in my written statement a chart that
provides a more complete list of the types of capabilities that
our research suggests merit the highest priority for
investments.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to appear before this
committee. I look forward with my colleagues to answering your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ochmanek follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT BY DAVID OCHMANEK \1\, THE RAND CORPORATION \2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The opinions and conclusions expressed in this testimony are
the author's alone and should not be interpreted as representing those
of the RAND Corporation or any of the sponsors of its research.
\2\ The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops
solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities
throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more
prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public
interest.
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Good morning, Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, members
of the committee, and staff. I appreciate the opportunity to
share insights that my colleagues and I have gained from more
than a decade of analyzing emerging threats to U.S. military
operations. Our work has revealed some serious and growing gaps
in the capabilities of U.S. Forces, raising questions about
their ability to accomplish the strategically important mission
of deterring and defeating aggression by adversary states. I
therefore applaud the committee's efforts to focus attention on
how the Department of Defense (DOD) can best act to reverse the
deterioration in the military balance of power in key regions.
The security environment in which U.S. Forces operate and
for which they must prepare is, in important ways, more complex
and more demanding than the one that DOD has used to build and
evaluate today's force. To be clear:
Our force planning prior to Russia's attacks on
Ukraine did not take account of the need to deter large-scale
aggression against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO).
We also have not moved quickly enough to provide
the capabilities and basing posture needed to meet the manifold
challenges posed by China's rapidly modernizing armed forces.
The prospect of deliverable nuclear weapons in
the hands of North Korea and, potentially, Iran poses
challenges for which we do not have satisfactory answers.
As these threats have emerged and our forces have carried
on a multifaceted campaign against Salafist-jihadi forces in
several locales, the Nation has not committed the resources
called for to build and sustain the capabilities that our
forces need to succeed in this more demanding environment. As a
result, the United States now fields forces that are
simultaneously:
larger than needed to fight a single major war,
failing to keep pace with the modernizing forces
of great power adversaries,
poorly postured to meet key challenges in Europe
and East Asia,
insufficiently trained and ready to get the most
operational utility from many active component units.
Put more starkly, our wargames and simulations suggest that
U.S. Forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next
war they are called upon to fight. \3\
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\3\ For a succinct assessment of the military balance between
Russia and NATO and the prospects for a defense of the Baltics, see
David A. Shlapak and Michael W. Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on
NATO's Eastern Flank, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RR-1253-A,
2016. For an assessment of trends in China's armed forces and their
implications for U.S. defense strategy and planning, see David
Ochmanek, Sustaining U.S. Leadership in the Asia-Pacific Region, Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, PE-142-OSD, 2015.
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Of course, DOD has not been idle in the face of these
developments. The defense development community, the services,
and industry are generating new ideas, technologies, and
operating concepts that offer real promise for countering the
threats that are the cause for greatest concern. For the
remainder of this testimony, I would like to highlight a few of
these new approaches and show how they can enable a robust
defense in the face of emerging challenges.
One of the most vexing problems facing power projection
operations stems from the proliferation of accurate, long-range
strike systems--ballistic and cruise missiles. Our land and sea
bases today are exposed to attack as never before.
There is no single, ``silver bullet'' solution to these
threats. Hunting down mobile missiles deployed deep in enemy
territory is not a promising solution. Currently available
ballistic missile defense systems are expensive and can be
overwhelmed by modest-sized missile salvos. But wargaming shows
that a number of complementary efforts can significantly
increase the resiliency of forward bases and allow them to
generate sustained combat power even in the face of repeated
attacks. Chief among these are:
dispersing forward-based forces across a larger
number of bases
creating uncertainty about the location of those
forces by parking them in redundant, low-cost shelters, moving
them frequently, and using decoys and deception measures
disrupting enemy reconnaissance capabilities
making bases themselves more resilient; this
generally calls for rather prosaic steps, such as positioning
rapid runway repair materials and fuel bladders at each base
and reducing the vulnerability of key nodes, such as fuel
pumping facilities.
Analysis also shows the value of active defenses against
cruise missile attacks. The Army's new short-range air defense
system, IFPC-2, seems particularly well suited to defeating
even sizable salvos of cruise missiles.
Another part of the answer to the vulnerability of forward
bases is to rely more heavily on platforms that can fight
either from afar (long-range bombers) or from sanctuary
(submerged submarines). In wargames, U.S. bombers--B-52s, B-1s,
and B-2s--often operate relatively unscathed by missile attacks
but fail to make decisive contributions to defense because they
run out of munitions that they can survivably deliver. U.S.
Forces could get much more capability from the bomber fleet by
greatly expanding inventories of weapons like the Joint Air-to-
Surface Standoff Missile--Extended Range (JASSM-ER) and
miniature air-launched decoy (MALD) cruise missiles and by
accelerating the development of new weapons, such as antiship
cruise missiles and swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),
that can be delivered by our bombers.
Similarly, the Virginia-class submarine has unparalleled
stealth capabilities and can fight from areas off the coast of
adversary nations, but it has limited weapons carrying
capacity. The Virginia Payload Module modification boosts this
capacity. Other promising concepts for affordable delivery of
payloads from undersea are being developed, such as unmanned
underwater vehicles.
A second priority for the force is to find more robust ways
to rapidly detect, track, and attack key military targets--the
enemy's operational centers of gravity, if you will--in
contested areas from the outset of a campaign. What do I mean
by this? Traditionally, U.S. Forces open military campaigns by
first establishing freedom of maneuver in the air, at sea, and
on land. Once the enemy's air defenses have been suppressed,
for example, our air forces are free to observe and attack
other targets--the enemy's ground forces, naval forces, command
and control centers-- more or less at will. This approach has
been central to the success of U.S. military operations since
World War II.
Russia and China are fielding air defenses of such density
and sophistication that our forces will not have time to
comprehensively suppress them before going after the invading
force they need to defeat. Therefore, our forces need to find
ways to ``reach into'' defended airspace to find and strike the
targets of highest priority.
What will it take to do this? Three types of capabilities:
1. Sensors that can survive in defended environments.
These may be deployed on a range of platforms, such as small
satellites; stealthy UAVs; swarms of small, expendable UAVs;
and robotic sensors on the surface. The idea is to spread
sensors across a number of different platform types so that
some portion will be available at all times.
2. Communication links that can function effectively in
conditions of heavy jamming and maintain data pathways among
sensors, control centers, and shooters. Again, robustness will
be achieved through versatility and redundancy. Airborne and
terrestrial systems may be called for to back-up key
capabilities on satellites, such as GPS and communications.
3. Distributed networks of delivery platforms and weapons
that can strike key targets from both within and beyond the
contested area. Examples of these include the sorts of standoff
attack missiles that I spoke of earlier for the bomber and
submarine forces, swarms of inexpensive autonomous weapons, and
specialized weapons for attacking armored vehicles, ships, and
surface-to-air missile systems.
One other observation: A significant portion of the
capability gap we face on NATO's eastern flank today can be
remedied simply by putting appropriate forces, munitions, and
support assets back in Europe. Russia's armed forces are not
superior to ours in most dimensions, but they have the
advantage of geographical proximity: Today they can mass ground
forces on NATO's borders far more quickly than NATO can
respond. Last year's European Reassurance Initiative, which
funded, among other things, the deployment of Army ground
forces in Europe, is a step in the right direction. But more is
necessary, and our European allies have shown that they are
ready to do their part.
At the conclusion of this statement, I have included a
chart that provides a more complete list of the types of
capabilities that our research suggests merit the highest
priority for investments intended to redress the growing
imbalance between the capabilities of U.S. Forces and those of
our most capable adversaries. Those capabilities are grouped
according to the adversary to which they are most relevant.
One caveat: The research on which this testimony is drawn
focused on understanding and countering the threats posed by
state adversaries, such as China, Russia, North Korea, and
Iran. My work has not delved deeply into issues of the
readiness of U.S. Forces, or the stresses that high operational
tempos may be imposing on people and units. I have also not
addressed the need to recapitalize U.S. Nuclear Forces. The
absence of recommendations in these areas should not be taken
as implying that investments there are not warranted.
CONCLUSION
DOD's leadership knows generally what is needed in order to
counter most, if not all, of the operational challenges posed
by our most capable adversaries. Many of the technologies
needed to make innovative reconnaissance, communications, and
weapon systems into realities are mature, and the services are
devising and testing new operational concepts for employing
these systems.
The two things that are needed now are money and insight:
additional money to allow the DOD to move swiftly to develop,
acquire, and field new systems and postures, and insight based
on analysis to guide decisionmaking, so that funding goes to
investments that have the potential to make the greatest and
most enduring contributions to a robust defensive posture vis-
a-vis China, Russia, and other adversaries. The Trump
Administration and the 115th Congress have the opportunity to
rectify the strategy-forces mismatch that has arisen over the
past several years and put the United States back on a path
toward fielding forces that can defeat any adversary.
One note of caution: Fielding the sorts of capabilities I
have highlighted here should not, in most cases, be expected to
restore to U.S. Forces the degree of overmatch that they
enjoyed against regional adversaries of the past, such as Iraq
and Serbia. Any major conflict involving China, Russia, or
North Korea is bound to be a costly and bloody affair. But I
believe that it is within our means--technologically,
operationally, and fiscally--to field forces capable of
confronting even the most capable adversaries with the prospect
of defeat if they choose aggression. That is the gold standard
of deterrence, and it is the standard to which we should
aspire.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to appear before this
committee. I look forward to answering your questions.
Table 1. Priority Enhancements to U.S. Forces and Posturea
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
China Accelerated development
and fielding of a longer-range,
fast-flying radar-homing air-to-
surface missile* and a longer-
range air-to-air missile*
Forward-based stocks of
air-delivered munitions,
including cruise missiles
(e.g., joint air-to-surface
standoff missile and joint air-
to-surface standoff missile-
extended range, long-range
antiship missile),* surface-to-
air missile suppression
missiles (e.g., homing
antiradiation missile,
miniature air-launched decoy),*
and air-to-air missiles (e.g.,
AIM-9X and AIM-120)*
Prepositioned equipment
and sustainment for ten to 15
platoons of modern short-range
air defense systems (SHORADS)
for cruise missile defense
Additional base
resiliency investments,
including airfield damage
repair assets and expedient
aircraft shelters, and
personnel and equipment to
support highly dispersed
operations
Accelerated development
of the Next-Generation Jammer*
A high-altitude, low-
observable UAV system*
More-resilient space-
based capabilities (achieved by
dispersing functions across
increased numbers of satellites
and increasing the
maneuverability, stealth, and
``hardness'' of selected
assets)*
Counter-space systems,
including kinetic and
nonkinetic (e.g., lasers,
jammers) weapons*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Russia Items listed under
``China'' that are marked with
an *
Three heavy brigade
combat teams and their
sustainment and support
elements forward based or
rotationally deployed in or
near the Baltic states
One Army fires brigade
permanently stationed in
Poland, with 30-day stock of
artillery rounds; one
additional fires brigade set
prepositioned . Forward-based
stocks of artillery and
multiple launch rocket system
rounds; antitank guided
missiles
Forward-based stocks of
air-delivered antiarmor
munitions (e.g., Sensor Fused
Weapon Pre-Planned Product
Improvement)
Station or rotationally
deploy eight to 12 platoons of
SHORADS forces in NATO Europe
Increased readiness and
employability of mechanized
ground forces of key NATO
allies
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iran Improved, forward-
deployed mine countermeasures .
High-capacity close-in defenses
for surface vessels
------------------------------------------------------------------------
North Korea Improved intelligence,
surveillance, and
reconnaissance systems for
tracking nuclear weapons and
delivery systems
Exploratory development
of boost-phase ballistic
missile intercept systems
Continued investments
to improve the reliability and
effectiveness of the ground-
based intercept system to
protect the United States
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Salafist-Jihadi Groups Improved intelligence
collection and analysis
capabilities and capacity
Acquire next-generation
vertical takeoff and landing
aircraft
Acquire Light
Reconnaissance and Attack
Aircraft
Develop powered
exoskeleton, also known as the
Talon Project
Develop swarming and
autonomous unmanned vehicles
------------------------------------------------------------------------
a David Ochmanek, Peter A. Wilson, Brenna Allen, John Speed Meyers, and
Carter C. Price, U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous
World: Rethinking the U.S. Approach to Force Planning, Santa Monica,
Calif.: RAND Corporation, RR-1782-IRD, forthcoming.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Thomas?
STATEMENT OF JAMES P. THOMAS, PRINCIPAL, THE TELEMUS GROUP
Mr. Thomas. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Reed, and distinguished members of the committee. I appreciate
the opportunity to appear before you today.
The chairman's recent white paper, ``Restoring American
Power,'' rightfully argues that reshaping the U.S. military
should be given priority over resizing. I certainly agree.
Getting the shape right is, in fact, more important over the
long haul before we think about the question of size. This will
involve determining the desired characteristics of the force,
its attributes, as well as its organizational design.
The truth of the matter is today our force is simply
misshaped for many of the military challenges we face. It
remains too rooted in the 1990s design that was over-optimized
for conventional regional wars more akin to Operation Desert
Storm, and it is relatively less prepared for protracted
counter-insurgencies, global counterterrorism, and the
expansion of warfare into new domains like cyber and space.
Take cyber warfare, for example. We know that this is
emerging as one of the most important domains of military
competition as countries and non-state actors alike attempt to
protect the viability of their networks while disrupting those
of adversaries, including the United States. Yet, we have only
begun to take rudimentary steps, initial steps to begin better
organizing, training, and equipping our forces for this
critical mission.
More broadly, our conventional military overmatch is
rapidly eroding in the face of great power revisionist states
like Russia and China that have adapted particular asymmetric
strategies to circumvent traditional U.S. military strengths
while imposing costs on the United States and its allies in
ways that are becoming very difficult to counter. They are
developing anti-access and area denial capabilities,
modernizing their nuclear forces, engaging in gray zone
activity below the threshold of war, and conducting cyber
attacks even in peacetime. These can no longer be considered
future challenges and we can no long afford to defer efforts to
reshape the U.S. military to address them.
The United States finds itself today confronting these
challenges with a much narrower margin of military advantage
but with far greater fiscal constraints and with a less unified
set of allies and partners than it had during the Cold War or
its immediate aftermath.
There is no single approach or strategy that can
effectively address the full range of these challenges.
Instead, as Chairman McCain noted in ``Restoring American
Power,'' the Department of Defense will need to fashion
regionally tailored strategies and force packages suited to the
unique requirements of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.
This is a point worth underscoring.
Efforts to reshape the force should be focused on specific,
particular military operational problems. Each potential
adversary in the theater will necessitate a unique approach,
and across the board, we will need a new high-low mix of
capabilities.
At the low end, the key attributes will be to reduce
procurement and sustainment costs and the ability to field
large numbers of weapons and platforms for steady state
operations in relatively permissive operating environments.
Many of our legacy forces and capabilities already fit this
bill.
On the high side, we will need two basic elements. First is
regionally tailored forces that are highly lethal and
survivable and can deter local aggression by potential
adversaries. These, in turn, will have to be backstopped by a
more globally fungible surveillance and strike swing force that
can operate at long ranges both physically and virtually to
penetrate denied areas and hold at risk large numbers of
hostile military forces and other targets with conventional,
nuclear, or nonkinetic weapons.
Regionally tailored forces in Europe and Asia in particular
would place a premium on permanently forward-stationed ground
forces because it may be too risky to deploy them in crisis or
time of war, and they may be too slow arriving to make a
difference.
The globally fungible, long-range surveillance and strike
element of the force would include offensive cyber warfare, as
well as air, naval, and missile systems to rapidly respond to
threats globally while operating from great distances with
large sensor and weapons payloads, penetrate into denied areas,
evade detection, and persist to strike elusive targets, conduct
electronic and cyber attacks, and sustain with minimal theater
basing or logistical support.
Together it is these two components which should serve as
the basis for reshaping the U.S. military. Now is the time to
make this transition to begin to reshape at least a portion of
our military so that we can effectively deter and prevail
across the range of competitions and conflicts we will face
over the next several decades.
