American Enterprise Institute

Monday, October 30, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

5:15 p.m.	Registration
5:30	Presenter:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
	Discussant:	Michael O'Hanlon, The Brookings Institution
7:00	Adjournment and Wine and Cheese Reception

Proceedings:

Frederick Kagan:  It’s a pleasure to welcome you here on this surprisingly warm late October day to talk with you about an extremely important subject – the past, present, and future of the American military.  I’m Fred Kagan, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  I will be speaking with you today about my new book, which just came out, Finding the Target.  There are copies of it available, I say shamelessly, in the lobby if anyone would like to purchase one.  Here to discuss this very important topic with me today is Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Michael also just had a book come out recently, called Hard Power.  Mike, why don’t you hold that up?  I particularly like it because I’m a fan of hard power, or at least having the capability to use hard power when it’s necessary.

I’m going to begin by making a few comments about how we got into the current mess in Iraq, from a slightly different direction than the one we usually take on take on this issue.  Let me stipulate in advance that I don’t think the Bush Administration handled the war planning or the war conduct very well.  I think that they haven’t reacted very well to changing circumstances on the ground.  I’ve been a consistent critic of the way the Administration has actually been trying to wage this war, but I think we can get a little too zoned in on the particular problems that the Bush Administration has demonstrated and lose track of the fact there are some more fundamental problems in the way the American defense establishment thinks about the use of military power to achieve national objectives. 

That’s what I’d really like to talk about today.  And even to the extent that people talk about the American Transformation Program, it is now so tied up in Don Rumsfeld and his acolytes at the Defense Department who really made it their own and drove it through, that it’s sometimes hard to remember that they inherited it.  They inherited an intellectual tradition that they did not originate.  They followed it through, and certainly more enthusiastically than their predecessors had, but it was not something they developed or created. 

I bring this up because I fear it’s not something that will necessarily go away, even when they have departed, or even when the President has departed.  After all, it was the President who first laid out this idea of military transformation as an active program in his speech as a candidate in 1999 at the Citadel.  This goes beyond Rumsfeld, even within this Administration.  But my point here today is to say that the problems we’re facing in Iraq stem from problems that go beyond even Bush.

In the 1990s, the American military in my view started to become very confused about its role in the world, about how it should adapt to changing circumstances, what the future of war would be, and how to prepare for threats.  To be fair, it was a terrifically challenging time.  We had been designing our forces for nearly 50 years to respond a few, very clearly defined overwhelming threats.  It was possible to guess with some accuracy where we were likely to fight, how we were likely to fight, count up the enemies tanks and bombers, and to read the enemy’s doctrine.  We had a whole revolution in our military thinking in the 1970s, resulting from actually reading what the Soviets were saying about how they were going to fight in Europe.  That’s how closely calibrated we were with that particular enemy. 

We moved from what seemed like relative certainty or probability into an era of strategic uncertainty.  Worse than that, because the Cold War wasn’t really all that certain, the 1990s seemed to be an era without threats.  People spoke about a strategic pause.  The emphasis came to be on the transformation to meet future threats, rather than thinking about current threats or how they might evolve.  It turns out that is very problematic, because once you start thinking about future threats without having any idea of what they’re going to be, you have a problem when trying to design a military to deal with that.  The problem that really emerged most starkly from this was that the military became captive of an idea in the early 1990s.  The idea was that there was an information revolution underway in human society, which was going to have – and this is the key point – an inevitable and predictable corollary in military affairs. 

The Army Chief of Staff in the early 1990s, General Gordon Sullivan, and many other thinkers began to argue that it was possible to follow the trend lines of the application of information technology to military affairs and see what the revolution in military affairs would look like, even if you had no idea who the enemy was going to be.  It was a short leap from there to making the argument that if we did not design revolutionized military forces, then an enemy would and do so sooner; and we would find ourselves at an enormous disadvantage.  This intellectual leap became a way of trying to create urgency for a transformation program prepared in an era when we didn’t feel like we had any threats – to deal with unspecified threats in an unspecified distant future.  As an exercise in attempting to defend the Defense budget, it was moderately successful.  As an in exercise in predicting the future, I think it remains to be seen how successful it will be.  Although, the problem is that these sorts of programs tend to general self-fulfilling prophecies. 

In my view, there was a very fundamental flaw in the thinking that pervaded most of this RMA concept from the very beginning.  The flaw was in the notion of what war actually is.  I’m going to give you a bumper sticker definition of war that I think serves reasonably well to keep us focused on what’s important.  War is the organized purposeful use of force to achieve a political objective.  In this perspective, what matters is that the purpose of war is the achievement of a political objective.  That’s why you fight. 

Now that’s a very obvious statement; it’s nothing new.  Clausewitz said it, and lots of people said it before Clausewitz.  But I fear that in the 1990s, the U.S. military lost sight of that.  For many decades, there had seemed to be a shortcut in the task of achieving the political objective through the use of force; that shortcut was to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight.  The presumption was that once you had destroyed the enemy’s ability to fight, success in attaining your political objectives would inevitably follow.  That has worked sometimes; it has not worked other times.  But as a generalized shortcut in war, it’s very problematic. 

