[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 17972-17974]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                    SPEECH OF GENERAL ERIC SHINSEKI

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. IKE SKELTON

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                      Tuesday, September 12, 2000

  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, on August 11, 2000, General Eric Shinseki 
addressed the Military Order of the World Wars in Kansas City, 
Missouri. I submit his speech for the Record:


       Congressman Skelton--thank you for that generous 
     introduction. It's good to be here with you this evening--
     thanks also for your service to our nation and the Army as 
     the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. 
     Your commitment to the national defense and your passion for 
     the well-being of our men and women is legendary. We are 
     indebted to you. Ladies and gentlemen--please join me in 
     thanking Congressman Ike Skelton for his devotion to the 
     soldiers, civilians, and family members of the Army.
       In this room this evening are also some other patriots who 
     have been great supporters of our military and our veterans. 
     Many have served our nation in war; among their numbers are 
     those who have felt the sting of battle. But all have 
     provided our communities the kind of leadership that has made 
     this country what it is today. To the Kansas City Chapter of 
     the Military Order of the World Wars, thank you for your 
     support of our soldiers and veterans.
       You know, this country enjoys a unique status in the 
     community of nations. We are a great nation, and we enjoy a 
     vibrant and flourishing economy. No other nation enjoys

[[Page 17973]]

     our unique status in the way that we do today. Americans 
     enjoy these special circumstances, but many do not associate 
     our national strength and our economic health with the 
     readiness and professionalism of our military forces. The 
     fact is, however, that you don't get to be a great power with 
     the world's leading economy without also having a world class 
     military that is respected by our allies and feared by our 
     adversaries. Our military forces enable the great nation 
     status enjoyed by the American people. No one understands or 
     appreciates the importance of that link better than those who 
     have defended this wonderful country of ours in war or those 
     who have the responsibility of assuring the readiness of its 
     military capabilities on a daily basis. The Military Order of 
     the World Wars understands that linkage. Congressman Skelton 
     understands that linkage. Both have worked to help us stay 
     connected to the American people. They have helped us fill 
     our ranks with the kind of youngsters who have kept our Army 
     a force for good and an instrument of national policy. Again, 
     we are grateful for all that you do on our behalf.
       Also present in the room this evening are a very special 
     group of international fellows. They are students at Fort 
     Leavenworth who will spend the next year at the Command and 
     General Staff College studying with, about, and for us. Since 
     World War I, all of the wars we have fought and most of our 
     significant operational deployments have seen Americans 
     serving side-by-side with soldiers from allied nations. We 
     will never again fight on our own. Coalition and 
     multinational operations are a fact of life. Many of the 
     uniforms on display this evening are the ones who have shared 
     space on distant battlefields with us. We are honored to have 
     so many allied officers and their spouses here this evening. 
     We know the keenness of the selection process that went on in 
     each of your countries, we are honored to have you join us in 
     residence at Fort Leavenworth. You add to the education of 
     our officers.
       Buffalo wings.
       There is a lot of excitement in and about our Army today. 
     Many of you know that we have set a course to transform this 
     great and magnificent army of ours from its current cold war 
     designs to a force that is more responsive, more deployable, 
     more versatile, more agile, more lethal, more survivable, and 
     more sustainable force for the future crises of the 21st 
     century. Last fall as we were about to walk from 1999 into 
     2000 through the door of a new century and the new 
     millennium, I went back to the turn of the last century to 
     try to understand what the last Chief and the last Secretary 
     to do so were thinking; what were their concerns; what 
     decisions did they put in place to prepare their Army for all 
     of its responsibilities in the 20th century.
       Secretary of War Elihu Root and General Nelson Miles 
     recognized that the Army was standing not just on the 
     threshold of a new century, but at the entrance to a new 
     world. The war with Spain the year before had been just the 
     second overseas deployment of the Army in history, and the 
     first in over 50 years. The Army of 1899 was scattered from 
     Cuba to Puerto Rico to the Philippines. The operating tempo 
     was high, with soldiers maintaining peace, rebuilding 
     nations, handling refugees, even helping with disaster relief 
     after a hurricane. The Army was overseas and that looked like 
     the wave of the future.
       So, 1899 was a pivotal time. The wars in the West were won. 
     The purpose of the Army seemed to be changing, but in what 
     direction? The Army had shown real growing pains when it had 
     mobilized for war. In addition, technology was changing fast. 
     The Army needed to rethink the future of warfare quickly.
       Root recognized that the Army had to grow and change as the 
     strategic environment of his times demanded. He tried to 
     envision what the twentieth-century Army should become. Could 
     he foresee a world in which nuclear superpowers threatened 
     each other and the rest of the earth with Armageddon? Could 
     he predict a decade-long depression? Did he know that within 
     the 50 years the world would twice be plunged into global 
     wars, wars unprecedented in scale and scope in all the 
     previous history of mankind? Certainly, the answer to all 
     these questions is no. Root foresaw none of these things. As 
     best we can tell from documents and their writings, neither 
     of them saw the First World War and it was only 15 years 