This concludes my opening statement, and I look forward to
your questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Thomas follows:]
Prepared Statement by James P. Thomas
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, and distinguished members of
the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today
to discuss the security challenges our Nation confronts, the urgent
need to reshape our military forces, and the attributes our forces will
need moving forward. The Chairman's recent white paper, Restoring
American Power, rightfully argues that reshaping the U.S. military
should be given priority over resizing. There is little question that
we need to do both, but too often in American force planning
discussions, there is a tendency to rush to judgment about the size of
the U.S. military before first figuring out what kind of military
forces are most appropriate for the strategic circumstances we
anticipate. I strongly support the idea that determining the shape of
the force--in terms of its desired characteristics, attributes, and
organization design--should precede questions of force size.
Our military today remains too rooted in the force design of the
early 1990s. The return of great power competitions, however, makes it
imperative to reshape the U.S. military to ensure it has an appropriate
high-low mix of regionally-tailored forces coupled with a global
surveillance and strike ``swing force'' to deter aggression and deny
adversaries their objectives. Moving toward this new force design
should be a matter of great urgency for the Pentagon and the Congress.
origins of the u.s. military's present shape
Understanding why the U.S. military needs to be reshaped warrants a
brief review of the current force's origins. In the immediate aftermath
of the Cold War, we over-optimized our forces for conventional regional
wars akin to Operation DESERT STORM, leaving them less prepared for
protracted counterinsurgencies, global counterterrorism, and the
expansion of warfare into new domains like cyber and space. We narrowly
viewed the revolution in precision weaponry as benefiting the U.S.
military, while failing to appreciate how other powers could leverage
such capabilities to achieve local air and sea denial, as well as build
up missile strike forces to hold our theater bases at risk. We assumed
a degree of conventional military overmatch that would last for many
decades to come but that we now see is rapidly vanishing. And we have
been too slow to walk away from overly rosy force planning assumptions
that undergirded the shape of the post-Cold War force, including that:
Wars would be short, conventional and intense;
Operating conditions would be fairly permissive--we would
have at the outset (or quickly achieve) air superiority, naval
supremacy, information dominance, and land control;
Munitions inventories could be smaller because a single
precision-guided weapon could destroy a single target;
Ground forces could rely more on air forces for assured
air superiority and strike, and thereby shed their organic short-range
air defenses and indirect fires;
Combat aircraft could be based ashore close to a
potential regional adversary and aircraft carriers could sail just off
an enemy's coast;
Enemy integrated air defense systems (IADS) could quickly
defeated;
Land and air combat forces could largely be based in the
continental United States and then surge forward expeditionary-style to
evict hostile invaders;
An increasing share of the Navy's surface fleet could be
dedicated to defending against ballistic missiles while sacrificing
some of its offensive strike capabilities;
The submarine force could be allowed to shrink because it
would be less relevant in operations against regional states;
Commercial ``just-in-time'' logistics could be leveraged
to achieve cost savings and efficiencies;
Communications networks would be assured;
Space would be a sanctuary that could be exploited freely
to gain tactical, operational and strategic advantages; and
Nuclear weapons could be de-emphasized and replaced by
conventional precision strike capabilities.
These assumptions have largely been invalidated by the realities we
now face at the end of the post-Cold War era.
addressing a panoply of threats
Today, the United States faces major challenges to world order
across three distinct geographic regions on the periphery of Eurasia--
Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Testifying before this
Committee last winter Dr. Henry Kissinger observed, ``The United States
has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end
of the Second World War.'' In lieu of a single hegemonic threat as the
Soviet Union posed during the Cold War, the United States now confronts
a more complex panoply of threats. Great power revisionist states like
Russia and China, nuclear outlaw states like North Korea, foes bent on
sectarian war like Iran, and transnational Jihadist groups--all have
adopted particular asymmetric strategies to circumvent traditional U.S.
military strengths while imposing costs on the United States and its
allies in ways that are difficult to counter. Smaller states and non-
state actors have resorted to irregular warfare and terrorism. Larger
powers are exploiting Gray Zone actions below the threshold of war,
pursuing conventional precision strike systems to create anti-access /
area denial battle networks, leveraging cyber warfare to hack U.S.
systems, and modernizing their nuclear forces for escalation control.
For its part, the United States finds itself approaching these
challenges with a narrower margin of military advantage but with far
greater fiscal constraints, and a less unified set of allies and
partners than it had during the Cold War or its immediate aftermath.
The viability of America's traditional means of projecting military
power abroad is waning, while its ability to check regional aggression
by potential adversaries is limited. A survey of the three major
theaters of concern to the United States demonstrates these
deficiencies:
In Europe, Vladimir Putin's Russia is attempting to reestablish
itself as a great power and restore its historic sphere of influence to
the maximum extent over its ``near abroad.'' To achieve this vision,
the Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, has outlined
what he calls ``New Generation Warfare,'' blurring the distinctions
between peace and war, while blending covert action, political and
economic warfare, conventional military force, radio-electronic combat,
and cyber warfare, as well as nuclear and other forms of strategic
attack to prevail in full-spectrum conflicts and long-term great power
competitions. It has fielded ground-launched cruise missiles in
violation of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Russia's particular style of confrontation, moreover, exploits the
minority status of ethnic Russians in neighboring states as a pretext
for undermining the sovereignty of those states while potentially
providing sanctuary for Russian regional power projection (as already
demonstrated in eastern Ukraine). Moscow has ordered large-scale snap
exercises close to the Baltic states and Poland, flexing its muscles in
the form of armor and rocket artillery, in sharp contrast with the
paucity of comparable NATO forces on the territory of allied frontline
states. Russia, moreover, has concluded some of these exercises with
simulated tactical nuclear strikes on NATO cities. The Russian military
has steadily modernized both its strategic and tactical nuclear forces
and adopted a doctrine that envisages the early use of tactical nuclear
weapons to ``escalate to deescalate'' and thereby prevail in local
wars, exploiting favorable asymmetries in interest, geographic
proximity and time. Beyond its nuclear forces, Russia is also expanding
its other options for strategic attacks on the United States ranging
from political warfare and active measures, to cyber warfare, to
attacks on America's undersea infrastructure and offensive space
control operations.
In East Asia, China's sustained economic growth has propelled a
massive defense build-up of advanced conventional air, missile and
naval capabilities for the past twenty years that dwarfs comparable
efforts by Russia in all but its strategic nuclear force modernization.
In turn, China's growing military strength has backstopped its
diplomatic assertiveness over unilateral claims in the East and South
China Seas. It has steadily expanded its air and sea denial
capabilities while improving its ability to hold the small number of
U.S. air and naval bases in the Far East at risk and thereby impede the
ability to flow additional forces into the theater and force the United
States to fight from range. China has built up a sizable inventory of
mobile-launched, precision-guided, intermediate- and medium-range
conventional ballistic missile forces, advanced air combat and naval
strike forces, as well as integrated network and electronic warfare
capabilities it believes are needed to prevail in a short, unrestricted
local war against a distant, ``informationized'' enemy like the United
States. Underneath the aegis of its ``anti-access/area denial'' shield,
it can employ non- and paramilitary forces, including its fishing fleet
and coast guard, to expand its maritime presence in the East and South
China Seas, while constructing and militarizing reefs with artificial
land features in the latter. Finally, China has achieved a credible
second-strike nuclear deterrent and recently tested an intercontinental
range ballistic missile dispensing multiple independently targeted
warheads.
While North Korea is by no means a great power, it nevertheless
presents an acute threat to the United States and its proximate
neighbors--particularly, but not limited to, our close allies Japan and
South Korea--through its pursuit of increasingly survivable
intermediate- and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, coupled
with the continued expansion of its nuclear weapons inventory. North
Korea represents the most salient case where deterrence may not hold,
given the erratic behavior of its ruler, Kim Jong Un. North Korean
leaders may believe that if they were able to demonstrate a credible
capability to mate and deliver a nuclear warhead with an
intercontinental ballistic missile, that they could attack South Korea
or Japan with impunity while deterring the United States from
intervening for fear of nuclear strikes against the U.S. homeland.
In the Middle East, the United States is confronted not so much by
a great power hegemonic threat as by the prospect of further disorder
and disintegration as the longstanding political order melts down. As a
latent nuclear (albeit not a classic great) power Iran poses the
greatest military threat to U.S. interests in the region. It has
improved its ability to wage unconventional warfare and support proxy
conflicts throughout the region, for example by using the Quds Force
and its Lebanon-based surrogate Hezbollah in the Syrian conflict. It is
building up advanced deep strike missile forces, aerial drones and
other unmanned strike systems, as well as anti-ship weapons. And Iran
has the potential to breakout from international monitoring efforts and
acquire a nuclear weapon within a few years. At the same time, Jihadist
organizations like Al Qaeda and the quasi-state of ISIL present very
different sorts of threats, coupling hybrid warfare (unconventional
uses of advanced weaponry) with terrorism. The nuclear and
unconventional threats posed by Iran on the one hand, and the insurgent
and terrorist threats posed by al Qaeda and ISIL on the other, will
present the United States with counter-proliferation and counter-
terrorism challenges for many years to come.
Together, these challenges suggest the United States is entering a
new strategic era characterized by the return of great power
competitions overlaid on a map where regional nuclear dangers and the
persistent threat posed by violent transnational Jihadist movements are
already prominent terrain features. These can no longer be considered
future challenges, and we can no longer afford to defer efforts to
reshape the U.S. military to address them. Similarly, there is no
single approach or strategy that can effectively address all of these
challenges. Instead, as the Chairman McCain noted in Restoring American
Power, the Department of Defense will need to fashion regionally
tailored strategies and force packages, suited to the unique
requirements of these different challenges and the military
capabilities required to address them.
reshaping the military for a new strategic era
Addressing these threats effectively will require a new high-low
mix of capabilities. On the ``low'' side, the key attributes will be
reduced procurement and sustainment costs and the ability to field
large numbers of weapons and platforms for steady-state operations in
relatively permissive environments. Many of our legacy forces and
capabilities already fit this bill. For instance, we have built up a
large fleet of non-stealthy remotely piloted vehicles over the past
decade that will continue to have utility in many areas of the world
where enemy air defense threats are non-existent or rudimentary.
Conventional deterrence of great powers like Russia and China,
however, will necessitate reshaping a large portion of our forces to
ensure they can deploy, operate and be sustained in far less permissive
operating environments than they have faced since the end of the Cold
War. Force planning for the high-end should assume that: (1) forces
will operate in denied communications environments; (2) space will be
contested; 3) neither our forward bases nor our homeland will be
sanctuaries; (4) adversaries will be able to deny us the degree of
local air and sea control to which we have grown accustomed; (5) only
the most survivable aircraft and munitions will be able to penetrate
and conduct surveillance and strikes over hostile territory ringed with
advanced air defenses; (6) large surface combatants will be at risk
near a hostile coast; and (6) large land formations will run far
greater risks entering contested theaters in crisis or after a war has
begun.
Consistent with these assumptions, the high-end force can be
divided into two basic elements: highly survivable and lethal
regionally-tailored forces to counter local power projection by
potential adversaries, and a globally fungible surveillance and strike
``swing force'' that can operate from long ranges to penetrate denied
areas and hold at risk large numbers of hostile military forces and
other targets with conventional, nuclear, or non-kinetic weapons.
Regionally-tailored forces in Europe and Asia would place a premium
on permanently stationed ground forces because it may be too risky to
deploy them in crisis or time of war or they may be too slow arriving
to make a difference. Rather than serving simply as local ``tripwire''
forces as in the Cold War, U.S. ground forces working side-by-side
local allied forces should be far more capable of repelling invading
forces by dominating the land approaches, denying hostile forces
aircover, holding enemy ships at risk, and preventing an enemy's
effective use of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Unmanned ground
vehicles would be particularly useful for a forward-stationed force in
Europe as they would increase the lethality of the force while helping
to minimize the risks to Soldiers in close proximity to numerically
superior enemy strike forces. Given Russia's ability to overrun the
small Baltic states in a matter of hours, the United States should give
serious consideration to the permanent forward stationing of several
multi-domain combat brigades on the territory of the Baltic states.
These forces should be armed with multi-mission missile launchers to
conduct air defense, counter-battery, deep strike, electronic warfare
and anti-ship strikes armed with a deep magazine of various munitions
to repel military attacks or incursions against the frontline NATO
states. Similarly, Special Forces should be stationed in the Baltics
and Poland to work with local territorial defense militias, training,
advising, assisting them in resistance tactics and air-ground
integration employing short-range precision-guided mortars, artillery
and rocket systems to hold at risk invading or occupying foreign
forces.
The United States should also reconsider long-standing arms control
conventions such as the INF Treaty, which proscribes land-based
missiles with ranges between 500-5,500km. INF-class missiles could play
a greater role in maintaining regional military balances in the coming
years, particularly given that Russia is already violating the treaty
while China, North Korea and Iran are building up sizable arsenals of
missiles with those ranges. Allowing the U.S. Army to re-enter the
long-range strike enterprise would be a game changer in great power
competitions and greatly complicate the calculations of potential
adversaries.
At the same time, the globally fungible long-range surveillance and
strike element of the force will need to emphasize air and naval
platforms as well as munitions with the ability to: respond rapidly to
threats globally while operating from long-range with large sensor and
weapons payloads; penetrate into denied areas; evade detection and
persist to strike elusive targets; conduct electronic and cyber
attacks; and sustain with minimal theater basing or logistical support.
For combat air forces, unmanned long-range penetrating surveillance
and strike aircraft could help the U.S. military operate more
effectively in the face of growing threats China could pose to close-in
airbases. Similarly, sea-based surveillance and strike aircraft will
need to operate from beyond the reach of enemy anti-ship sensor and
strike capabilities, be capable of aerial refueling at the outer edge
of an enemy's own maximum fighter range, and be sufficiently survivable
to penetrate sophisticated air defenses in order to locate and strike
mobile fleeting targets in coastal areas, including enemy air defenses.
Given the demands of endurance, high-end combat air forces should be
unmanned.
A greater proportion of naval high-end standoff strike capability
will need to migrate undersea to perform close-in missions in contested
maritime areas. Submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles, which are
among the most fungible elements of the Joint Force, may also take on
new cross-domain missions such as suppressing enemy air defenses,
holding high-value aircraft at risk, and disrupting an enemy's long-
range sensors to ``open'' a theater for other naval and joint forces.
At the same time, 100+ ton displacement unmanned underwater vehicles
could complement manned submarines to achieve a more distributed
undersea surveillance and strike constellation and perform riskier
combat missions. Puncturing enemy-imposed air and sea denial areas may
also place a greater premium on cyber warfare and electro-magnetic
operations conducted by naval and amphibious forces to create a
multitude of false target apparitions that overwhelm the processing
capabilities of enemy sensor nets.
The U.S. military's space posture, which by its nature is
inherently fungible, will also need to be modernized to support
regionally tailored forces and global surveillance and strike with
strategic early warning; persistent and resilient surveillance; and
protected long-haul communications systems. In turn, this will
necessitate exploration of innovative low-cost means of accessing
space, disaggregating some sensor systems to improve their resiliency,
and fielding larger constellations of smaller satellites to more
frequently revisit and survey targets.
A key metric for munitions in the past several decades has been the
probability of kill, which was largely a function of precision.
Confronting enemies possessing advanced air defenses, future munitions
will need a higher probability of arrival at the target, which will be
a function of their survivability and/or return to larger, massed raid
salvos that can saturate enemy air defenses. New classes of weapons--
including cooperative weapons systems that can swarm targets, longer-
range air-to-air munitions that out-range those of enemy fighters,
survivable standoff nuclear and conventional cruise missiles,
hypersonic weapons, and high-power microwave cruise missiles--will be
needed to strengthen the effectiveness of the global surveillance and
strike component of the force.