It’s very problematic in part because it obviates the need for military planners to think carefully about what the desired political objectives actually are, and to ask – and this is the key – the question:  If the military operations they’re designing to defeat the enemy armed forces are actually going to be suitable for laying the groundwork for achieving political success after the enemy’s armed forces have been defeated.  That is not a process that the American military has been comfortable with in recent decades.  Trend lines in the 1990s that focused on improving our ability to identify, track, and destroy targets over enormous distances reinforced this trend.  If you’re talking about targeting, you’re really talking about destroying things. 

What are you talking about destroying?  Fundamentally, you’re talking about destroying the enemy’s ability to fight you.  There is an enormous amount of sophistication in how the targeting theory developed in the 1990s, and I’ll be happy to talk with your during questions about some of that.  A lot of it was very positive.  It certainly did move away from visions of war that focused on obliterating the enemy’s armed forces divisions; it focused on pinpoint destruction of critical nodes to prevent the enemy from operating in a coherent fashion without killing all the enemy’s soldiers.  Those were positive developments.  But again, these are all really developments that are focused simply destroying the enemy’s ability to fight and not directly achieving the political purpose. 

Apart from the planning, what was the practical consequence of all of this?  The practical consequence was that in the 1990s we spent a lot of money – not enough, by the way, from the standpoint of the RMA advocates – but we spent a lot of money on research and development of information technologies and other technologies enabled by IT.  We spent a certain amount of money on actually buying stuff, but not very much.  We spent a lot of money on R & D.  That money came out of an ever-strengthening Defense budget because the 1990s was also the era of several peace dividends, as we drew the Armed Forces down to a fairly arbitrary figure that really didn’t correlate very well with reality at the time, let alone the possibilities that actually emerged.  In that era of shrinking defense budgets, this extremely heavy focus on research and development, information technology, and buying stuff inevitably led to shrinkage of emphasis on ground forces. 

That turns out to be very important.  You can destroy things from the air; you can deny the enemy use of terrain from the air, but there are a lot of things that you can’t do from the air.  It’s very hard to actually change enemy mindsets from the air.  It’s very hard to convince the enemy that you are actually not going to simply destroy him, but to take away from him what he values most – control of his country.  There are not a lot of enemies we face now that actually believe we will wipe them off the face of the Earth. 

Fortunately, I’d say, we lost our credibility in that regard.  I think that’s generally a good thing.  It’s not very persuasive to an enemy to say we will simply continue bombing them until there’s nothing left.  Our bombing now is so pin-point accurate that it makes it even less credible.  But as soon as you introduce ground forces into the equation, you also introduce the possibility of not destroying the enemy’s country, but taking it away from his control and reorienting the organizations of his civil society.  Every day that goes on when he doesn’t contest it, he has to fear that it will become irreversible.  He will never be able to regain control.  You can do all of that without necessarily killing very many people.  Ground forces give you the ability to end arguments in a way that air power doesn’t unless you’re willing to push it to extremes.  As we had this bifurcation develop in the 1990s between those who favored IT-enabled air power solutions and those who favored ground forces, the ground forces generally lost the argument.  It was ironic because the military operations that we conducted in the 1990s were very heavily dependent on ground forces.  They were operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, which were peacekeeping operations. 

Something very strange happened.  A lot of very interesting theories were developed how to wage information technology-enabled campaigns, in particular an idea known as shock-and-awe.  That idea was actually put out in a book - I believe it was 1995 – by a couple of retired officers.  It was an explicitly developed theory; it wasn’t just something that Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration came up with to explain what they were doing.  This had been going on all along.  The thing that is striking about shock-and-awe is that when you read the book there is actually a chapter in there about shock-and-awe in peacekeeping operations. 

How do you use shock-and-awe in peacekeeping operations?  There are 2 parts to peacekeeping operations we conducted in the 1990s.  In the first part, in Bosnia and Kosovo, we bombed portions of enemy territory in order to compel the enemy – usually the Serbs - to accept international peacekeeping forces.  The second part was the part that actually mattered.  That was the actual peacekeeping operation, where we had ground forces working to get things under control and keep people from killing each other. 

Well, shock-and-awe talks about the first part.  It defines that as peacekeeping operations.  This is again is part of the problem.  We became so fixated on the problems that are most amenable to these sorts of technological solutions that we lost track of the fact that you use the technologic solutions in order to pursue political aims.  The technology may not be enough for you.  I would submit that in the long list of mistakes that the Bush Administration made in Afghanistan and Iraq, the principle one was the failure to consider carefully what the post-war political configuration would like and what would be required to actually attain it.  Then, backwards plan that into the military operation.  There’s all kinds of blame going around, and it’s all justified in my view, for that failure. 