     away. But with insight and courage and deliberation, they 
     developed a vision for what the Army needed to become, given 
     the strategic and technological realities they faced at the 
     time. They took risks and made preparations that proved to be 
     effective--and timeless.
       Root began with fundamentals. He presented two principles 
     that are as true today as when he wrote them 100 years ago:
       ``First. That the real object of having an army is to 
     provide for war.
       ``Second. That the regular establishment in the United 
     States will probably never be by itself the whole machine 
     with which any war will be fought.''
       Root was reaching back toward concepts that were almost as 
     old as the nation itself. First, being ready for war means 
     having an army, and there's no reason to have an army that is 
     not ready for war. The Army might be called upon to do many 
     things, but its first purpose was warfighting. And the Army 
     would never fight alone. Root knew that the Army would need 
     to rely on the Navy for transport, logistics, and gunfire. It 
     would also fight with volunteers and citizen soldiers.
       Those first principles were right on the mark. And they 
     have served as a foundation upon which Root and Miles and 
     their successors built the twentieth-century Army. Root 
     consolidated the professional gains that the Army had made 
     through the establishment of the Army War College and the 
     restructuring of the Army headquarters into a modern general 
     staff. He brought to fruition the idea that military 
     leadership was a calling, and one that demanded rigorous 
     education and training. The officer corps that flourished 
     under this system became the leaders who produced our 
     victories in two world wars--wars unimaginable in 1899. The 
     Army of the twentieth century, the nation whose freedom it 
     guaranteed, owed a great deal to Elihu Root's vision 
     preparation for the future.
       As we stood on the cusp of the new millennium 10 months 
     ago, we saw a situation remarkably similar to the one that 
     Root and Miles faced 100 years ago. The world has changed 
     dramatically. The cold war was a historic anomaly. We 
     maintained relatively robust forces for 50 years because of 
     the danger of superpower conflict. That very preparedness 
     deterred a war too terrible to contemplate, but one that we 
     stood trained and ready to fight for half a century.
       Since 1989 we have reduced the size of the Army by 32 
     percent, but our operating tempo is higher than at anytime in 
     several decades. The recent mission in Kosovo brings to 35 
     the number of operational mission deployments the Army has 
     made since the end of the cold war. The world is a far less 
     stable place than it used to be.
       Moreover, the world is a far different place than it was 10 
     years ago. In a word, it is ``wired.'' The information 
     revolution has placed a computer on every desk. We are all 
     cyber-connected to each other and everything imaginable 
     around the world. We are renegotiating zones of privacy and 
     business practices and property protections and the very idea 
     of what a nation-state is. Many of the advertisements we see 
     on television are for products that did not exist 15 years 
     ago. It is impossible to predict with assurance what the 
     world will look like in 5 or 10 or 25 years. But we know that 
     it will continue to change and that the pace of change will 
     continue to accelerate.
       We must prepare to fight our future wars. We must also be 
     ready for the next crisis. We must be able to respond to 
     missions throughout the spectrum of operations, from the low 
     end of disaster relief to the high end of major war. We need 
     to take advantage of emerging technologies to counter 
     emerging threats. And we can't make it up as we go along--we 
     need a plan.
       And so it is that last October, the Army charted its course 
     for transforming itself into a force more capable than the 
     magnificent force we field today. We intend that it will be a 
     force capable of handling the full array of missions that we 
     have been called upon to do in the last 10 years--in many 
     ways, we have described the 1990's as the first 10 years of 
     the 21st century in terms of the kinds of missions we see for 
     ourselves in the years ahead. But what we will not lose sight 
     of is what Elihu Root concluded 100 years ago--our non-
     negotiable contract with the American people is to be trained 
     and ready to fight and win the nation's wars.
       This we will do--and just as Root and Miles could not see 
     all the technological advances that were going to present 
     themselves as opportunities in the 20th century, we cannot 
     today settle on the technologies that will go into the design 
     of the hardware that will describe the objective force we are 
     trying to design for the 21st century. But what Root and 
     Miles were able to do was to position their army for all The 
     unseen opportunities that were to lay ahead by putting into 
     place the system for training soldiers and developing leaders 
     who were going to have to make those decisions when the time 
     was ripe. And so it is with our responsibilities today. Much 
     has been written over the past 10 months about the 
     technologies that the Army will need to transform itself. The 
     debate about combat platforms has turned hot and in some 
     cases mean-spirited as the competition for inclusion has 
     become intense. I have even received the concerns of allied 
     armies about the fear of an ever-expanding technological gap 
     between the American army and those of our closest allies. I 
     think the lessons of Root and Miles are important---their 
     conclusions are as important today as they were then. It 
     isn't about technology, although technology is important; it 
     isn't about platforms, although combat platforms is 
     important. It is about leadership and character and doctrine. 
     It is about the preparation of the Army to be ready to fight 
     each and every day with the technologies it has available, 
     and it is about the development of visionary, courageous 
     leaders who have the skill and determination to leverage the 
     technologies as they become apparent and embed them into the 
     formations that will fight them. Focus on