As Russia, China and Iran seek to circumvent or avoid traditional
U.S. military conventional strength, they are turning increasingly to
the use of Gray Zone active measures short of armed conflict, influence
operations and covert action, propaganda and disinformation, as well as
financial or economic warfare to achieve their own strategic aims. The
United States will need to take account of such threats and devise both
military and non-military means for deterring or defeating them.
Special operations forces (SOF) will have a critical role to play. As
they pivot from the counter-terrorism missions of the past decade, SOF
will need to expand their capacity for special warfare missions
including unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense,
psychological warfare, and train/advise/assist.
Renewed great power rivalries--alongside continued global Jihadism
and the disintegration of the Middle East--also suggest that strategic
competitions will be highly protracted in character. And in the remote
case of potential conflict with China, the possibility that combat that
could stretch for many months or years means that we must have: (1) far
deeper munitions magazines at the ready long before war begins; (2) a
greater margin for attrition in our land, air, and naval combat systems
than we have since the end of the Cold War; (3) far more robust combat
logistics forces capable to sustaining our forces under attack for many
months; and (4) well-defended, ``warm'' production lines for weapons
systems in our defense industrial base. In particular, stockpiling
munitions and conducting exercises that demonstrate American
preparedness for protracted warfare may strengthen deterrence by
reducing an adversary's calculation that it could win quickly or at low
cost.
Finally, the range of potential strategic attacks that could be
conducted against the U.S. homeland, its space constellation, or its
undersea infrastructure, particularly through the increasing employment
of cyber or electro-magnetic attacks, is increasing. Major strategic
challengers all have at least some capability to affect U.S. homeland
security. Russia and China, in particular, are pursuing capabilities in
less mature domains like cyber, the electro-magnetic spectrum, space
and undersea. To address these threats, the United States will need to
reshape its forces to ensure a range of new defensive and offensive
measures. The Department of Defense should ensure, above all, that its
nuclear command, control and communications are safeguarded during
peacetime, crisis or war and that the credibility of America's most
devastating military response options are beyond question. The Pentagon
will also have to consider how to conduct new missions, such as the
defense of its undersea infrastructure or the protection of its land-
based space launch and ground segment infrastructure as it reshapes the
U.S. military.
conclusion
Reshaping the U.S. military should be treated as an urgent matter.
Increasing the size of our legacy force--even at the highest state of
readiness--will simply be inadequate to meet the military challenges we
face across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and will squander
previous resources in the process. Now is the time to make the
transition and begin to reshape a portion of our military so that we
can effectively deter or prevail across a range of competitions and
conflicts over the next several decades.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Donnelly?
STATEMENT OF THOMAS M. DONNELLY, RESIDENT FELLOW AND CO-
DIRECTOR OF THE MARILYN WARE CENTER FOR SECURITY STUDIES,
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH
Mr. Donnelly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to the rest of
the members of the committee for the opportunity share my
thoughts with you.
My role here is a little bit to be troglodyte knuckle-
dragger, and I am happy to play that part. I do not really know
any other, so I am going to focus less on technological
capabilities, although when photon torpedoes are invented, I
hope we are the first people to field them.
I think also that I have a certain sense of deja vu, going
back to the end of the Cold War, in that our failure is less
that we have not adequately responded to the technological
tactical or operational challenges that we face, but that we
have sort of failed to define our strategic purposes in the
world, although Jim Thomas? testimony began to, I think, head
in the right direction.
We have certainly behaved since 1945 as though our
principal strategic interest was the balance of power across
Eurasia, a favorable balance of power in those three theaters
that Jim talked about.
However, we have fallen into the habit of defining wars by
types rather than by particulars, by the location, by the
adversaries, and again by our own definition of what success
would be. Especially lately, we have gotten into the habit of
substituting the idea of strategic agility for strategic
sustainment. In other words, we have withdrawn from the posture
that we had through the end of the Cold War, beginning with the
withdrawal from the Philippines in the late 1980s, almost 30
years ago, and the process more or less has continued
uninterrupted since then.
What we see today is less the development of stunning new
capabilities on the part of our adversaries and potential
adversaries, but the fact that they can operate without coming
into contact with U.S. Forces. To put it simply enough, when we
are not there, the ``axis of weevils,'' as Walter Russell Mead
has called them, burrow into the woodwork and make a lot of
mischief.
Finally, my testimony as written is shaped by a sense of
urgency about this. The United States has thought that we have
been in a strategic pause since the end of the Cold War, and
now we see what the results of that attitude have led to.
Therefore, I am more interested in figuring out what we can
do in the near term with the forces we have to reverse the
geopolitical tide that seems so desperate just from reading the
headlines every day. I have four suggestions, things that can
be invested in within not only this fiscal year but over the
course of a future years defense budget and can return
significant benefits within the period.
First of all, forward-positioning forces is the single most
important reform that we could make. Again, not being there is
a recipe for mischief, and the actions especially of the
Russians and the Chinese reflect an absence of American
presence much more than their own really innovative
capabilities. They are using technologies that we invented or
others invented 20 years ago, but simply using them against
less capable people who are our allies and our friends but
without the backstop of American forces.
Secondly, we could get a lot more from the force that we
already have by fully funding readiness accounts. We just
recently did a series of naval deployment games in addition to
quantifying what the difference of forward-basing would be. It
is also pretty clear that we could improve our readiness
models. Since the end of the Cold War, we have gotten into a
rotation model of readiness. The consequence is, particularly
when forces return from the deployment, they almost immediately
begin to degrade at a precipitant rate. They are not really
available to be redeployed. The investments that we have made,
both in readying them in the first place and then deploying
them, dissipate remarkably quickly.
My final two recommendations are basically subsets of the
readiness one. Again, one of my recent projects has been to
understand how the next brigade that will deploy the European
Readiness Initiative that is based at Fort Riley in Kansas is
preparing itself for that rotation.
Putting it simply, the biggest problem they have is
personnel readiness. Because the force is too small, they are
unable to sustain small unit or large unit cohesion over the
course of time. It is often the case that, again, even sort of
at the company level and below and even at the crew level and
below, cohesion and teamwork get broken up incredibly rapidly,
the result being that even at the small unit level, infantry
company commanders will only have, say, a quarter to a third of
their Bradley systems fully manned and mobilized, and they will
not have any dismounts whatsoever across the company.
Related to this is the dangerously low level of munitions
stocks. Tomahawk cruise missiles are probably the paradigmatic
example of this. These get cross-leveled. As ships come, the
ships go into repair, but the missiles go into other ships,
which are going back out to sea. That is just simply, again, an
example of the kinds of things that are being done simply to
sustain day-in/day-out patrolling and presence even at the
diminished rate we are at.
I think there are things that can be done in the near term
while we are waiting to field new and more capable and more
technologically advanced systems, but we still have a lot of
capability left within the force that we have. If we use it
more efficiently, more effectively, and fully fund-- make sure
that the platforms that we have were completely up to speed, we
could get a lot more mileage out of the old jalopy that we have
got.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Donnelly follows:]
Prepared Statement by Thomas Donnelly
making sense of america's balance-of-power interests
The post-Cold War era has been a confounding period for the United
States military and for the country as a whole. The collapse of the
Soviet empire, an entirely unforeseen event, seemed at first to create
a ``unipolar moment,'' a self-sustaining Pax Americana. This ``end'' to
history begat a holiday from history. Now history is having its
revenge. The impulse to ``make America great again'' is a reflection of
our anxieties as much as our aspirations.
These varying assessments of our geopolitical power directly
reflect attitudes about the strength of the military; ``unipolarity''
was grounded in the primacy of United States military forces
demonstrated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and our current feeling of
decline stems from the frustrations of the Iraq and Afghanistan
conflicts. As President Trump put it: ``We don't win wars, we just
fight, we just fight. It's like . . . you're vomiting: just fight,
fight, fight.''
Having struggled with the costs--in blood, in treasure, and in
domestic political support and leadership attention--of these long-
running irregular contests, we now find ourselves also facing deficits
in the conventional realm, which we have so long taken for granted. The
Joint Chiefs of Staff fret over China's ability to target our surface
Navy, over the range advantages of the Russian Army's artillery, and
over the difficulty our aircraft face in penetrating modern air
defenses everywhere. These are real and growing concerns.
However, my greatest fear stems less from our ability to meet the
technological, tactical, or operational challenges of the times but
from three more fundamental but repeated failures of the last
generation. First, the reluctance of political leaders to define their
purposes in traditional geopolitical terms; second, the U.S. defense
community's propensity to define wars as types--``great-power
conventional conflict,'' for example--rather than in particular--
``deterring Russian aggression and influence in Eastern Europe;'' and
third, the faith in ``strategic agility'' in place of strategic
persistence. To prevail over our most threatening competitors, we must
define victory, be attuned to the particular strategic circumstances
that define the contest, and ready ourselves for the long haul.
the purpose of american power
Defining victory demands clear-eyed self-knowledge, something that
is often difficult for Americans trained to look to the future and
dismiss the past. But the roots of American strategy-making predate our
republic. Since the mid-16th century, English-speaking peoples have
sought to defend the ``liberties'' of the international system against
the prospect of a ``Universal Monarchy,'' that is, the would-be
hegemons of Eurasia: the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon, German
``Reichs,'' Russian and Soviet tsars, and Japan's emperors. In the 20th
century, the standard in this struggle to preserve a favorable great-
power balance passed from Great Britain to the United States. Even as
we have imagined ourselves as benevolent, commercial, maritime
``offshore balancers,'' our actions have betrayed our rhetoric: the
Eurasian great-power balance has been our principal geostrategic
concern.
The logic in these deeply ingrained habits of strategy is powerful.
As John Donne, as deep a politician as he was a poet, wrote:
No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main;
This is to say that our ``exceptional'' experiment in self-
government is inseparable from the nature of government elsewhere in
the world and in particular in those parts of Eurasia where power,
wealth, and great geopolitical ambitions lie. The bell tolls for us in
2017 as it did for Donne in 1624; the Stuart regime's attempts to
absent itself through the 17th century from the continent's great-power
conflicts, the Thirty Years' War and the wars of Louis XIV, twice cost
them their crowns and lost Charles I his head on the chopping block.
Any government in Washington that similarly fails to secure Eurasia's
``liberties'' against the assaults of 21st-century absolutists will
lose not only international respect but also domestic legitimacy.
What does it mean to be ``a part of the main'' today? It means we
must formulate an effective response to the challenge that China,
Russia, and Iran pose to the balance of power across Eurasia. Walter
Russell Mead has dubbed this trio the ``Axis of Weevils,'' a phrase as
apt as it is clever. The first order of business for China, Russia, and
Iran is to undermine the American global order. Each pursues military
designs meant to confound United States influence in their ``near
abroad'' and then establish regional spheres of influence. Even their
principal ``strategic'' systems--their nuclear weaponry--are intended
as a deterrent. None of these three powers is a proximate challenge to
or substitute for U.S. primacy on the global commons of the seas, the
skies, in space, or in cyberspace. Thus the Weevils' principal
investments have been in ``anti-access'' and ``area-denial'' forces and
systems, although more recently these have been balanced with a growing
capacity for power projection; having had substantial local successes
in rolling back the tide of the United States and its allies, the
Weevils are increasingly leaning forward.
It will be very difficult to make the military changes necessary
until we can be clear and precise about the geopolitical outcome we
wish to achieve. ``Everything in war is simple,'' wrote Clausewitz,
``but the simplest things are difficult.'' Over the past generation,
American military planners have suffered from a great deal of self-
induced ``friction'' stemming not from our inability to understand our
enemies but from our inability to understand ourselves.
wars in particular versus war in general
One of the distinguishing and consistent features of the many U.S.
defense reviews conducted since the end of the Cold War has been a
desire to define wars by type rather than in particular. This began
with the 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR), which measured the requirements
of the post-Cold War armed forces by their ability to conduct two
``major regional conflicts'' at the same time. Although the review
rested, at least in part, on detailed analyses of the Gulf War and
studies of what a renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula might be
like, the purpose of the effort was to distill various common
``phases'' of generic military ``campaigns'' that would be ``employed''
in a contest against ``Country X.'' The universal model clearly was
derived from the Gulf War experience; the four phases of any campaign
would be to ``halt the invasion,'' then ``build up U.S. combat power in
the theater while reducing the enemy's,'' culminating in a ``decisive
defeat [of] the enemy,'' and ``providing for post-war stability.'' With
some recent modifications and much debate about ``Phase Zero
operations,'' this basic structure remains more or less intact as the
American model of campaigning.
The review also acknowledged that the United States might employ
military power in other ways and for other missions--for ``smaller-
scale conflicts or crises'' of short duration, ``overseas presence''
patrols, and deterrence, both nuclear and for other ``weapons of mass
destruction.'' However, these were assessed as ``lesser, included
cases'' for force-sizing, posturing and defense budgeting purposes in
the belief that a military capable of fighting two nearly-simultaneous
regional conflicts could handle anything else that might come its way.
Two final distinguishing features of the Bottom-Up Review were that
it took the post-Cold War to be a ``new era,'' defined not by the
enduring interests of the United States but by the collapse of the
Soviet Union and, relatedly, that it looked warily outward for signs of
new threats rather than new opportunities to secure interests.
In these significant ways--seeking a typology of possible conflict,
placing faith in the unprecedented novelty of international
competition, and measuring the challenge by dangers rather than
enduring geopolitical goals--subsequent Quadrennial Defense Reviews and
other official studies have been, essentially, footnotes to the BUR.
This method has had a powerful grip on American defense planning.
However, it ought to be plain by now that it has been powerfully
problematic. That is not because its analyses have failed to predict
events accurately or that they were insufficiently detailed; the reams
of possible-future studies produced across the U.S. intelligence
community and the detailed campaign modeling churned out by the
Pentagon and federally-funded think-tanks represent immense effort. But
this approach has deprived our adversaries of their particular
qualities, strengths, and weaknesses. In a profound way, we've been
looking through the wrong end of the telescope to define the many
things that might lead to defeat rather than to chart a path to
victory.
If the United States is to respond successfully to the emerging
challenges to its Eurasian interests, it must first define what
constitutes success in the three principal arenas of competition. In
Europe and East Asia, for all the troubles of recent decades, a
favorable overall balance of power persists: our alliances are
fundamentally sound, our force presence remains and could be augmented,
and our ability to project additional force is considerable.
Deterrence--a relatively low-cost strategy--is a practicable posture.
Alas, and particularly with the precipitate reduction in presence of
recent years, there is no stable ``status quo'' to preserve in the
Middle East; the weevils are on the loose and eating everything in
sight. To achieve our traditional strategic aims, it will be necessary
to compel change, to reverse the course of current events.
showing up is 80 percent
One of Woody Allen's most famous quips was that ``eighty percent of
success is just showing up.'' The same applies to sustaining the life
of the liberal international order. When the United States doesn't show
up or goes home, things begin to unravel.
Alas, U.S. military presence in critical regions is, increasingly,
American absence. Beginning with the withdrawal from the Philippines in
the early 1990s, the global ``footprint'' of United States Forces has
been steadily shrinking. Perversely, we have come to imagine this as a
virtue: the model of ``campaigning'' enshrined in the Bottom-Up Review
was one that emphasized rapid response rather than continuous presence.
In contrast to the patrol-the-frontiers-of-freedom approach of the Cold
War--even, as in West Berlin, where the tactical situation was all but
untenable--U.S. Armed Forces have increasingly withdrawn from forward
garrisons and sought ``strategic'' deployments from bases in the
continental United States. This approach has had mounting consequences:
rather than being in position to check rising revisionists, we have
ceded them the initiative and, with diminished overall forces, been
slow to respond and lacking in the capacity to tend to multiple
contingencies.
Belatedly, the Obama Administration appeared to recognize this. The
European Reassurance Initiative, one would hope, represents a form of
repentance for and reversal of the drawdown that has opened an
opportunity to Vladimir Putin to begin to overturn the result of the
Cold War. But rotational forces--not only American troops but also
those of NATO allies in the Baltic States--cannot supply the day-in,
day-out deterrence that the alliance's exposed eastern flank demands.