What I want to say is, given the trend lines of American military development in the 1990s, there is [nothing??] surprising about it.  Different administrations could have had different emphases and you have might have had stronger individuals say no, we don’t want to do it that way, but that was definitely the trend in American military thinking in the 1990s.  And it continues to be the formal trend of transformation programs in the Services today. 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m in favor of information technology.  I’m in favor of advanced technology.  I want our soldiers to have pinpoint accuracy and to be able to communicate.  But I don’t want to do it at the price of having to accept a notion of war that reduces it to a simple targeting drill.  I think we’ve seen what we could have predicted.  That is likely successful against enemy militaries, but unlikely to be successful in generating desired political outcomes.  I think that we are going to soon approach the point where this transformation trend is in tatters.  I think people are increasingly recognizing that this approach is bankrupt and is not going to get us where we need to go. 

The problem is that I don’t see any particularly coherent body of thought on the horizon to replace it.  That’s very problematic because, although I have real questions about this particular trend of transformation, I have no questions at all about the importance of transforming the military.  The military is not as well suited as it might be to engage in current conflicts.  There will undoubtedly be new challenges that will arise, some of which we can predict and some of which will be harder to predict and we will have to react to.  The worst thing that could happen in many respects is that we simply jettison this transformation program and replace it with nothing at all.  That would be very unfortunate and dangerous in my view. 

The challenge that we face is really immense.  We have to recognize that the Transformation Program and its intellectual basis that we’ve been pursuing so far are deeply flawed and have to be replaced.  We have to change the Armed Forces appropriately so that they can deal with the current overwhelming requirement they are now facing.  They are overwhelming in part because of previous programs.  We have to develop a new basis for thinking about transforming the Armed Forces to meet future challenges.  All the while, we’re already committed to purchasing large numbers of various sorts of aircraft and ground force equipment, much of which is fine and probably should be purchasing, but none of which by itself is going to provide the answer. 

I suppose if you are hoping that I will stand up now and tell you what we should do, alas, that I am not able to do.  My job for today, and the goal for writing Finding the Target, is primarily to say we must recognize that the path we’ve been on has reached a dead end.  We must recognize its failure, not for the purpose of allocating blame, but for the purpose of understanding that road will not lead us where we need to go.  From that starting point, I hope that we can engage in a fruitful discussion to consider where to proceed next.  Thank you very much.

Michael O’Hanlon:  Fred, thank you.  It’s a wonderful book and I look forward very much to discussing it.  It’s a real privilege to be here.  I also want to thank you again for plugging my book.  The most recent time I was able to do so on my own merits was on a radio talk show.  We were trying to plug the Hard Power book and it was during a pledge campaign on NPR.  You had to choice of what prize you wanted if you pledged: either our book or a book of rejected New Yorker cartoons.

[Laughter]

I think at the hour, we were behind the would-be New Yorker cartoons by something like 13 to 2.  The only solace I took from this was that at least there wasn’t a third option, which was sort of a new hot soup that could stay lukewarm while being shipped.  I’m not sure how we would have fared against that.  In any event, I really admire this book.  This should be your first choice, if anybody out there is next to their computer or on a NPR pledge campaign. 

Let me say a few things about it.  Fred has obviously done a better job than I can of summarizing the argument, but let me tell you as a consumer of the book about a couple of things I liked best about it.  I’ll mention a couple of things about the argument and my own take on the argument as well.  First of all, for me this is very high praise.  For those of you who are more diligent readers, perhaps this won’t mean much:  It’s just the right length.  I always appreciate books that are meaty enough to really teach me something, and short enough to be readable.  This is a pretty hefty looking volume, but the nice thing is that the font is also friendly.  It’s not big, but it’s definitely not small.  It also is a very nice time period.  It’s about a 30-year time period in terms of U.S. military policy. 

When you think about it, there haven’t been that many books that have really tried to describe the post-Vietnam evolution of our military.  There have been a number that did this piece or that piece and viewed Desert Storm as the culmination of the first round of the RMA.  Or as Fred’s been saying, they really tried to amplify the RMA hypothesis in the course of the 1990s - often the people reaching back thousands of years for various examples of revolutions along the way.  This is a very nice history of the last 30 years, in a very sophisticated and broad historical context.  I really like the level of detail and the level of argumentation. 

Let me also read Steven Biddles’ nice blurb on the back, which you won’t be able to see on your home TVs unless you’ve already bought the book.  If you haven’t, please do.  Steve says:  “Provocative and thoughtful do not often go together in today’s debate, but Fred Kagan regularly combines them.  His Finding the Target is an important book by one of America’s most insightful military analysts.”

I would again add to that this is a very readable book.  This is very nice prose and a nice history.  I will say as a wonk, I find nothing lacking in the documentation or rigor.  But as a reader, I find that there is just the right number of footnotes and just the right amount of information to make it readable and informative all at the same time.  It makes the case without getting burdened down with too much political science theory or too many irrelevant factoids.  It’s a very readable book and let me commend it to you. 

I’m going to read one more thing from the book itself, which is one of my favorite segments.  Fred has really laid out his thesis in the previous remarks, but this is one way to help drive home some of his points with some very nice writing he did on page 363, for those of you who do have the book.  He writes:  “In a marvelous piece of irony, the transformation enthusiasts who had prided themselves on pioneering a new way of thinking about war for a new era, suddenly became guilty of old-think.  Their programs had not been designed to fight terrorism, as we have seen, but to defeat relatively poorly equipped enemies in conventional combat.  The forces they were designing were supposed to be ready for wars like Iraq much more than for wars like Afghanistan, let alone the more nebulous campaigns that made up the rest of the global war on terror.  Rather than reorienting those programs however, they modified the definition of transformation to include any military approach that is novel; and they identified almost anything positive the military accomplished as novel, whatever historical precedents there might have been.”