[[Page 17974]]

     warfighting; develop the leaders for the next conflict. If 
     you do that well, those leaders will be able to get the right 
     technologies into place in time. But without that kind of 
     leadership or without warfighting formations which have been 
     disciplined to execute one's warfighting doctrine, all the 
     technology in the world will make no difference. Warfighting 
     is ultimately a human dimension in which the most dedicated, 
     disciplined, and best trained will prevail.
       It is about leadership and in this Army, we consider it our 
     stock in trade. To our allied officers, your attendance at 
     Leavenworth is important for us---for the American officers 
     attending the course and for our force as a whole. You give 
     our officers other perspectives on our common challenges. Our 
     differences in culture, language, nationality, and geography 
     give us each our different outlooks on military operations. 
     We must understand and appreciate the importance of 
     interoperability---but not just technical and tactical 
     interoperability but interoperability of the mind. The 
     lessons you learn in professional give-and-takes with your 
     fellow officers, inside the classroom and at the officers' 
     club, will be among the most important that you take away 
     from this course.
       Equally important will be the professional associations you 
     make with your fellow students. The future battlefields will 
     be joint and multinational and you will find yourselves 
     serving with the officers you are studying with this year---
     just as I have experienced. I can tell you that as commander 
     of the stabilization force in Bosnia, the relationships that 
     I had developed with my counterparts in years past, whether 
     in operational assignments, or in the Command and General 
     Staff College or the National War College, helped us to 
     bridge the gaps. Personal relationships and a common 
     professional understanding turned those differences into 
     strengths.
       We, in this country, have put tremendous effort into our 
     professional education systems. The pay-off for that 
     investment has been a consistently high quality of officer 
     leadership. I would also tell you that our noncommissioned 
     officer education system is equally the finest in the world 
     and it has produced the very finest NCO Corps in the history 
     of our army.
       In the gulf war, one of the take away lessons was that our 
     technological and materiel superiority made us successful. 
     Those who fought the war would give you a slightly broader 
     lesson. As one division commander proclaimed, we could have 
     traded equipment with the Iraqis and still beat them in 100 
     hours. That may sound like vain boasting, but his point was 
     that our professional education system and the 
     professionalism of our soldiers and their leaders were the 
     foundations of our warfighting prowess--not technology.
       That has always been true. In the Army we do two things 
     every day---we train soldiers and we grow them into leaders. 
     Some of that work happens in our operational units. Some of 
     it happens in quiet moments when our officers and soldiers 
     can read about their profession, its history, its methods, 
     and its doctrine. But the foundation of it all resides in our 
     professional schools.
       I'm glad that you have all come to study with us. I 
     appreciate the value that you bring to our professional 
     education system. I thank you for breaking bread with us 
     tonight. And though I don't look forward to our joining ranks 
     on a future battlefield, I do look forward to the trust and 
     confidence that we will build together as professional 
     soldiers.
       Thank you and God bless you.

       

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