Further, current plans do little to cover alliance commitments in
southeastern Europe, where Russian bribery and ``political warfare''
have helped to bring truculent and nationalist leaders and parties to
the fore.
The situation in the South China Sea is similar. In the face of the
administration's much-protested ``Pacific Pivot,'' Chinese irregular
and, increasingly, regular forces have dredged their way across the
sea, island-making rather than island-hopping. Not only have we
withdrawn from the business of long-term basing, but an overstretched
Navy--whose principal task has been to maintain a robust presence in
the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea to offset the lack of land-based
forces--also lacks the assets to interpose itself between China and the
ASEAN states it tries to intimidate. Philippine President Rodrigo
Duterte is a mercurial man, but his periodic pronouncements about
American weakness and Chinese strength reflect, at the least, the
region's nightmares.
Alongside these mounting worries in Europe and East Asia, the
policy of ``ending'' America's wars in the Middle East has led to a
precipitate collapse of what little order there was, although, in
retrospect, the situation in 2009 stands as a high-water mark of
American influence in the region, the very-hard earned result of
efforts made not only since 2001 but since 1979 as well to stabilize an
inherently volatile region. From a traditional American strategic
perspective, the return of Russia and the ascent of Iran from the
Levant to the Hindu Kush is a catastrophe of epochal proportions.
Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut, three of the great capitals of the Arab
world, are essentially satrapies to Tehran. Iran's rise was aided
immeasurably by Russia's willingness to deploy a few thousand troops
and a few dozen aircraft; in the vacuum left by United States
withdrawal, a little went a long way. The change has unnerved our
remaining traditional allies and partners in Riyadh, Cairo, Tel Aviv,
and, especially, Istanbul; if there is to be a near-term settlement to
the horrific conflict in Syria, America will have little to say about
it.
As a post-script on presence, it is worth asking whether we have
made the most of the promised partnership with India. This was
supposedly a priority of both the second Bush and the Obama
presidencies; the expectation that the Indian Ocean and the surrounding
littoral might someday become a fourth critical Eurasian ``theater''
was sound, and it would only be prudent to anticipate such a
development--if only because the Chinese are headed in that direction.
Although this is more a failure-to-advance opportunity missed than a
tangible retreat, the region's weight in the Eurasian balance of power
can only increase.
recommendations
What, then, is to be done?
To begin with, the new administration ought to bring a greater
sense of urgency to restoring a favorable Eurasian balance. It has been
a commonplace argument that the post-Cold War period was not only a
time of ``strategic pause'' but also an era of rapid technological
change, and that the United States could afford and might even benefit
from a time-out, awaiting developments and positioning itself as a
``second mover.'' Even if that were once true, the contradictions of
``leading from behind'' and superpower passivity have been increasingly
apparent. Dreaming of a ``transformation'' of military forces or
waiting further to ``offset'' adversaries initiatives is to reinforce
geostrategic failure. Therefore we must work with what we have,
immediately improve and increase what we can in the near-term, and
selectively develop new capabilities that can be fielded within a
foreseeable future. Photon torpedoes, warp drives, and cloaking devices
would be cool; once they're invented, we should build them. In the
meantime, we must:
Forward-position forces. No other single defense reform
would pay a bigger or more rapid return on defense investment than
negotiating a return of forces based or home-ported closer to the zones
of contention. Though this is an obvious measure of efficiency, it is
even a greater measure of effectiveness in reassuring and mobilizing
alliance partners. Advancing to patrol the new frontiers in Eastern
Europe--the line from the Baltic to the Black Sea--and Southeast Asia
is critical to reestablishing a credible deterrent. But the same is
true in the Middle East, although the task will be much harder; we
cannot expect to much influence, let alone reverse, the terrible trend
of events from over the horizon or ``offshore.''
Fully fund force readiness accounts. The force we now
have could be made significantly more effective if a ``sustained
readiness'' model were implemented to replace the ``just-in-time''
rotational model of the last 15 years. We have imagined that
deployments can be made eternally predictable and created a system
whereby units are brought to adequate levels of manning, equipment, and
training just before they are sent into harm's way. Then, immediately
on their return to home station--and mostly to save money--the people
are dispersed to new assignments or schools, the equipment sent to the
depot for ``reset,'' and tactical proficiency and teamwork thereby
lost. No matter the emergency, within a matter of weeks it makes little
sense to attempt to redeploy these forces; they've lost their edge.
Increase personnel strength. The most crippling factor in
force readiness is personnel instability and shortages. These factors
are intertwined. The current personnel system was designed at the
height of the Cold War, when deployments and missions were relatively
constant, end-strength levels much higher, and service raise-train-and-
equip institutions much more robust. Over the course of an extended
career, this system produced a force of incredible tactical
competence--its ability simply to operate helped immeasurably to make
up for the strategic errors of recent decades. Personnel reductions
have diminished both unit stability and cohesion as well as the
services' ability to produce the needed raw human and intellectual
capital.
Increase munitions stocks and spares. Material readiness
and force deployment capacity are most limited by sparse stocks of
precision-guided munitions--Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles are
the poster children for what is now a widespread dilemma--and spare
parts--even the smallest units have taken to cannibalizing some systems
to field others; there is hardly a hangar, a dock, or a motor pool in
every service that does not have a ``cann bird'' or two.
I will conclude my testimony here. I cannot convince myself that
many other defense investments--with perhaps, the expansion of F-35
purchases or deciding not to mothball modernized Ticonderoga-class
cruisers--would have a substantial and timely effect upon the
degenerating balance of power in the critical regions of Eurasia. The
immediate need is for restored capacity, not innovative capabilities.
The Weevils have gotten into the woodwork, and it's time to call the
exterminator, not the architect.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Clark?
STATEMENT OF BRYAN CLARK, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC
AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Mr. Clark. Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, and
distinguished members of the committee, thanks for inviting us
to testify on this important subject today. I am honored to be
here with my colleagues and former bosses. Hopefully I do not
embarrass them too much.
I believe we all agree that we need to reshape and grow the
military. One thing we will have to think about as we do that
is the fact that it will take at least a decade for us to get
down the road of building up a bigger fleet and a bigger Air
Force and getting more ground forces and developing new
capabilities.
We already see that great powers like Russia and China are
likely to be big players, and that is only going to get worse
as we go a decade down the road. We are not going to be able to
necessarily consider the Islamic State as the most important
threat to deal with. Great powers in that time frame are likely
to be the most important factor in our force planning.
That has some significant implications for how we need to
structure and posture the force in the future. In particular,
the objectives of countries like China and Russia are
relatively close at hand, when you think about Russia wanting
to go into the Baltics potentially. They certainly have gone
into Ukraine. Look at China looking at potentially trying to
coerce Taiwan into submission or to attack the Senkakus and
take them from Japan. Those are all objectives that can be
gained within a very short period of time by those countries.
The so-called anti-access/area denial capabilities or the long-
range missiles and surveillance systems they have would enable
them to slow down a U.S. and allied response enough to where
they could achieve those objectives and be done before we
arrive. Now the United States and its allies look like the
aggressor that is trying to change the status quo. When you
think about what happened in Crimea, if we were to try to
overturn the results of the Crimea invasion, we would look like
we are trying to change the facts on the ground as opposed to
coming to the aid of an ally or a partner.
What that means is that in the future, we are not going to
be able to take the same model we took with Iraq and
Afghanistan where we let something happen, aggression occurs,
bad things occur, we try to come back in after the fact and
overturn that aggression and change the status quo maybe and
change the regime of the adversary that started the aggression.
We are going to have to prevent those things from happening in
the first place, otherwise our alliances are going to begin to
fray, our security assurances will not have the value that they
need in order to sustain alliances that we rely on.
We are going to have to think about deterring rather than
trying to come in after the fact and overturn the results of
aggression. That has some significant implications when you
think about the capabilities of great powers like Russia and
China. There are three main things that I would advocate that
we really consider and take a hard look at, which my colleagues
have talked about.
First of all, a much more robust overseas presence or
posture. Not just putting forces out there for the purpose of
creating a faster response time, but putting forces out there
for the purpose of denying or defeating aggression when it
occurs. When you think about the Cold War, we were worried
about Soviet forces coming across the Fulda Gap, coming into
Japan across the Kamchatka Peninsula, relatively fast
operations that required us to be there to be able to stop it
rather than come in after the fact and try to recover. That is
where we are going to have to go in the future, is manage that
much more robust presence with greater forward-basing and
forward-stationing of forces.
But we are going to have to reshape the military to give it
the capabilities to survive in these kinds of environments and
conduct the offensive operations necessary to defeat aggression
so we can demonstrate to adversaries that we are going to be
able to stop them. That is the heart of deterrence really.
I think growing the military to allow it to sustain this
more robust overseas posture, while affording it sufficient
time for training and maintenance between deployments--our
readiness crisis of today is a function both of not putting
enough money into readiness necessarily, but it is mostly a
function of not having the time to do the training and
maintenance between deployments because the force is not large
enough for the demands we are placing on it today.
Some specific things with regard to those three elements.
In terms of posture, not just increasing the presence of forces
but making sure they are tailored with the capabilities
necessary to deal with the threats and opportunities of that
environment. Today we deploy forces more or less on a one-size-
fits-all basis. It is the same kind of unit, whether it goes to
Europe or it goes to Asia or it goes to the Middle East with
some minor tailoring. We are going to have to re-equip those
forces and they are going to be much different between regions
because what Russia cares about in the Baltics is much
different than what Russia might care about and be able to do
in the Mediterranean, the same with China in the South China
Sea versus the East China Sea. We need to think about tailoring
the forces much more.
Some of these changes will be counterintuitive to address
the particular challenges that a great power might provide to
us. For example, we might have to rely on naval forces to a
greater degree in Europe to help address a Russian challenge in
the face of NATO being unable to respond quickly and therefore
NATO forces and our own ground forces in NATO not being able to
respond to a Russian aggression in the Baltics.
So really, ground forces in the Pacific might be necessary
to be able to provide us the ability to hinder Chinese power
projection beyond the first island chain of the Philippines and
Japan.
As Dave talked about, we need to improve our basing, but we
also need to improve the ability of our bases to defend
themselves, shifting to shorter- and medium-range air defenses
like he discussed.
The increased use of forward-stationing where we have
equipment and ships or aircraft that remain forward and
rotationally send crews out there to man them. That is a model
that the Navy and other forces have used somewhat and we used a
little bit in the Cold War, but it is a model that might enable
us to more affordably increase the posture overseas without
necessarily having to grow the number of people in the force
dramatically.
In terms of reshaping, we are going to have to think about
making the force able to survive in these highly contested
environments at the onset of conflict and do two main things:
to deliver high-volume missile-based fires very quickly on
short notice with very little warning. For example, you think
about a Russian aggression in the Baltics. It could be done in
2 or 3 days, so you got to be able to mount a very strong
defense with something that is going to give you a lot of fire
power very quickly. A lot of that is going to be missile-based,
so you think about surface-to-surface missiles the Army has,
missiles that the Navy and Air Force have. That is the kind of
fire power that is going to be necessary for that very short
period at the beginning of hostilities, followed by some
moderate volume but sustained combat that might have to occur
for a very long time in order to demonstrate to the adversary
that the U.S. is able to carry on the fight for the long haul.
We are going to need new operating concepts that allow the
force to survive and conduct these kinds of high-volume initial
and then moderate-volume follow-on operations. Increasing the
capacity of air and missile defenses by shifting to shorter
ranges and using capabilities like IFPC or other short-range
air defenses, being much better at electronic and
electromagnetic spectrum warfare, being able to find the enemy
without ourselves being counter-detected, being able to deny
the ability to communicate with themselves and conduct
networked operations, and going back to some of the old Cold
War techniques of concealment and cover and deception where we
might have to rely on physical decoys to deal with the growing
prevalence of electro-optical and infrared sensors, ground
force multi-domain fires, like the Army is working on right
now, to contribute to strike and anti-ship warfare from the
ground, and then as you talked about, Mr. Chairman, undersea
warfare. We are going to have to look at shifting to unmanned
systems to carry a larger number of undersea missions as our
own submarine force shrinks but also dealing with the fact that
our adversaries are mounting more capable anti-submarine
warfare efforts of their own.
Reshaping the force is going to require reform in how we
acquire military systems and how we build strategy to define
the priorities for those systems.
The last priority in terms of growing the military, again,
we need to address the size of the military because of the
current readiness shortfall, which is a symptom of not having
sufficient forces to do training and maintenance between
deployments.
But growing the military is also going to require some
changes and reform of the Department to eliminate excess
organizations and excess personnel and infrastructure that
currently are going to constrain the ability of the military to
grow itself to the size needed to sustain its readiness.
I think we can accomplish these changes over the next
decade, but it is going to require a strategy and the
leadership to follow it.
I am looking forward to your questions, and thank you very
much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Clark follows:]
Prepared Statement by Bryan Clark
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, thank you for inviting me to
testify today on this important and timely subject. The United States
is at an inflection point in its national security. After enjoying
almost three decades of military superiority, the United States now
faces competitors with strategies and capabilities that could
circumvent, undermine, or defeat the defense posture and forces of
America and its allies. In some regions and mission areas, the U.S.
Military is already behind those of its potential adversaries. If we
fail to reshape our military and implement new ways to deter
aggression, respond to provocation, suppress terrorism and insurgency,
and protect the homeland, we risk the security assurances upon which
our alliances are based and, with them, the security and economic
health of the United States.
I applaud Senator McCain's recent white paper, ``Sustaining
American Power,'' which recognized the loss of U.S. Military overmatch.
The paper's recommendations to rebuild U.S. Forces would significantly
improve America's ability to counter the efforts of its competitors and
adversaries.
emerging challenges
The Department of Defense (DOD) describes five major adversaries it
must address: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and violent Islamic
extremists. \1\ Today, DOD's level of effort indicates it considers
terrorism its most important challenge. Thousands of U.S. troops are
fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; a carrier strike group
and dozens of aircraft ashore are conducting air strikes against
Islamic State and Al Qaeda targets; and U.S. strike and special
operations have expanded into Somalia, Yemen, and Libya.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Military Strategy
of the United States of America 2015, U.S. Department of Defense, 2015,
p. 1-2, available at: http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/
Publications/2015--National--Military--Strategy.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although terrorism and violent extremism will continue to threaten
the United States, the importance of challenges from great powers such
as China and Russia will likely increase over the next decade as they
further modernize their militaries. Of greatest concern, both countries
now deploy networks of long-range sensors and precision weapons able to
threaten military forces in the air, on the sea, or on the ground
hundreds of miles from their territory. These networks could enable
Russia or China to delay or prevent intervention by the United States
and its allies long enough to conduct a rapid attack or invasion
against nearby targets like Taiwan for China or the Baltic states for
Russia. After such an act of great power aggression, the United States
and other allies will need to either accept the result and subsequent
collapse of American security alliances or counterattack and risk
triggering a great power conflict that could have potentially
catastrophic consequences.
The sophisticated capabilities being fielded by Russia and China
are also proliferating to regional powers such as Iran and North Korea,
giving them the ability to threaten their neighbors and delay
intervention by U.S. forces. Moreover, these adversaries can exploit
geographic advantages, such as Iran's proximity to the Strait of Hormuz
and North Korea's location near Japan and China, to quickly conduct an
attack that could greatly impact the global economy and lives of
millions of people.
return to an old strategy
During the Cold War, America and its allies deterred Soviet
aggression by posturing conventional forces where they could defeat or
delay a Soviet offensive and relying on nuclear weapons as a backstop
in the event conventional forces failed. Since the Cold War, however,
America's approach to aggression has been to mount a response after the
fact, such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kosovo. Conventional deterrence
was achieved by the presence of some U.S. forces in the region that
would signal America's resolve and act as the leading edge of an
eventual counterattack.