It’s just very nice writing, and I think it’s a very nice critique of the way the Revolution of Military Affairs debate, or the Defense Transformation debate became political, with sort conventional wisdom or almost politically correct language to talk about the military.  It is good to be innovative.  It is good for a super power not to rest on its laurels, not to assume that the next war is going to be like the last war.  When language gets so sloppy, you can describe almost everything as revolutionary.  Then you have to worry about whether your rhetoric is also weakening your analytical thinking, and leading you off in directions of not making tough choices about the relevant importance of one program versus another; or about people versus technology; or about one kind of reorganization of the military versus another possible kind.  Again, I’m a big fan of the book and a big fan of the argument.

Let me just mention a couple of things that have come out of my research over the years that largely make the same kind of point in a slightly different way, just to reinforce my agreement with the main thesis.  I’m just going to make 3 overall points about why the basic thesis of this book, as I understand it, is correct.  The basis thesis being, we’re not going to be able to narrow in on one definition of future war or future contingency and say that’s the future of war; let’s just plan against that and let the other contingencies and possibilities be secondary. 

There are three big reasons why I would say that’s not going to be true.  Strategically, we don’t have that luxury as a super power with many interests around the world.  We all know the irony of this administration having campaigned with more vigor against the notion of nation building than any previous Presidential campaign that I’m aware of in our nation’s history.  And yet, George Bush has now become the #1 nation builder overseas in our nation’s history, perhaps rivaled by Harry Truman.  But in terms of the difficulty of the task, no one has ever had the combination of effort and difficulty that George Bush has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

What an irony that we thought we could figure out this one kind of war was not really what conservative Republicans would want to engage in, and they wind up in this very kind of a fight because of decisions they largely made themselves.  This is not something that only Republicans are potentially vulnerable to.  It’s entirely plausible that somebody else could come in and say the future of the war is now clearly demonstrated to be all about counter-insurgency, and the new threats of demographics, global warming, HIV/AIDS, and let’s just worry about stabilizing countries because that will be the big concern in the future.  The great powers basically should get along. 

Well, the great powers do basically get along.  Part of why they get along is because there’s a fairly good hierarchy of military power in the system.  Fred argues that this is at some jeopardy and that we better be wary about what we’re doing to that hierarchy of American-led military power in the world system, and that we should never take it for granted. 

We also have to worry about China’s rise.  I’m a fan of China overall, but we have 1 little place called Taiwan which could easily pit the 2 great powers of the 21st Century against each other.  We also have a place called North Korea where classic combat could still be necessary, depending on how things play out.  We don’t have the luxury of just deciding one kind of war is going to be our future.  Even in wars that we choose ourselves, or at least the timing of, we can’t specify what kind of combat we’re going to wind up engaged in. 

We find ourselves surprised.  As the superpower that ultimately has to be the main force winning a war that’s important for the international system, we don’t have the strategic choice of saying it’s going to be this or that type of combat.  If you put a gun to my head and asked which of the four American Armed Services is most important to the future and I got to give an answer – no caveats, ifs, ands, or buts – I would say I don’t know; go ahead and pull the trigger. 

I have no idea.  I can think of very important contingencies for which any 1 of the 4 would be the lead Service.  I think we just have to acknowledge that as tough as it is for an author to sometimes argue for a balanced and nuanced thesis - it’s sort of more fun to argue for an extreme thesis - sometimes the more thoughtful and nuanced argument is correct.  I think if you’ll read Fred, you’ll agree with me.  Strategically, we just don’t have the choice.

Technologically, we also aren’t as powerful as we think.  Thank God we have a very good Defense industry and very good Defense laboratories.  There are a lot of good ideas coming down the pipeline.  We’ve done incredible things with our military in the last 20 years, but technologically, we also know we still can’t beat a darn IED.  How could it be?  We’re losing against IEDs in Iraq right now; it’s remarkable.  IEDs are explosives with a bunch of metal buried in the dirt, detonated by a garage door opener.  We can’t beat that.  It’s incredible.  We can do a lot of things to mitigate it to give ourselves a chance against it. 

I have incredible admiration, as I’m sure everyone else in this room does, for the men and women of our military and the Iraqi military who put themselves in vehicles that unfortunately we can’t design yet to be impervious to these devices.  They go out and risk their lives in the interest of trying to build a stable Iraq.  Technologically, it’s something that we either can’t do, or it’s so hard that we haven’t yet figured out how to do it.  Technologically, you’ve got to be ready for a broad range of capabilities. 

It’s not just land warfare.  What if we wind up in a protracted struggle over Taiwan with China?  It’s not an all-out war, but blockades and counter-blockades; China pulls back and sends a couple of subs; sinks a couple of merchant ships; we go out and try to clean the waters and get near Taiwan, but China puts mines in the shallow waters.  This is the sort of thing that Bill Cohen tried to address in the 1997 QDR.  He had some good initiatives, but we still don’t have any magic bullets for that kind of scenario.  I think we would do pretty well against China on balance, but there are a lot of aspects to that sort of irregular struggle where we would be severely challenged.  It’s not just ground war in cities that are the dilemma. 