The mere presence of United States Forces and the threat of
response were enough to deter aggression by regional powers such as
Iran or North Korea, who did not yet have the capabilities to rapidly
achieve their objectives or to defend themselves from eventual U.S. and
allied retaliation. This approach won't be enough in the future to
deter great powers such as China and Russia or regional powers with
improved defensive capabilities. Moreover, because the targets of their
aggression are close and achievable within days, U.S. attempts to
reverse the results of the aggression after the fact-as the United
States and its allies did in the first Gulf War-could potentially place
America in the position of being the aggressor.
Nuclear deterrence may also be less useful in these scenarios than
during the Cold War. Aggression by Russia against border regions of
NATO allies in Eastern Europe or by China against Japan's Senkaku
Islands may not be perceived as existential threats that warrant a
United States nuclear response. United States threats to use nuclear
weapons in those cases may not be credible to Russian or Chinese
leaders.
Instead of simply threatening to respond to aggression after the
fact, the United States will need to deter an attack before it occurs
or defeat it promptly using conventional military forces. U.S. and
allied intervention that delays aggression may also be successful at
eventually stopping aggression if it enables the economic and
diplomatic costs of the aggression to mount to unacceptable levels. As
in the Cold War, this approach will require forces and capabilities in
proximity to the aggressor's territory or objectives so they can
interdict an offensive or punish the aggressor by promptly attacking
targets of value to compel the aggression to stop.
American military forces will need to adopt a new posture that
places them near potential adversaries and their targets--areas that
are likely to be highly contested in wartime by the long-range
surveillance and weapons systems these countries have been putting in
place over the last two decades. Deterrence will, therefore, rely on
new operational concepts and capabilities that enable ships, aircraft,
ground units, and their bases to survive and conduct offensive
operations in these highly-contested areas long enough for them to stop
aggression and punish the aggressor. These operational concepts and
capabilities should be the focus of efforts to reshape the U.S.
military over the next decade.
new operational concepts
New technologies could improve the lethality of U.S. Forces and
their ability to defend themselves in highly contested areas. But
technologies alone will not enable U.S. Forces to deter, deny, or delay
aggression, or operate effectively in range of long-range enemy
weapons. New technologies must be incorporated into operational
concepts for U.S. Forces to integrate new and existing systems and
fully exploit the new capabilities technology can bring.
The improvement and proliferation of adversary military systems and
new technologies for precision weapons, sensors, and autonomy are
prompting a series of shifts in warfare that should be reflected by new
U.S. operational concepts. DOD is beginning to pursue some of these
concepts and supporting technologies, but slowly and only by small
portions of the force. They will need to be incorporated more broadly
across the U.S. Military to enable it to compete effectively with the
militaries of other great powers and regional adversaries. The most
important areas for DOD to address in reshaping the force are air and
missile defense, electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) warfare, strike and
surface warfare, land warfare, and undersea warfare.
Air and Missile Defense
Air and missile defense is arguably the most important area for new
operational concepts. Each of the most important adversaries identified
by DOD relies to a large degree on precision-guided weapons to level
the playing field between their relatively less proficient forces and
highly-trained and prepared U.S. operators. In some cases, these
competitors have built up large inventories of precision-guided
missiles and rockets that could overwhelm the current defenses used by
U.S. Forces, which mostly rely on expensive interceptor missiles to
physically destroy incoming weapons.
New directed energy technologies could significantly increase the
air defense capacity of U.S. Forces. Lasers can damage the external
structure or seeker of an incoming missile and high-power
radiofrequency (RF) transmitters can damage its internal electronics;
because they use energy instead of physical interceptors, their
capacity is only constrained by electrical power and cooling. Both
technologies are now mature enough to be incorporated into U.S. Forces.
Directed energy weapons will not always work against all threats,
however. Some missiles have hardened shells that can resist lasers or
lack apertures for high-power RF signals to penetrate. ``Hard-kill''
weapons that physically destroy missiles will still be needed in those
cases. Hypervelocity projectiles that travel at Mach 5 or greater could
enable today's naval or ground artillery to damage or destroy attacking
missiles, creating more air defense capacity. And new shorter-range
interceptors such as the Army's LowerAD and AIM-9X used by the Indirect
Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) launcher or the Navy's Rolling
Airframe Missile (RAM) and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) can be
less expensive and smaller than most current interceptors, enabling
more to be carried in weapons magazines.
New energy weapons and interceptors, however, engage incoming
missiles at 10-30 miles away, compared to larger and more expensive
interceptors-such as Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-2, Terminal High
Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), or the Navy's Standard Missiles-that can
engage threats more than 100 miles away. U.S. Forces will need to adopt
new operational concepts that engage air threats closer to the defended
target to increase their capacity and enable them to shift to energy-
based defenses with virtually infinite magazines.
Although new air defenses will not make U.S. Forces impervious to
attack, they will increase the number of weapons an adversary will need
to launch at ships, bases, or ground units to defeat them. If combined
with new concepts for distributed operations and EMS warfare, improved
air defense capacity could make individual targets too costly to defeat
in detail.
EMS Warfare
Despite increases in air defense capacity, an enemy near his own
territory may still be able to concentrate fires and overwhelm U.S.
ships, aircraft, and ground units. Conducting large attacks, however,
requires detecting and tracking the target to ensure it can be
classified and its location determined with sufficient precision for
the weapons to be used. Most sensors, except for undersea, rely on EMS-
based technologies such as radar or passive signal reception.
U.S. Forces can confuse or deceive these sensors using new
operational concepts and technologies for EMS warfare. U.S. Forces will
need to improve their ability to jam and confuse active EMS sensors
like radar by exploiting advances in cognitive and autonomous
electronic warfare such as in the DARPA Adaptive Radar Countermeasures
(ARC) program. These systems go beyond today's jammers that use pre-
planned techniques against recognized threat radars and instead develop
new techniques that they employ iteratively against signals they may
not be able to recognize, but whose characteristics can be classified
as potential threats. To fully exploit the capability of new electronic
warfare systems, U.S. operational concepts should employ large numbers
of jammers and decoys like the Air Force's Miniature Air-Launched Decoy
(MALD) across a force, networked together to create a false target
picture in the EMS, as in the Office of Naval Research's Multi-Element
Signatures Against Integrated Sensors (NEMESIS) program.
Passive sensors are an even greater challenge for U.S. Forces. They
are hard to find and an adversary on its own territory can deploy large
numbers of them with overlapping fields of view to improve their
accuracy and range. An enemy can be expected to employ passive sensors
to target U.S. radars and radios and attempt to jam them. To counter
these efforts, new U.S. EMS warfare concepts will need to move away
from relying on high-power active radars like the SPY-1 on Aegis ships
or the APY-2 on Airborne Early Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft.
Instead of active radars, U.S. Forces will need to rely on passive
and low probability of interception or detection (LPI/LPD) sensors and
communications that can circumvent enemy jamming. DOD is developing
technologies to support these concepts, like new passive RF receivers
in the E/A-18G Growler or F-35 Lightning II aircraft and communication
systems such as the DARPA Collaborative Operations in Denied
Environment (CODE) or Communications in Extreme Environments (COMMEx)
programs.
Where DOD will need to make the most improvement, however, is in
countering electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) sensors, which rely
on the visual or heat signature of targets and therefore cannot be
defeated simply by turning off radars and radios. Commercial EO/IR
satellite imagery providers such as BlackSky and Planet Labs are
proliferating while China and other countries are expanding their own
government EO/IR satellite constellations.
U.S. operational concepts will need to return to old counter-
surveillance approaches using obscurants, physical decoys, and
camouflage to prevent classification and tracking by these sensors.
Although they have improved dramatically in recent years, obscurants,
decoys, and camouflage do not need to be perfect. They only need to
make real targets and decoys indistinguishable from one another. An
adversary must then decide whether to use enough weapons to destroy
both potential targets, which further increases the number of weapons
required, or risk choosing the wrong one.
Strike and Surface Warfare
In addition to simply surviving in a contested area, to deter,
defeat, or delay aggression U.S. Forces must be able to attack the
enemy at sea and on the ground. New concepts for EMS Warfare will
improve the ability of U.S. Forces to find and target the enemy while
themselves not being effectively tracked. They must then exploit their
targeting by conducting attacks rapidly and with sufficient capacity to
overcome enemy air and missile defenses.
Like the United States, potential adversaries like China and Russia
have been improving their defensive capacity in an effort to make
attacks too costly except against the most important targets. U.S.
Forces can gain an advantage in this ``salvo competition'' by
increasing the size and survivability of their attack salvos. This
requires using smaller strike weapons that can be carried in larger
numbers by strike platforms and developing operational concepts or
weapon features that improve their ability to evade defenses.
To exploit fleeting target information from passive and LPI/LPD
sensors, U.S. Forces will need standoff missiles that can quickly
engage targets throughout the sensor's field of view. Weapons platforms
also should be distributed to increase the number of individual targets
an enemy must attack and thus the number of weapons it will need to use
to defeat U.S. Forces. Both these factors argue for long-range standoff
weapons. Weapon range, however, will need to be balanced with weapon
size because longer-range weapons are larger and reduce the number that
can be carried in a ship, aircraft, or ground launcher. Previous CSBA
studies found that strike weapons with ranges of 100-500 miles have
enough standoff range to protect the launcher from counterattack and
are small enough to fit on most air, ship, or ground launchers.
DOD's current weapons portfolio, unfortunately, consists almost
entirely of direct attack weapons with less than 100 nm range that are
useful in the permissive air environments of Iraq and Afghanistan. It
has a small percentage of longer-range weapons, but they are generally
too expensive to buy and employ in large salvos. DOD should accelerate
development of less expensive weapons with ranges between 100 and 500
miles, such as the rocket-propelled Joint Standoff Attack Weapon (JSOW)
and powered variants of the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB).
To improve weapons survivability, U.S. Forces can adopt new
operational concepts that incorporate jammers or decoys into weapons
themselves, or into missiles like the MALD that would fly with weapons
salvos to the target. The DOD can also employ weapons such as
hypersonic missiles that can fly at more than Mach 5 and are very
difficult for air defense systems to detect and engage. Hypersonic
weapons are in development under several programs and could include
air-launched variants similar in cost to existing missiles like the
Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM).
Land Warfare
Ground operations are likely to become increasingly specialized as
adversaries grow more sophisticated and better able to exploit their
local environments. In Eastern Europe, U.S. Forces must survive and
conduct combined--arms combat against a multi-dimensional Russian force
that, although relatively small, is more capable and adapted to that
environment than are U.S. Forces. In the Middle East, ground units will
continue to encounter irregular terrorist and insurgent forces that
will require highly coordinated intelligence and special operations to
address. And in the Pacific, long-range sensor and weapon networks and
the archipelagic geography will place a premium on operations combining
ground-based air defenses, surface-to-surface fires, and EMS Warfare
capabilities.
After more than a decade focused on stabilization and counter-
insurgency operations, the Army and Marine Corps are not prepared for
these challenging scenarios. Even in the Middle East, U.S. ground
forces will need to address improving threats from precision weapons,
electronic warfare systems, and sensors. They will need to develop new
operating concepts and capabilities, especially for EMS Warfare and
surface-to-air and surface-to-surface fires.
To improve their survivability against enemies with improved
sensors and precision weapons, ground forces will need to use more
distributed formations and employ new operational concepts, as
described above, for EMS Warfare and air defense. They will need to
invest in more air defense systems like the IFPC, so each deployed unit
can be equipped with them. The Army and Marine Corps will also need to
field multi-function EMS warfare systems, including unmanned air and
ground vehicles, to passively detect and track enemy transmissions, jam
enemy radios and radars, and enable secure communications.
In addition to protecting maneuver forces on the ground, air
defense and EMS warfare concepts and capabilities can also be used by
ground forces to threaten enemy aircraft attempting to pass overhead.
Similarly, ground-based surface-to-surface missile launchers such as
the high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) could carry anti-
ship versions of missiles like the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System
(ATacMS) or M-31 Guided Multiple Rocket Launch System (GMLRS).
Together, these capabilities could enable concepts that turn the
``First Island Chain'' of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines into a
barrier to hinder the projection of Chinese forces into the open ocean.
More distributed ground forces will need new approaches and systems
for logistics and sustainment. Current Army and Marine Corps logistics
capabilities are designed for more concentrated formations such as
Brigade Combat Teams or Marine Expeditionary Units. They may not be
able to support highly distributed formations down to the company level
scattered across islands or in rough terrain and using large numbers of
missiles and fuel for radars and EMS warfare systems. Unmanned vehicles
like the Marine's K-Max aircraft or Army ``Big Dog'' ground vehicle may
be needed to sustain forces in the field.
Undersea Warfare
As potential adversaries improved their ability to threaten U.S.
ships, aircraft and ground units, the United States increased its
reliance on submarines for surveillance, strike, and anti-ship
operations near their coasts in wartime. This, in turn, is leading
potential adversaries, particularly China, to deploy seabed sonar
arrays and larger numbers of maritime patrol aircraft to challenge U.S.
access undersea.
As undersea areas forward become more contested, the U.S. Navy
should shift to using more unmanned vehicles and systems for
surveillance missions currently conducted by submarines. Unmanned
systems will likely also be able to conduct offensive operations such
as mining, attacks on enemy warships, and strike missions. At the same
time, submarines will need to move from being front-line tactical
platforms, like fighter aircraft, to being operational-level command
and control platforms, like aircraft carriers.
Against the growing number and capability of Russian and Chinese
submarines, U.S. naval forces will not be able to continue today's
anti-submarine warfare (ASW) approach that would track and try to
destroy every enemy submarine. This effort would require time and
platforms that are needed to counter adversary aggression. Instead, the
United States should focus on suppressing, rather than destroying,
enemy submarines. Using overt sensors like sonar and radar and
harassing attacks, U.S. Forces could exploit the inherent limitations
of submarines: They are relatively slow, especially when trying to
remain stealthy; they have little self-defense capability; and have
much less situational awareness than surface or air platforms. When
attacked or counter-detected a submarine is therefore likely to evade,
rather than standing and fighting as a surface warship might.
U.S. naval forces can best support these new ASW concepts by
fielding active sensors such as low-frequency variable-depth sonars and
periscope detection radars and inexpensive weapons such as the Compact
Very Lightweight Torpedo (CVWLT). To cover large areas and reduce the
vulnerability of manned platforms to counterattack, these sensors and
weapons should be deployed by unmanned surface, undersea, and air
vehicles. Further, combinations of active and passive sensors could be
used by unmanned vehicles to conduct multistatic surveillance and
targeting operations.
the importance of posture and capacity
New technologies and operational concepts can only help deter,
defeat, or delay aggression if U.S. Forces are positioned where they
can use their new capabilities to interdict an enemy offensive. Russia
could invade the Baltic States and China could devastate Taiwan before
American forces coming from the continental United States or another
theater would be able to intervene. Scenarios involving regional powers
such as Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz or North Korea attacking
South Korea similarly require a local response.
The United States must return to the more robust military posture
that defined its Cold War-era force. Forward-based forces will need to
be increased and joined by larger numbers of rotationally-deployed
units from the United States, as well as forward stationed ships,
aircraft, and equipment with rotational crews that deploy from the
United States.
U.S. military posture will also need to be more tailored to enable
new operating concepts and address the threats, adversaries, and
opportunities present in each region. For example, the form aggression
from Russia might take will be different in Eastern Europe compared to
the Mediterranean; protecting objectives of Chinese aggression in the
East China Sea will require different forces than those in the South
China Sea. Today's military forces are usually not tailored to the
specifics of their region, in the interest of promoting efficiency by
reducing the number of training pipelines needed to prepare them and
enabling the flexibility to deploy units to different regions over
time. The elevation of efficiency over effectiveness will need to end
if the United States hopes to deter great power aggression in the
future.
A more robust U.S. military posture will translate into a larger
and more diverse set of military units than today. For example, CSBA's
recent fleet architecture study found the Navy should grow to more than
340 ships by the 2030s to address the future security environment,
close to the Navy's subsequent assessment of 355 ships and about 20
percent larger than today's fleet. Similar increases would likely be
needed in other parts of the joint force.
There is much discussion today about the urgent need to address
readiness shortfalls in today's force before trying to grow its
capacity. This is a false choice. Today's readiness crisis is a product
of the U.S. military's lack of capacity and the increasing demands
placed on it that are symptomatic of the emerging strategic
environment. When more ships, aircraft, and personnel are deployed
overseas from a shrinking force, each unit must deploy longer or more
frequently. This reduces the time available for training and
maintenance and eliminates flexibility in maintenance scheduling that
could allow for unforeseen repairs. Although DOD has received
increasing amounts of supplemental Overseas Contingency Operations
(OCO) funding in the last five years to pay for more operations and
maintenance, this funding cannot be accurately projected and is not
efficiently used because of schedule changes and emergent work
resulting from the high operational tempo being sustained by the
smaller U.S. military.
conclusion
America's military is the best in the world as an overall force but
is already falling behind those of its competitors in some regions and
missions. In Eastern Europe, U.S. ground forces lack the fires,
surveillance and targeting, and electronic warfare capabilities to
counter battle-hardened Russian forces fighting in Ukraine. In the
Western Pacific, the U.S. Fleet has fewer ships than the Chinese Navy
and faces a wide array of land-based counter-maritime capabilities. And
in the Middle East, U.S. air forces are struggling to sustain an air
war against the Islamic State, which lacks its own aircraft or long-
range air defenses.
There is no quick fix to this situation, which resulted from almost
two decades of decisions to prioritize efficiency and savings without
reducing the demands placed on U.S. armed forces for peacekeeping,
security, and stabilization operations. Reversing it and restoring our
military will require a sustained effort to reshape it for the ways it
will need to fight in the future and grow it to provide the posture and
readiness it will require to remain forward. If we fail to do so,
competitors will erode the security assurances and alliances that
underpin America's position in the world and with it the economic and
security benefits that position provides.
Chairman McCain. Thank you very much.
Leaving out the issue of sequestration, which is a big
leave-out, what would be your first two or three top priorities
that this committee and this administration should address,
beginning with you, Mr. Ochmanek?
Mr. Ochmanek. Mr. Chairman, clearly we have unrealized
potential in many of our platforms, and I think all of the
other witnesses observed that as well. I believe the quickest
way to fill that gap is to ramp up the production and
procurement of advanced munitions, cruise missiles, guided
weapons, things of that nature that can allow our forces from
the outset of a campaign to deliver these high-volume fires
that Bryan talked about. I think that would be number one for
me.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Thomas?
Mr. Thomas. I absolutely agree. I would start with the
munitions inventory and figuring out how we thicken our density
of a whole range of munitions that we simply lack today. We
have got this huge mismatch between the number of platforms we
have and the weapons to deliver them and to persist in a lot of
these fights.
The other thing I would add is getting on with the business
of looking seriously at the issue of forward-stationing our
forces. I think this has really been delayed. We have been in
this expeditionary warfare mindset for 25 years, and I think
that really needs to be revisited because I think it is very
dangerous for the world that we are going to be in for the next
couple decades.
Chairman McCain. Well, I also would give some credit to the
previous administration for the European Reassurance Initiative
on that issue.
Mr. Donnelly?
Mr. Donnelly. I would agree with the two points brought up
before. Again, I would add the need to add people to flesh out
hollow units. We lose the investment. Even when the platforms
are ready, the crews are not. If we could just have more people
within the unit structures and within the institutional
structures, the headquarters--I know this is like anathema, but
there needs to be a training base to be able to produce trained
and ready forces.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Clark?
Mr. Clark. I would say munitions, as we just discussed, but
maybe even more importantly, the ability to passively sense the
adversary and target the adversary. Today our potential
adversaries know exactly where we operate with our radars and
our other active sensors, and if we do not have the ability to
find them passively without being detected ourselves, our
weapons are not going to be that useful because we will be
counter-detected.
Chairman McCain. Well, we will begin with you with my other
question, Mr. Clark. We have not talked in this conversation
much about cyber, and that obviously the aspects of cyber have
dominated our news and our priorities here for some time. What
do you think we ought to be doing there?
Mr. Clark. Clearly, we need to be refocusing ourselves on
cyber defense of our own networks, particularly our classified
networks. I think one challenge we are going to face is we are
focused on our unclassified networks being a potential source
of exploitation, particularly industrial networks where you can
get information on acquisition systems. But we need to look at
the defense of our classified networks where there has been a
lot of work done by our potential adversaries on how to get
into those systems as potentially a trusted user. Dealing with
that would be a key factor I think that we have to deal with in
cyber.
Chairman McCain. How about developing a policy as to how to
counter it, Mr. Donnelly?
Mr. Donnelly. I would also add that we need to understand
better what the impact of these things is at the tactical
level. We have not operated in a contested electronic
environment really since the end of the Cold War. It is more
like old-style electronic warfare than it is cyber. Again, this
brigade from Fort Riley in its National Training Center
rotation is really going to be the first sort of tactical
experiment because the opposing force at Fort Irwin will have
Russian-style capabilities in the exercise. I think that will
be a great learning experience for us to understand what these
developments mean for actual people in the field operating in
this kind of environment.
Mr. Thomas. Mr. Chairman, we have been talking about cyber
for more than 20 years, and everyone thinks that they do cyber
to a certain extent if you look across the services. The
reality is no one is singularly focused on it as a mission the
way we focus on the air domain or the undersea or the land
domain. I think it is time to reconsider do we need a single
organization which focuses on organizing, training, and
equipping for cyber warfare. I would start there.
Chairman McCain. Cyber Command is not doing that?
Mr. Thomas. I think Cyber is taking component efforts from
the services, but it is playing the role of a combatant
commander in terms of how it thinks about fighting the force.
But I think we are not doing as well as we could be doing when
it comes to just basically recruiting, organizing, and training
those forces. In particular, I think about the role of the
Reserve component, which could be a huge advantage for the
United States in how we approach cyber warfare in the years
ahead.
We also need to fully integrate cyber into our war plans
today. Oftentimes it is treated as an annex and special
technical operations, and it is not fully appreciated by our
operational commanders.
The last is I think we need to move beyond the ghettoizing
of cyber and we need to fully integrate it with electromagnetic
warfare--electronic warfare as we move forward. These two are
just integrally related.
Mr. Ochmanek. Very quickly, I would endorse what Bryan said
about the importance of cyber defense, that is the threat to
the integrity of our command and control systems. But I want to
take a page out of Tom Donnelly's book and be the troglodyte
here.
Cyber is sometimes invoked by people as a magic wand they
can pass over things to make up for gaps in kinetic
capabilities. I am skeptical about that. We do not have a lot
of ability to test the efficacy of our cyber tools, to the
extent we have them, nor do we know how long they will last if
they are in fact in place. So at some level, there is no
substitute for putting holes in things and breaking them.
Chairman McCain. Senator Reed?
Senator Reed. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This has been very insightful and I appreciate it very
much.
We all talked about priorities, but in reality, they are
competing priorities. We would all like to do them all and we
would all like to resource them robustly. But when push comes
to shove, it is going to be the competition between these
priorities.
The three key ones I think that have been mentioned by the
panel--one is the readiness of the existing force today. Second
is growing that force with comparable readiness, and then the
third is the new technologies, the third offset, the leap
ahead, the investing in something that today does not appear to
be of immediate consequence but could be the changing system.
Starting with Mr. Ochmanek, just kind of your response to
how do we deal with those competing priorities. Do we emphasize
immediately one and then shift? Or do we concentrate on the one
that is going to be neglected and that might be the new
technology? And so your comments and then right down the line.
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Reed, could I respectively take a
little bit of issue with your third priority? I do not think I
would equate modernization of the force with third offset and
exotic technologies. I think there are some very near-term
mature things that we can invest in quickly like munitions that
we have already tested to really get a rapid return on that
investment in terms of improved power projection capability.
I would hope that this Nation could find the will and the
resources to, at the same time, bring our troops and units the
training and readiness they need and accelerate this
modernization program, again buying into near-term munitions,
sensor systems, forward posture, putting another heavy brigade
in Europe. These are not high-tech, high-cost, exotic things. I
think you would get some very quick strategic returns on those
kinds of things.
Senator Reed. Mr. Thomas, please.
Mr. Thomas. For a long time, we have drawn this line
between near-term readiness and long-term readiness, and maybe
our adversaries are doing a favor because those really now are
almost one and the same. The problems we are talking about
here, whether it is great-power competitions dealing with
Russia and China or dealing with nuclear powers and potential
nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran or dealing with the
continued global jihadist threat--these are all with us today
and they are going to be with us for quite some time. We do not
have the luxury of just saying here is what we can do about
Russia and China 10 or 15 years from now. As Bryan Clark said,
I mean, a lot of the scenarios we think about are scenarios
that could happen tonight. These really are not that
futuristic.
I think it is a question of balance between what are the
near-term steps, as Dave Ochmanek is talking about, in terms of
building up our munitions inventories, forward-stationing, and
these sorts of steps that we could take immediately, as well as
skating to the puck of the future in terms of what are we going
to need as the threats continue to evolve 10 years hence. Ee
have to do both of those things more or less simultaneously.
Senator Reed. Mr. Donnelly, please.
Mr. Donnelly. I would basically agree with what has been
said by Dave and Jim. A dollar spent today is probably worth $5
or more programmed 5 or 10 years from now. There are some
exciting technologies. We have also failed to buy really
anything new in numbers for 2 decades. We have very few choices
about what we could throw money at.
Again, I think there are some things we could do
differently, particularly with platforms like the F-35B, that
again would give us capabilities that we do not necessarily
have on station at the moment but could really use. I believe,
Senator Reed, you are the one who said the future is now and
that is pretty much true.
Senator Reed. Thank you.
Mr. Clark?
Mr. Clark. To restore the readiness of the force, even down
the road just a few years, we are going to have to reduce the
amount of operations we do today. There is no other way to
reset the force because we cannot build a bunch of new force
today. One choice we are going to have to make is reduce the
operations we do and the stress we put on the force today to
enable it to get the readiness it might need in 5 or 10 years.
That is the only way we are going to be able to reset it.
I think in terms of technology and new systems, as Dave was
saying, there are a lot of new technologies that are currently
being demonstrated, tested, prototyped. They are just not
transitioning. They are just sitting waiting for somebody to
take them on and say I am going to put you onto my platform and
begin to use you as a system. Examples of this might be IFPC,
like Dave was saying, which could really improve our air
defense capabilities. Active protection systems for tanks and
other armored vehicles. We do not have active protection
systems on our ground vehicles today, and every other NATO
country does. Those systems are available and could be strapped
on, bolted onto our existing systems.
Munitions, electronic warfare, sensors. There are a lot of
systems that we currently are just waiting to bring on board
and we could incorporate those into the existing fleet or
force.
Senator Reed. Mr. Clark, just quickly because my time has
run out. These systems are out there. Our NATO allies, who we
generally consider to be sort of less advanced or progressive,
have them. Why do we not have them? Is it a budget issue or is
it a cultural issue? What is it?
Mr. Clark. To some degree a cultural issue. When you do not
think you are going to have to fight in an environment where
you are going to be faced with people shooting high-end weapons
at you all the time, then you tend not to invest in those
things. And now that we are faced with a situation where all of
our forces are going to be in contested environments against
high-tech weapons, they are going to have to start thinking
about how to defend themselves.
Senator Reed. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Inhofe?
Senator Inhofe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think it is important just to get in the record because
of this very distinguished panel that we are in a threatened
position today in this country and times have changed from the
past.
We had a hearing--I chair the Readiness Subcommittee--last
week. We had the vice chiefs come in. It was a pretty sobering
experience there. They made their testimony such as General
Allen said we have had most of our modernization programs on
life support for the last several years. Currently our
modernization is 50 percent of what it was in 2009.
It was General Wilson, and this is a quote. He said at the
very bottom what we called the hollow force of the 1970s,
pilots were flying 15 sorties a month, about 20 hours. Today we
are flying less hours, less sorties than we did in the 1970s.
He was saying essentially we have a hollow force today. We have
to recognize that.
The first question I would ask you probably in anticipation
of this, you read some of the statements that were made by the
four vice chiefs. If so, do you agree pretty much with them?
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Inhofe, I do agree. Some of this is
probably unavoidable as a result of 15 years of heavy use of
the force and ongoing operations. Some of it is certainly
related to budget constraints that have been placed on the
force by the Budget Control Act. But we absolutely do need to
get our men and women in uniform and our units the training and
resources they need to be at their peak level of readiness.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you very much.
The rest of you, do you generally agree with them?
Mr. Clark. Yes, sir, Senator.
One thing I would add, though, is part of the reason we had
this readiness problem is we do not have the time for the
forces to train and maintain between deployments. The other
part is the budget uncertainty, not so much the lack of money
overall. It is the fact you cannot plan your maintenance in
advance and then budget to it and carrying it out. As a result,
you have to do maintenance on an emergent basis or it is
insufficiently planned, which causes growth. It increases the
cost, and then you do less work in the end.
Senator Inhofe. Yes, but of course, if you are in a period,
as we have been, of starving the military, the first thing that
goes is maintenance and then modernization because that is less
visible out there.
Now, you, Mr. Clark, mentioned just a minute ago--yes, it
was you that said it would take at least a decade preparing
right now for what we are going to try to have for the future
to face these threats that are coming. I think, Mr. Thomas, you
also made reference to taking a decade.
It reminds me a little bit of my last year on the House
Armed Services Committee before I came to the Senate. We had
someone testify--this is 1994--that in 10 years we would no
longer need ground troops. It kind of puts us in a situation.
If it is going to be 10 years, what do we prepare for today?
That is a problem.
Now, the one agreement--and I think it is very significant
that we get this in the record from the four of you. You have
already done it I think in your opening statements and in your
responses--is you are looking very much at forward-deployment.
I think we all agree that that is necessary.
We remember also--it was back in the 1990s during the
Clinton administration--the emphasis was the other way. In our
political system, something you folks do not have to deal with
but we do, people, when they start talking about going through
a BRAC round just say, fine, just do not do it here at home. Do
it overseas. Well, that is what happened.
I remember when Vincenza was under attack. That was in
Italy, and it was one of them that was going to be reduced down
in the process of the BRAC round.
Now, we all remember what happened when we were trying to
get troops into Iraq and we were not able to take them on the
ground through Turkey, and so Vincenza came through. Well, if
that had been bad weather at that time, we could not have done
it, so we went in. It was very difficult to do, but we rebuilt
in Aviano the capability of sending these kids in no matter
what the weather conditions and all that.
I am saying I agree wholeheartedly. I disagreed back in the
1990s when the reverse was true. I would like to have each one
of you make a comment as to the necessity for the forward-
deployment, anything you have not already said so it will be in
the record, starting with you.
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Inhofe, our alliance relationships
and the integrity of those security commitments that we give to
our allies are the bedrock of our national security strategy.
If we are going to influence events in Eurasia, which have the
potential to directly affect the security and wellbeing of
Americans, it is important that those security alliances be
viable. Forward-stationed U.S. Forces are both a tangible
demonstration of the U.S.'s will and ability to defend common
interests abroad, and they are the advance lead elements of our
initial defensive operations. I absolutely agree that forward-
stationed forces are essential to the viability of our strategy
and that we are under-postured certainly in Europe and to some
degree in the western Pacific as well to meet the challenge.
Senator Inhofe. My time has expired. Do the rest of you
generally agree with that statement? Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Warren?
Senator Warren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the witnesses for lending your expertise here
today.
You know, when I look at what is happening, it seems to me
that right now our potential adversaries are more interested in
challenging us through cheap and asymmetric means, whether that
is through cyber activities, the use of local agents,
separatists, paramilitary forces, as we have seen in Ukraine
and other places. All the ships and all the aircraft in the
world cannot solve that challenge. In fact, our adversaries
pursue alternative means to achieve their ends precisely
because we have always had such dominance in the air and sea.