As good as we are, we’ve gotten better at things we were already good at more than we have redressed our vulnerabilities or Achilles’ heels.  Strategically, we don’t know which wars we are going to fight or what types of war they will be; and technologically, we don’t have all the answers and we’re not going to.  By the way, the laws of physics are part of the problem here.  It’s not just U.S. scientists and the U.S. Defense industrial base.  The laws of physics make it hard to find certain things in certain places, and that’s not going to change.

The last point is sort of a corollary to what I’ve already said.  Operationally speaking, when we get involved in one of these wars, even when we know who we’re fighting and where, we don’t necessarily know how the enemy will perform because the enemy is also a human actor.  In Iraq, while there were some of us who were warning this could be a very difficult enterprise and we better be ready for a lot of things to go wrong, I was not expecting this level of insurgency for this long.  I thought we had to go in a lot more muscular with a lot more capability.  Unfortunately, I think I was vindicated on that, but I did not have a crystal ball on what the nature of the conflict would be.  Even when you go into a specific kind of theater against a certain kind of enemy that you can analyze, you don’t how that enemy is going to fight.  They still get a vote in how the operation proceeds, and they often wind up being pretty clever.  Fred’s point about the basic nature of warfare, what it consists of, and how inherently unpredictable it is, because it is so inherently human as an enterprise.  These are the main reasons why I would wholeheartedly commend this book to you and reinforce the thesis.

I have one last word.  I’ve had the pleasure of working on a paper this fall with Fred.  We’re enjoying the collaboration.  We agree on a lot of things, but we also have somewhat [different] takes on issues such as the proper size of the Defense budget and the Army, and so forth.  This whole agreement on the basic thesis about defense transformation doesn’t mean that one is therefore led to an obvious outcome on all the policy issues of the day, but I think we’re both troubled by the degree to which a certain buzzword, notion of language, or a notion of how war could be predicted became a little too much deregure in this town in the last 15 years. 

It really is time that we discarded most of that way of thinking.  I’m glad this book does so.  I appreciate the chance to plug Hard Power as well, but mostly I’m glad to be here with you all and I look forward to the discussion.

Frederick Kagan:  Mike, thank you for that excessively generous and very insightful presentation.  I will open it to questions in just a minute, but I do want to pick up on the last point that Mike made.  I think it’s very interesting; it’s one of the reasons why I was very pleased to have Mike, apart from the fact that he’s a great guy and I have boundless respect for him.  I think it’s very interesting that he and I can sit here shoulder to shoulder and agree on so much at this point. 

The problem of American national security is becoming far too partisan an issue in some respects, and far too much of the discussion about what to do in Iraq and generally in world has unfortunately fallen victim to a pretty poisonous political environment.  What is interesting to me in this town is that among those who study these issues very seriously, it’s still possible to have an open-minded and nonpartisan discussion and come to, not complete agreement, but agreement on some fundamentals.  I think that’s tremendously important because the truth is that the defense of this country is far too important to be a partisan political issue.  It is very important that we find ways to broaden this discussion and move it away from the partisan political football that it’s been, and allow us to be able to think carefully where we need to go in an objective nonpartisan way. 

In my book, I try to show there were Democratic Administrations that did the right thing and the wrong thing, and Republican Administrations that did well and did badly.  It isn’t really a question of which party is in power.  It’s a question of which leaders pursue which ideas, and who is thinking clearly about the challenges facing the nation.  I hope that we can proceed in that fashion. 

With that, I will open the floor for your questions.  Our rules are for you to wait for the microphone, identify yourself, and ask a question.

Frank Fletcher:  Yes, Frank Fletcher.  My question for both of you would be – I don’t understand this brigade-centric concept as being revolutionary for the Army.  I was in the Army, but I’m not a military expert.  When I was in it, and I think even before I was in it in the 1980s, has always had brigades that were capable of deploying separately without being a part of a division, with their own embedded logistics, intelligence, communications, etc.  The battalion I was in the 101st deployed as a battalion many times without a brigade or division to support us.  I don’t know what they’re talking about.  Do either of you understand how this could be revolutionary, or is this semantics being sold as something?  I don’t know what it would be.

Frederick Kagan:  Well, I don’t think it’s particularly revolutionary.  There are a couple of points here.  First, on the specific question, you’re speaking about the Army’s modular brigade redesign.  Yes, of course, brigades have been deploying independently for basically as long as there have been brigades.  Prior to the modular redesign, brigades had to pull significant support assets – that is to say logistics and often artillery and engineers as well – from division and corps level pools in order to deploy.  They didn’t actually have those organic to the brigade.  They were not the normal part of the brigade in most divisions. 

The result of that was when a brigade deployed, it reduced the overall division’s capability to train and deploy as long as the brigade was gone with that slice.  The idea behind the Army’s modularity program is to give each brigade the organic assets it would need to function independently so its deployment doesn’t harm the readiness or training of other brigades in the division.  That’s the concept as I understand it. 

There are number of problems with it.  There are low level technical problems with it.  For instance, the brigades actually have only 2 maneuver battalions in each, and then a sort of high-tech target acquisition squadron.  Most normal brigades have historically had at least 3 maneuver battalions.  It may seem like a trivial distinction, but think about this way:  If you have 2 battalions in a brigade, what are your possible formations?  You’re actually back to a sort of 18th Century alternative.  They can be in columns or lines.  You can have 1 battalion behind the other, or you can have both battalions in line next to each other.  That is to say you either have 50 percent of your force in reserve, or 0 percent force in reserve. 

I find that very problematic from a tactical standpoint.  This is one of the situations where the Army has designed a system to solve one problem, but it has thereby introduced other problems into the force because it’s unable or unwilling to think the problem all the way through.

I didn’t make this larger point before in my presentation, but it is very easy to become entirely internally focused when you think about transformation.  To say that anytime you change the way you do business it’s transformational, and therefore revolutionary in warfare – that doesn’t follow.  You can change the way you do business without changing war.  You can in fact change the way you do business without necessarily even getting any particular advantage over another enemy.  But if your yardstick for success is to simply change the way you do business, then you really run the risk of becoming divorced from the fact that war is an interaction, and the enemy gets a vote. 

What matters is less how you do what you want to do, then what you do relative to what the enemy is trying to do.  This is one of the cases where I think we are tremendously inwardly focused, and tremendously fixated on overcoming problems in our own organization without necessarily thinking through how this might interact with the enemy. 

I just have one last point here.  Changing anything in the bureaucratic organization is very painful.  Anyone who has served in the military or has been in a bureaucratic organization knows that.  There is another danger.  Because it’s so painful to change anything, you start to equate change itself with success.  You get such a feeling of triumph to have actually gotten your reform through, that it feels like it must have been terrifically important.  But the importance of reform is not actually correlated with the difficulty of getting it through.  This is another thing that I think has tended to confuse us.  Mike, do you want to add anything?

Michael O’Hanlon:  Those are excellent answers.  The point I would add is that I agree 100 percent with what Fred just said, but there is one more tangent I want to bring into this.  Even if we are not making changes that quite do justice to the rhetoric that is being used, they are sometimes still good changes.  We have the flip side of what you are saying; sometimes the biggest changes aren’t necessarily great, like when the Brits went to all tank units between the wars or when the Air Force went to strategic bombing in our post-Cold War history, or when the Army went to its Pentomic Division. 

What could be more radical than nuclear artillery?  It turned out not to be the most usable thing on the battlefield.  There is one danger of going too far with your change, or measuring change in the wrong way as its own desirable, irrespective of what it does for you in the battlefield.  The more positive interpretation is that sometimes we do make modest changes that are worth the trouble.  If people use a little bit of highfalutin rhetoric to justify them as a bureaucratic device to draw more attention and support, we should be wary about the rhetoric, but it may not always produce a bad result. 

I would mention here a couple of examples of the last 5 or 10 years.  I think that some of the changes in the Army have been worthwhile.  I think that the Army is now doing this Stryker Brigade concept.  There is a long way to go in figuring out what we can do with 20-ton vehicles, as opposed to the 70-ton Abrams tank, but it is right to have that debate and technology effort.  As you know, the Army has got another program after Stryker – the Future Combat System – which I think could mishandle if we handle it the wrong way or get too ambitious, but it’s still the right thing to be trying to do on the laboratory of the test ranges. 

That’s a good concept.  I’m a big fan of what the Navy has done the last few years under Mr. Rumsfeld, in which I think he did a good job of promoting military reform by allying with the right people inside the military.  That’s usually the best thing a civilian can do.  The Navy no longer maintains the slavish devotion to presence in each of the 3 overseas theaters: the Western Pacific, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean.  The Navy says that sometimes we’re going to have 0 carriers, and sometimes we’re going to surge 2 or 3; we’re going to keep the enemy guessing. 

We’ve got a lot of ways that we can maintain some level of presence.  We’ve got various land assets that give us some level of immediate responsiveness.  We can be little more unpredictable and a little more flexible with our carriers.  To me, this is a common-sensical operational reform.  It doesn’t depend on technology at all, and yet it was still worth doing.  One can go through a few other examples, but I think one positive message I want to add to the overall arguments on the table is that sometimes these small to medium changes are really worth doing.  They can help you in important ways, even if they don’t radically transform warfare.  That’s sort of the opposite side of what we’ve been saying.

Frederick Kagan:  I’m going to agree with that and actually tack on one more comment before I turn it back to you.  When you think about what kind of technology you want to buy, Mike’s point is really very profound.  If you go back and look at the technological revolution in the Services in the 1960s and 1970s, which gave us the generation of super fighters, the M-1 tank, the Bradley and so forth, what you will see is that in almost every case the technology that helped us transform war was not leap-ahead technology. 