To start, I would like to focus on one of these asymmetric
threats. Mr. Clark, what capabilities do we need in the cyber
realm specifically to deter asymmetric actions that fall short
of open conflict?
Mr. Clark. The first thing, Senator, would be to have a
cyber policy that clearly defines what our actions are going to
be in the event of an attack and clearly defining what it is
that we mean by attack. This might involve being a little bit
more open with things that we now treat as classified and do
not want people to hear about. Just like in other areas of
warfare, we are going to have to be more open about it.
Senator Warren. That is very helpful. Thank you.
Do you believe that future conflict with a sophisticated
adversary will involve attempts to exploit our cyber
vulnerabilities, disrupt our reliance on space, or distort our
ability to communicate and share information rapidly?
Mr. Clark. Certainly, yes, Senator. Also, it is going to
involve electronic warfare where they do not just use the wired
Internet but also use the radio frequency spectrum to affect
our ability to conduct the kinds of operations we are used to.
Senator Warren. What kinds of investments should we be
making in order to prepare for this kind of contingency?
Mr. Clark. The focus should be maybe on the ability of our
forward forces to be able to operate in an environment where
they are going to lose a lot of the long-range communications
that they today are used to having. So line-of-sight
communications, more resilient communications that are jam-
resistant. There are technologies out there. DARPA has a lot of
programs that are building these. They are very successful. It
is sort of amazing how well that they are able to protect
communications. You just have to accept the fact that you are
going to be down to a much shorter-range set of operations than
you are used to.
Senator Warren. I think that is very helpful, and I
appreciate that.
We have heard a lot today about conventional equipment, but
I think that these new domains may well be decisive in any
future conflict and we should be putting a lot of attention on
them.
We have also heard a lot today about the size of the force,
and I just want to take a minute to ask another question about
the focus on its future capability. The Department recently
briefed this committee on its third offset strategy and
advanced technology, and while it all sounds very promising,
the fact is many of these technologies that they are talking
about are still in development.
So given that that is the reality, what priority should we
give to maintaining or increasing the size of the RDT&E budget
in fiscal year 2018 so that the investments are in place to
support the Department's third offset and other offsets and
efforts like the ones that you all have described in your
testimony? Mr. Clark?
Mr. Clark. I would say we need to increase the RDT&E budget
not just to bring on some of the far future technologies but to
transition some of the ones that have been developed. We have a
lot of really effective technologies that have been
demonstrated that I have seen but just have not been
transitioned into the force because they have not made that
last set of testing or that last set of transition developments
that are enabled to be plugged into an existing platform.
Senator Warren. Well, let me actually just hone in on that
a little bit more. As you point out, we may be 10 to 20 years
away from some of these technologies like autonomy before they
are fully mature. Are there other more achievable near-term
technologies that we should be investing in right now to put us
on the right path?
Mr. Clark. Electronic warfare systems I think would be a
key area and undersea warfare systems. Autonomy undersea is
very hard because of sensor capabilities, and so the other
place I would look at investing is in sensor capabilities to
enable an autonomous system to better see where it is going. I
mean, the problem we have with autonomous systems in a lot of
cases today is they do not have a good enough sense of their
environment to make a good decision. They can be really smart,
but they cannot see what they are doing.
Senator Warren. It is very helpful. I see lots of nodding
heads. I will put this in as a question for the record so I can
get everyone's views on this.
You know, I think we should be budgeting our defense
resources based on 21st century threats. I want us to invest
smartly not simply rolling out more of the last century's
equipment off the production line, but instead focusing our
investment on the next generation and even leap-ahead
technologies that are more likely to ensure our military's
superiority across multiple domains.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman McCain. Senator Cotton?
Senator Cotton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your testimony today. A lot of
the talk today has focused on three buckets, about which we
frequently speak: end strength or how many troops we have;
readiness, how those troops are trained, ready to fight; and
modernization, buying new stuff for the future, new vehicles,
new aircraft. We have not yet touched on a subset of that third
bucket, nuclear modernization, some of which is both nuclear
conventional like the F-35 or the B-21, some of which is
exclusively nuclear like the ground-based strategic deterrent
or the nuclear command and control system.
Could we just maybe start at my left, your right, and go
down the panel and get your thoughts on nuclear modernization?
Mr. Ochmanek?
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Cotton, I think the Nation at this
point does not have a choice but to modernize its strategic
nuclear forces simply because of the block obsolescence of our
major platforms and weapon systems. Nuclear weapons remain the
bedrock of our security. We must have a viable deterrent. We
must have a viable second strike capability so that no
adversary ever could see an advantage to crossing that
threshold and using nuclear weapons against us. I think the
Ohio replacement program rightly has first place in line both
because of the age of the Ohio ships and also because I
personally believe that the undersea portion of our nuclear
triad is the bedrock of that survivable second strike force.
Senator Cotton. Mr. Thomas?
Mr. Thomas. I would just add to that and say we need to be
paying closer attention to our tactical nuclear forces and the
tactical nuclear balance. The most likely nuclear confrontation
we are going to have is going to be a theater range tactical
contingency, and this is one that I think we have largely
given--we have been inattentive to over the past 25 years. For
example, in the case of Europe, we know that Russia is in
violation of the INF Treaty. They are developing medium-range
both cruise and ballistic missile systems that could hold NATO
military targets at risk. I think we should question the
ability of fourth generation fighters armed with gravity bombs,
B-61's, to respond in the presence of precision air defenses
that would likely ring almost any militarily significant
target. We need to have viable theater-range, lower-yield
response options than we currently do.
Senator Cotton. Before we move on, I have got to follow up
on that. What is your best estimate on the imbalance today
between Russia and NATO forces on tactical nuclear weapons?
Mr. Thomas. Well, there is obviously a numerical asymmetry
that favors Russia. I would say more importantly is the
qualitative asymmetry. In terms of these middle rungs on the
escalatory ladder, I think Russia has the advantage, and we
need symmetrical, in-kind response options that we lack. We
talk a lot about LRSO and that is a viable option. There may be
other systems more similar to JASSM, which allow us some low
observable standoff capability with a very high probability of
the weapon arriving at the target that we are going to need to
consider in the years ahead.
Senator Cotton. You mentioned Russian violations of the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. If media reports are
to be believed and Russia has now not just tested but put into
operational use a road mobile cruise missile of intermediate
range, does that mean that the United States is the only Nation
on the face of the earth that has restrained itself from such a
missile?
Mr. Thomas. I do not know if it is the only Nation on the
face of the earth, but if you think about the robust arsenal of
intermediate-range ballistic missiles that China has built up,
the IRBM capabilities of North Korea and Iran, and now Russia
in flagrant violation of the INF Treaty, the United States is
kind of the last party standing. We look sort of like a chump
in this class of problems. This is an area where we need to
probably be thinking about a world beyond the INF Treaty both
because that may be the world that becomes our reality, but
also if we want to go back and try to reinforce the INF Treaty,
we have to have some viable military backstop for any sort of
negotiations. Right now we would be negotiating from a position
of technological weakness.
Senator Cotton. Thank you.
Mr. Donnelly?
Mr. Donnelly. I would agree again with what Dave and Jim
have said, but Jim's point I think is a larger one than he
suggested. That is, we have a strategy deficit when it comes to
nuclear warfighting. I hate to use that terrible term. We have
a world that is increasingly a multipolar nuclear world. There
was a report yesterday that the Chinese have allegedly reached
parity both qualitatively and quantitatively with the U.S.
nuclear arsenal. I have no idea whether that is actually true
or not, but if it is not true today, it will be true tomorrow
or pretty soon.
So we think in Cold War very tit for tat terms. I am not
sure what the new paradigm should be, but I am pretty sure that
the old one is inappropriate to the world that we are living in
now.
Senator Cotton. Mr. Clark?
Mr. Clark. I would agree with the comments of all my
predecessors here, particularly with regard to the tactical
nuclear weapon question because if we do not have the ability
to respond to that kind of threat, it is not so much that we
might have an exchange there, but it is just the fact that we
are vulnerable to coercion then. The Russians threaten the
Baltics. We threaten to come in on their behalf. The Russians
threaten a small nuclear attack, and we do not have any way to
respond to that, so we are forced to back down.
Senator Cotton. Thank you.
Chairman McCain. Senator Hirono?
Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
All of you have identified a number of countries in the
Asia-Pacific region as threats, and you additionally identified
the prepositioning of U.S. Forces as a key strategy in the
proposed reshaping of the military.
Relative to what is in place in Pacific Command right now,
what additional assets and capabilities would you recommend
placing in the Asia-Pacific theater? We can start with Mr.
Ochmanek.
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator, I would start by ensuring that the
bases and facilities that we rely on in that theater have what
they need to defend themselves in the case of attack. As I
mentioned in my remarks, there are some fairly rudimentary
things we can do. Putting gravel out there to fill holes in
runways, building inexpensive shelters so that our airplanes
are not exposed to observation and attack, moving those
airplanes around more frequently would go a long way toward
bolstering our deterrent posture in that region.
Going beyond that, these deficits we see in capabilities
across the board for standoff weapons and munitions, for
sensors that can survive in a contested environment, those
sorts of things. As we begin fielding more of those
capabilities, the Asia-Pacific region should have perhaps first
claim on those as they reach the force.
Senator Hirono. Do we need more submarines in the area?
Mr. Ochmanek. I think that submarines can make very
important contributions. Every combatant commander but
particularly the commander of PACOM would like to have more
submarines.
Senator Hirono. If the rest of the panel pretty much
agrees, if you have something to add, please do so, otherwise I
can go to my next question.
Mr. Donnelly. I have a couple of things. First of all, we
need to be more forward, particularly in Southeast Asia and the
South China Sea. It is very unfortunate that President Duterte
is not only an erratic personality but seems very interested in
at least balancing American influence with Chinese influence.
Secondly, you need to think about the theater more broadly
speaking. We are treating it now only as a maritime theater.
China is principally a continental power and its most
traditional strategic vulnerabilities have been from Southeast
Asia and also from Central Asia. This is a case where a
continental power is going to sea and projecting power, and we
are doing nothing to divert its attention back to its most
traditional and the things that make the Chinese most
neuralgic.
Mr. Clark. I would add that we need to increase the forward
posture of surface naval forces, as well as submarines, because
that is maybe a more visible deterrent to Chinese aggression,
at least over next 5 or 10 years.
Australia is a place we need to be putting investment with
regard to infrastructure and expeditionary basing in the
northern part of Australia. In our wargaming, we find a lot of
times that Australia ends up being the sustainment point for a
lot of United States Forces that would be operating in the
South China Sea.
Senator Hirono. Well, right now, we have rotational forces
in Australia. But what about Guam then to what you are seeing?
Mr. Clark. We already rely on Guam, but what happens in
some of these games is that Guam ends up supporting operations
in the East China Sea and we end up having to rely on Australia
to a greater degree to provide the fuel and the back office
logistics, if you will, for the force that is in the South
China Sea.
Senator Hirono. Do we not have some concerns about
Australia's willingness to have our ongoing presence there?
Mr. Clark. Not necessarily. I was in Australia a month ago
and talking with the government officials there. They are very
supportive of a U.S. presence and using the--they call them
expeditionary bases in northern Australia to a greater degree
than we do today.
Senator Hirono. Thank you.
Our reliance on special forces--the U.S. has relied very
heavily on special operations forces over the past decade and a
half, and they have been very successful in many missions,
including anti-terror operations. There is speculation that
President Trump could rely even more on these forces that, some
would argue, have been overused and in need of better dwell
ratios.
What are your thoughts on the role of special operations in
the future? Anyone?
Mr. Thomas. Well, I would just comment and say I think the
role of special operations is going to continue to expand. We
have already taken steps over the last decade to grow our
special operations forces. They can only grow at a certain
pace, and we are limited in terms of recruitment and the
training pipeline. It will always be a very limited, highly
valued asset.
But as we think about great power competitions, I think
that the special warfare role of the special operations forces
is going to increase; that is, think about unconventional
warfare, training our allied and partner forces in resistance
techniques, helping them to assert more effective local
defenses in the event of an invasion or even low-intensity gray
zone activity in those countries. They will also have a much
greater role to play in some of the missions Dave Ochmanek was
talking about earlier, in things like disrupting the sensor
grid of an opponent early in a campaign. But direct action and
special reconnaissance roles for special operations forces in
high-intensity conflicts I think is also an area that will
increase.
Senator Hirono. Do the rest of you agree? Very briefly.
Mr. Donnelly. I disagree pretty strongly. We have grown our
SOF. They have done remarkable things over the last 15 years,
but they have had no discernable strategic effect from my point
of view. I think that is in the nature of special warfare. It
is very difficult to achieve a large-scale effect by raids and
things like that. I think it has diverted our attention from
things that are more strategically critical.
Senator Hirono. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Ernst?
Senator Ernst. Thank you all very much for your testimony
today.
I chair the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
Yesterday I held our first briefing and focused on Russia's
increasing anti-access/area denial capabilities in Europe. The
current problem set that is posed by Russia right now is
expanding placement of their air defense systems, surface-to-
surface missiles, and coastal defense weapons. All of this is
not just concerning to me. It is concerning to a lot of folks
out there.
My concern is compounded by Russia's aggressive actions. We
see it every day on the news, not just with their naval
vessels, but their ground forces as well.
Mr. Ochmanek, you argue that a significant portion of the
capability gap we face on NATO's eastern flank can be addressed
today through appropriate U.S. Force structure changes. Could
you explain a little more about that, and really, what is the
most immediate need that you would see to counter the rising
threat that we see from Russia?
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Ernst, in our gaming, we found that
there is sort of a critical threshold of about three heavy
brigades that need to be present to actually give the defending
forces the ability to effectively slow down an advancing
Russian attack on the Baltic States. So positioning that kind
of asset, along with artillery forces forward, would make a big
effect on deterrence.
But there is a capability dimension to this as well, and
you mentioned the Russian air defenses. Since the end of the
Cold War, the Russians have deployed whole new generations of
surface-to-air missile systems. These are longer-range systems
than we ever encountered before, very powerful radars, very
capable electronics. We are still shooting at them a weapon
that was developed in the 1970s, and it is out-ranged by the
things it is shooting at. So we are asking pilots to go into
situations to suppress SAM systems that they cannot reach with
their weapon.
Solving this particular problem has nothing to do with
high-tech. It has to do with building a bigger rocket. We know
how to do that. That is why I say this is not necessarily a set
of things that requires a lot of high, exotic technology. It
involves ramping up investments in things we know how to do
today.
Senator Ernst. The suggestion of three heavy brigades in
Eastern Europe--would that be a permanent presence? Is that a
rotational force? Is that a combination of the two?
Mr. Ochmanek. we are examining those options for the Army
right now at RAND. I think it could be a combination of the
two. You certainly want to have some on-the-ground presence all
the time, if only to cope with the possibility of a surprise
attack out of the blue, but I think also just positioning a lot
of the heavy equipment there and ensuring that we can fly
people into marrying up with it quickly would also be a part of
the solution.
Senator Ernst. Also part of the solution is just different
munitions as well.
Mr. Ochmanek. Absolutely right. Having those also forward
so that they are available from the outset of a conflict.
Senator Ernst. I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
Mr. Donnelly, in your testimony you talk about how things--
I like this--like warp drives and cloaking devices would be
cool, but in the meantime, we really do have to refurbish our
current force. After hearing the service vice chiefs testify on
readiness last week, I think all of us where appalled once
again this year. I think you raise an important point.
Focusing on readiness and ensuring our current capabilities
can address the threat we face today is very important. That is
why I have been a proponent of upgrading small arms.
General Allen last week in his testimony--he said something
that was pretty striking I think that we all should listen to.
He had said if we do not have soldiers carrying guns, we do not
have anything. So true for the Army. How important is it for
fixing today's readiness in making sure that we are ready to
fight the wars of tomorrow?
Mr. Donnelly. I think it is really a disservice to
disaggregate wars by type and to abstract out the element of
time from any strategic competition. We could invent some
really nifty gizmos and we could probably do it pretty quickly.