It was not technology which you could imagine coming in 20 to 25 years.  It was technology just on the horizon, at the time the developers were looking for it.  It was within the realm where you could be pretty confident that it was going to work out.  It wasn’t a high-risk venture to say let’s try to make this happen, but it was far enough ahead that it actually introduced a quantum change in the nature of warfare. 

To the degree that there is goodness in Future Combat System, one of the things that’s good about it is that it tends to be focused on that kind of technology and not on Star Wars or Buck Rogers.  Let’s see what we can pull from just over the technological horizon.  It’s really important not to have excessive expectations. 

I agree fully with Mike.  The rhetoric doesn’t matter.  At the end of the day, what matters are the system and the way you organize the military.  The rhetoric can be very problematic if it creates a very inflated sense of expectations that says we’re going to reject this technology we can see because it’s not revolutionary enough.  I think this Administration came into office with a predilection for that, and it’s taken awhile to ratchet it back.  I think we’ll see the benefits of that over time as long as we develop a coherent program.

Louisa Savage:  I’m Louisa Savage [phonetic].  I write for MacLean’s Magazine, the Canadian news weekly.  You hinted at this a little bit at the beginning of your comments.  Your book is obviously coming on the heels of several books that talk about all of the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lay them at the feet of the Secretary of Defense.  Could you comment a bit about how you put him in both historical context of this greater transformation ideology that you were describing, and has he done well or poorly in your judgment?  Kind of give me your take on the critiques that are out there.  Actually, I would like to hear that from both of you.

Frederick Kagan:  Where does Rumsfeld fit in?  Well, Secretary Rumsfeld has been a very enthusiastic executor of an intellectual program that he did not originate.  In fact, I don’t believe, when all the documents are open and we can actually see everything, we will find it was even his idea to do this in the first place.  What’s very interesting is to go back and trace the intellectual lineage of this transformation idea and see that it really was President Bush who first laid out a very clear vision of this kind of transformation, before anyone was really talking about Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. 

When Rumsfeld went before the Senate for his confirmation hearing and when Paul Wolfowitz went before the Senate, transformation was only 1 of 5 or 6 line items they identified as being their priorities.  And it was not the top one; the top priority that Rumsfeld talked about at his confirmation hearing was redressing the personnel problems that the Army was having.  Believe it or not, in the late 1990s we thought the Army was over-stretched. 

We hadn’t seen anything, but we were having problems with recruitment and retention.  There were major quality of life initiatives that the Bush Administration had promised to put through.  That was what Rumsfeld talked about when he was confirmed.  It was until several months into his tenure that he really started to focus on transformation like a laser beam, as Bill Clinton might say, and make that the defining element of his tenure.  This is a guy who I think inherited a program, has embraced it very enthusiastically, has subsequently made it the center piece of his efforts, and I think Rumsfeld will go down in history as something of a tragic figure.  His priority has been to transform the military.  He has consistently attempted to defend transformation programs, even in the midst of this war.  That is clearly the legacy that he means to leave the nation. 

What he wants to do is leave armed forces that are better prepared to face the enemies of the future.  I think the tragedy is that he is going to unintentionally leave us with armed forces that are less well prepared to meet the future challenges.  Mike?

Michael O’Hanlon:  A tragic figure is the term that I would use as well.  This picks up on an argument that Kurt and I make in the Hard Power book.  Rumsfeld did a lot of good things.  If you’re studying his legacy, even though the overriding decision he made on Iraq he made poorly, his style of leadership was in many ways what a civilian should be trying to do within the military.  This also builds on some other writing by Steve Rose and others about the nature of military transformation and the proper role of civilians within it. 

Fred has done a very good job making this argument in his book.  I think the basic role of the civilian Secretary is to shake up the debate, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to ultimately empower military reformers.  To empower those reformers, you have to decide who you think is right.  And you better have a pretty good sense of who is right, or you’re going to empower the wrong people and hurt the Armed Forces.  I think a Secretary of Defense cannot usually come up with the vision by him or herself.  There’s not enough time and, even as those of us on the outside who study war, to be able to rival the expertise of the whole body of uniformed military officers is a challenge. 

What we can do is try to bring in historical parallels, new strategic paradigms, and try to sift through the arguments to challenge people so they don’t just defer to what their Chief of Staff thinks at that moment.  Military organizations are very hierarchical and deferential.  Rumsfeld is right to challenge a lot of things. 

Another way I would make the same point about the tragedy of Rumsfeld is that my own guess is that in regard to the war plans he inherited – I bet he improved every single one except the one for Iraq.  What I can gather from what he did with the Korea, Taiwan, and Afghanistan war plans – which didn’t really exist until he, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks made one up – those war plans were generally speaking not in as good of shape before he took new eye to them and challenged the military.  But in Iraq, he went to an excess. 

First of all, he was totally consumed with the question of when you deploy which unit.  He seemed to take great pride in curbing the original plan by 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000.  Tony Zinni, with his plan for overthrowing Saddam, had perhaps 400,000 or more American troops.  Rumsfeld worked very hard to get it back to 250,000, as if there was some huge virtue in being at 250,000 rather than 400,000.  But Ken Pollock, my colleague at Brookings, had it right when he said you don’t [get] points in war for style.  This is not about proving you’re more economical than the next guy.  In his obsession to get the numbers down, he forgot to think about what happens after Saddam is overthrown. 