We actually have a lot of technology that is backed up in the
pipeline that just has not made it to the field that we could
accelerate by modifying some of the things that we failed to
field and be in much better shape. But really, we always take
the element of time out of our reckoning of our military
posture, so that is why we are where we are today.
Senator Ernst. Exactly. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Chairman McCain. Senator King?
Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
All of you have testified in one way or another about one
of the important features of a new strategy is the dispersement
of assets, a distribution somewhat across the country. I do not
question that strategically except that it puts a much greater
strain on communications. The tide of the Civil War turned when
Lee lost his ISR, otherwise known as Jeb Stuart, at the Battle
of Gettysburg. As we distribute, I am just worried about our
communications, cable and satellite principally, being
disrupted on the first day, and with a distributed system, then
you have a lot of autonomous units without necessarily the
command and control that can put them effectively into the
field.
Your response?
Mr. Ochmanek. A very good point, Senator King. We are
constantly balancing between the efficiency of having small
numbers of lucrative targets out there and the survivability of
distributing the force in a way that makes it more difficult to
attack. And absolutely, distributing the force places a premium
on survivable communications and also training that force so
that they can operate in what we call a low bandwidth
environment. Our analysis suggests that with modest investment,
we can assure ourselves of having at least minimal
communications with disbursed forces even in highly jammed
electronic warfare environments. But there is a culture
dimension to this, as well as a technology dimension, and
learning how to operate in that low bandwidth environment where
you are not getting massive amounts of data from higher
headquarters but still being effective is part of the solution.
Senator King. Do others have thoughts on that issue of
communication?
Mr. Thomas. I would just add that we have a huge
opportunity in places like Japan to move from wireless
communications to go to buried fiber. We can have very, very
secure communications links between distributed cluster bases
across the country and our ability to immediately disperse
aircraft out not only to military bases but also potentially to
civil airfields and then to be able to net them together with
buried fiber that is very hard to attack is a potential
advantage that we have and we could exploit.
Senator King. Let me change the subject for a minute. We
have been talking principally about peer adversaries and those
kind of conflicts. Yet, the real conflict that we have faced
over the last generation has been asymmetric, non-state actors,
terrorists, lone wolves. That is an entirely different kind of
adversary. What has bothered me--and I have been going to these
hearings in Intelligence for 4 years, and we are engaged in a
kind of international whack-a-mole where we are trying to kill
the hydra and it keeps growing back.
Should we not also be talking about a much more vigorous,
strong, focused information war with this Islamic terrorist
faction that is so dangerous? For example, I think in 1998 we
did away with USIA. It drives me crazy that we are the country
that invented Hollywood and Facebook, and yet we are losing the
information war. I see a lot of nods. For the record, could you
say yes?
Mr. Clark. I would say, obviously, the information war
involves being better at doing public diplomacy. But also part
of the information war is defeating the adversary out in the
field.
Senator King. You cannot kill an idea with a gun.
Mr. Clark. Right, but you can start to erode the viability
of that idea by demonstrating that it does not have an effect
in the end. If you can show the terrorist acts that are
attempted and fail or that the IS troops are dying and losing
in the field, that is part of the information campaign, and
then you have got to communicate that to the potential recruits
they are trying to seek.
Mr. Donnelly. A couple things.
First of all, you can kill an idea with a gun. The counter-
Reformation was killed because it failed militarily. Spain's
bid or the Hapsburg bid to dominate Europe was defeated on the
battlefield by both Catholic and Protestant powers.
Secondly, again abstract out the phenomenon of Islamic
terrorism from the geopolitical--the struggle for power in the
Muslim world, the Arab world--chose your term of art-- is again
bound to be misleading. That leads you to not only whacking
moles but whacking the wrong moles. So putting war back in its
political context would be the most clarifying thing that we
could do especially in the Middle East.
Senator King. But war does not always necessarily--when you
use the term ``war,'' you are not necessarily, at least in this
day and age, talking about nation states. That is the
conventional thought of war.
Mr. Donnelly. In the period of the 17th century, the wars
of the Reformation and counter-Reformation were conducted not--
there were nation states involved, but there were what we would
describe as terrorists. You know, we could use the very same
language to describe that conflict as we use today to describe
the conflict in the Middle East.
Senator King. Perhaps there are some lessons we could take
from that period.
Mr. Donnelly. Well, history is good.
Senator King. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Sullivan?
Senator Sullivan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Your testimony is very
helpful.
I just have one question. I think a number of us have to go
vote. But it is about missile defense and about the recent
threats, the growing threats, the inevitable threats--let us
face it--of North Korea. This is all unclassified. It is not if
but when he is going to be able to range the continental United
States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, likely with
a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile. That is going to
happen at some point. You know, the classified estimates are a
little bit nerve-racking. He is already being able to range
places like my home State of Alaska--the North Korean
leadership.
Do you think we need to do more on missile defense to buy
us an insurance policy if you have a leader of a rogue nation
who is trying to shoot one or two nuclear missiles at the
United States and to be able to say, hey, we are definitely
going to shoot this down and then if you do this, we will
massively retaliate? What should we be doing? I think we are
not doing nearly enough on missile defense, but given the
threat, what do you think we should be doing? I just want the
answer focused on missile defense. I know there is a whole
other dimension of what we should be doing on North Korea.
Mr. Donnelly. As a matter of missile defense, I mean, the
North Koreans still have liquid fuel missiles. So they need to
bring it out of the garage and put gas in it. We should figure
out how to find that missile on the launch pad and destroy
before it is launched.
Mr. Ochmanek. But we have to assume that one day they will
also have a solid fuel mobile missile that we cannot be
confident--I think this is one area, Senator, where we are
ahead of the power curve with our national missile defense
ground-based interceptor systems. As I understand it, the focus
now is on improving the reliability of each of those missiles
and their guidance systems, which were admittedly kind of
rushed into initial operational capability. So continuing to
focus on that, making sure they are reliable as well.
But I agree that this is not a nation that we can be
confident of being able to deter from using nuclear weapons
through the threat of retaliation because of their very
weakness and the unpredictability of this leadership.
Senator Sullivan. Anyone else on missile defense as it
relates to North Korea?
Mr. Clark. Clearly, this is one case where the ground-based
defenses in the United States make sense because it is a small-
scale threat that could be dealt with those kind of
capabilities, and it is one that is not likely to be deterred
with the threat of retaliation because there is not much for us
to gain by immolating North Korea.
Senator Sullivan. Great. Thank you, gentlemen.
Senator Reed [presiding]. Thank you very much, Senator
Sullivan.
I am informed that Senator Blumenthal and Senator Strange
would very much like to come and ask questions. I have the
opportunity to bedevil you a bit, and I will take that
opportunity.
One of the issues that we face--we have talked about how we
grow the force, how we make it more ready, and how we do the
innovation. On the innovation side, so much seems to be now in
the commercial sector, particularly with cyber, some electronic
products, autonomous vehicles. It is not the old industrial
model of an arsenal, a contract for the Department of Defense
doing the cutting-edge work, a national laboratory doing the
really great work. I think this is important.
How do we make the connection with the commercial sector?
What are the obstacles? How do we do it better? All your
comments would be appreciated.
Mr. Ochmanek. Senator Reed, I am not an expert on
acquisition or industrial policy, but I can only agree with you
that much of the dynamism in these areas is happening in the
private sector. I know Secretary Carter and Deputy Secretary
Work have reached out to Silicon Valley to improve our
connections there between them and the Department of Defense.
The point I would make from a force planning standpoint is
we have to assume that any advances we make in exploiting these
kinds of information technologies for our armed forces are not
likely to be monopolized by us. Right? Those technologies are
available through private R&D throughout the world. These are
not long-lasting advantages we are going to have. We are
interested in finding ways to use red teams in a more vigorous
way to ensure that we can anticipate what our adversaries will
do in response to these kinds of developments.
Senator Sullivan. I have noticed the return of my
colleagues. I will suspend that wonderful line of questioning.
Senator Strange, on behalf of Chairman McCain, you are
recognized.
Senator Strange. Thank you very much, Senator.
I want to express my appreciation to the panel for being
here today.
I am very pleased to serve on this committee. It is my
first hearing. I respect the long tradition of bipartisanship
on this committee. The armed services, military is critical to
my State. I am following in the footsteps of Jeff Sessions, but
I have a rich military tradition in my family. Senator Reed and
I talked about my uncle who went to West Point, the
contribution of our State. I am highly concerned with the
issues you have raised. I am very new, obviously.
But the one thing that I have learned in the short time I
have been here is the urgency of these needs. The question I
have for you--and I know Mr. Donnelly addressed it. There are
two or three things that you had on your urgency list. Is there
anything else--and feel free, anyone, to comment on this--that
the Pentagon could do immediately that would address some of
these urgency needs? So much of what we talk about has a long
horizon. But is there anything in particular you would like to
add that you have not already mentioned for the record that we
could be thinking about immediately to address some of these
issues?
Mr. Ochmanek. One thing we have not really mentioned is the
importance of training and exercises, both as a way of
improving the facility of our forces but also demonstrating to
adversaries that we have capabilities they may not have taken
into account. So we have been very predictable over the last
few decades of where we operate in the Western Pacific, out of
Okinawa, out of Guam. If airplanes start showing up in small
numbers unpredictably at places where we have not been before--
and here the Philippines is the perfect place, if we can ever
get the politics right again. But Australia, Southeast Asia--
you know, here are eight airplanes that are going to operate
for 2 weeks and demonstrate the capability to sustain a high
tempo of operations from an austere base. That is a cultural
change for our United States Air Force. The Marines are better
at it than the Air Force. That would alter the deterrent
calculus of China because all of a sudden they have uncertainty
about how we are going to operate and what they have to contend
with in war. That is just one small thing.
Senator Strange. Thank you.
Mr. Thomas. I would just pick up on Dave's demonstration
point and say it is also thinking about surprising ways in
which we can repurpose some of the forces that we have in
existence today. So the classic example is the SM-6 missile,
which is designed for air defense but could also be used in a
surface attack role. We could think about the use of bombers
firing air-to-air weapons. We could think about submarines and
novel missions they could perform or demonstrate perhaps
involving the suppression of enemy air defenses. So there are a
lot of ways we could be perplexing and surprising our potential
adversaries and changing their calculations by demonstrating
that many of our systems could be used in ways they have not
anticipated.
Mr. Donnelly. Sir, I think there are a number of things we
could do to better harvest the technologies and the programs
that we did not bring to fruition. One thing that is very
obvious is the Navy's cruiser modernization program. We were
going to upgrade the Ticonderoga-class but then put half of
them in mothballs so that we can have another 10 years' worth
of cruisers. Again, if time is an important part of your
calculation, bringing that extra capability into the fleet
earlier rather than saving it for a rainy day makes a heck of a
lot of sense.
Also, take, for example, the very troubled Zumwalt program.
It was just poorly conceived from the start. It is a big boat
with a big engine in it. I have been told it is technologically
possible to turn that--to equip it with electromagnetic guns or
directed energy weapons, which would be a very effective fleet
air defense platform. Again, I am not enough of an engineer or
a budgeteer to figure out what that would cost, but again, if
we are looking about how to get quick return on investment
beyond just making what we have got a little bit better, there
are modifications like that that we could make that would bring
greater capability and greater capacity to the table faster.
Mr. Clark. I would say to build on what Jim and Dave talked
about, the idea of experimentation--it is not just
demonstrations, but the idea of going out and doing experiments
to be able to figure out how to employ these modifications to
existing weapons. The OSD's Office of Strategic Capabilities is
doing a lot of really good work in terms of modifying existing
weapons to make them usable for other types of missions, and
then doing experiments to say, well, how is that going to work
and come up with the operating concepts and the tactics and
publish those. Those are things you do within the next 2 years
and you would have new capability. So that is an urgent thing
that we could do now.
Senator Strange. That is very helpful to me. I take away
this urgency message. It comes through loud and clear. The
repurposing concept is very helpful and encouraging. I am
already over my time. Mr. Chairman, I apologize. My first
appearance at the committee. Thank you.
Senator Reed. Thank you, Senator.
On behalf of Chairman McCain, Senator Blumenthal.
Senator Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Reed.
As you know, we are moving toward a new world with new
technology. You know better than we do what those new
technologies may be. One way to address this challenge is the
third offset strategy, which seeks to improve the Department of
Defense's operational concepts, organizational constructs, and
technological capabilities to restore United States power
projection and deter conflict. Deputy Secretary Work, for
example, has been heavily involved, emphasizing that it is
about, quote, preserving peace, not fighting wars. End quote.
As we invest in these new technologies, we need people who can
help us develop and implement them, and we need to be able to
recruit the right talent.
Do any of you have any thoughts about how we actually
recruit that talent that we need so desperately in these new
technological areas?
Mr. Thomas. Senator, it is a great question. One area that
I think this committee might explore further is repurposing and
kind of re-imagining the Reserve component of the armed forces.
For a lot of things we are talking about, you are looking for
creativity and ingenuity. You do not necessarily need that 40
hours a week. You need it periodically. You almost want kind of
your mission impossible set of resumes that you can flip on the
table and say I need this guy, this guy, and this woman over
here to go as a special team and think about a new concept,
think about the application of a new technology, think about
how they can confound an adversary. We have this almost
inexhaustible pool of talent in the United States, both
technologically, in the humanities, in terms of the ethnic
heritages of Americans, and I do not think we are nearly
exploiting that sufficiently.
Mr. Clark. One thing I think we need to do is carefully
look at the technologies that are being pursued in the
commercial sector that we may harvest our own. There are some
great examples of that in communications in particular, the
work that Google is doing with the *Loon Balloon program is a
great example of a technology we can just harvest ourselves
without having to develop and then things that we develop
uniquely in the military and try to attract the engineers into
those fields where they want to do interesting work but they do
not want to go do communication technology work for DOD when
they can go do it for Google. But if you want to do work in
electronic warfare or electrical engineering that relates to
electronic warfare or undersea warfare on acoustics, then the
military is the main place you are going to be able to do those
kinds of technology developments. So if we clearly strategize
our technology development to focus on things that are uniquely
military, we are more likely to attract those engineers who can
only come to you to be able to do that work.
Senator Blumenthal. Thank you.
Mr. Donnelly. Sir, if I can say, again, I sound like such a
knuckle-dragger here I am sure. But if we could get some new
stuff in the hands of soldiers and sailors and airmen and
marines, they would figure out amazing ways to employ it.
Things that others have talked about earlier about
operating aircraft in a dispersed environment--that is what the
Army and the Marines already do with their helicopters. Doing
it with an everyday stealthy strike aircraft--we do not even
know what that would mean. Again, we have very talented and
innovative people who wear the uniform, again, not for a
paycheck but because of a whole host of other reasons. If we
could just get them some new tinker toys to play with, they
would build some amazing structures out of them.
The adaptation that the force made in the course of Iraq
and Afghanistan was quite remarkable. Again, if we could just--
I think it has mostly been a problem of the government and the
Nation as a whole that we are not giving the people the tools
of innovation, not a question of talent but of capability and
capacity.
Senator Blumenthal. Speaking of new technology, I am
assuming that all of you on the panel believe that we need to
move ahead with the Columbia-class submarine, which is going to
be critical to our nuclear deterrent program as a matter of
stealth and survivability and strength, and also the F-35, the
next generation of fighter aircraft.
My time is about to expire. So if any of you disagree, I
hope that you will submit responses in writing. But there is
continuing controversy about at least the F-35. All of us agree
we have to drive down the cost but still proceed with that
aircraft. If any of you have thoughts specifically about either
of those two programs, I would very much welcome them in
writing rather than go over my time now.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Reed. Thank you very much.
Gentlemen, thank you for your excellent testimony and not
only that, for really a lifetime of contribution to a very
serious and provocative intellectual debate about our national
defense policy which aids us immensely and ultimately aids the
troops in the field, which we are all committed to do. So thank
you very much.
On behalf of Chairman McCain, let me call the hearing
adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 11:13 a.m., the Committee adjourned.]
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