Anyway, a lot has been thrown at Rumsfeld’s feet.  For the most part, he deserves it.  But the reason why it’s a tragedy is because he could have done, and did do, so many good things.  His style of leadership in many ways is the right style, but you can’t afford to make a mistake on the biggest single issue you take on.

Frederick Kagan:  In my view, the military has gotten a pass on a lot of things that it deserves censure for in these wars.  One of them is the fact that there was no developed war plan for Afghanistan on 9/11.  There should have been nothing surprising about the possibility that we might have to launch some sort of reprisal attack against Afghanistan, since we knew that al-Qaeda was based there and was attacking us.  It tells you something about the degree to which the military was not taking strategic problems seriously.  There was not in fact a war plan on the shelf, and Tommy Franks and Don Rumsfeld had to spend so much of their time developing one from scratch, rather than really thinking about what the situation required.  This is one of the reasons why we have problems in Afghanistan.

Steve Tronofski:  Hi, my name is Steve Tronofski [phonetic].  I really appreciate your comments.  Hearing you gentleman discuss the intellectual basis of perhaps of how we’re going to proceed with transformation or do a u-turn and change course, I couldn’t help but think about the intellectual capital needs of that.  More specifically, our officer personnel policies and how we’re going to move forward when, for the last 35 years, we’ve doggedly contracted the base of people geographically, academically, and culturally that we’re bringing into our military officer corps. 

From my own service in the Army, I see a dangerous trend of almost a creeping anti-intellectualism in the uniformed senior Army leadership.  There was a purge of the 2 and 3-stars a couple of years ago, and rising of a number of new 1-stars, who don’t even have graduate degrees.  This is really a new trend if you look at how made the ranks in the 1970s and 1980s.  We have 100 percent OCS selection for the past 30 months, 97 percent selection rate to Major, and 10,000 Lieutenant and Captain vacancies in the Army Reserves.  It’s not getting any better.  I’m just concerned about what your ideas are for maybe stimulating some discussion within our Army leadership.  I think the Marines are actually doing a better job of this.  We’re in a dangerous bind here because we’ve assessed such a narrow swath of people since the draft ended, and we’re promoting them at such historically high rates.  Where will this take us?

Frederick Kagan:  Well, there’s a lot buried in that question.  I will say that I’m also concerned about the trends of anti-intellectualism within the military.  It was not that long ago that a senior Army General dismissed the notion of Officers getting advanced academic degrees basically saying they got their degree in combat, and clearly not understanding the role that intellectual development plays in senior officer development.  Nevertheless, there are countervailing trends.  The Army has discovered that the promise of advanced civil schooling, basically a Masters degree, is extremely enticing for a lot of young Officers.  In fact, you can entice them to sign up for additional years of service if you promise it to them. 

The Army has got a program now that is offering dramatically increasing numbers of young Officers the opportunity to go to fully funded graduate programs, in exchange for extending their service commitments.  Many young Officers are taking the Army up on this offer.  I think the Army is basically doing it for the wrong reason.  The Army institution doesn’t understand the benefit it will gain from that over the long run.  It’s mostly doing it as a recruiting and retention tool.  Over the long run, I think it will be very valuable. 

I spent 10 years at West Point.  There were many good things about what was going on there, and there were some problems there.  There are problems throughout the professional military educational system – things that tend to reinforce this.  You can also develop a saying.  If you want an army to do your thinking, ask the Russians.  If you want an army to actually do something, ask the Americans.  We are terrific executors.  We make things happen.  That’s the mindset of the American military and we’re the best in the world at it. 

Thinking deep thoughts, developing complex intellectual frameworks about war?  There are American Officers who can do that, but a lot of them tend not to make it to the highest levels.  That’s a problem and it’s something we’ll have to confront.  If I had a magic bullet, I would definitely fire it, but I don’t.  I think advanced schooling is definitely a great thing, but it’s not a panacea. 

The problem is that we need to a have a senior military leadership that really identifies this, that is increasing intellectual discourse and increasing deep intellectual development of the Officer Corps as a major challenge that it wants to take on and deal with.  Until that happens, I don’t think we’re going to have a whole lot of improvement.

Michael O’Hanlon:  I think that’s very well said.  Your question was very well posed too.  I don’t have a whole lot to add.  This is not meant to just be a kind of fawning praise, but I will say that even though I share both of your worries, I also don’t know of a group of individuals in our country that impresses me more than the Officer Corps of the U.S. military. 

You were pointing out that they have different approaches toward traditions of education and so forth, but I think of General Shinseki and his transformation plan for the Army.  General Shumaker perhaps doesn’t have that advanced degree, but he is about as formidable of a debating opponent as you ever want to wind up with.  There are a lot of people in the Army who I’m very impressed by, and that’s not reason to think we should stop worrying. 

As you pointed out, there is a new generation and we have to be concerned about the messages we’re sending out.  As much as I’m glad for this conversation, I’ll also make a point that you both probably don’t strongly disagree with.  There is a lot of intellectual firepower within the Army, but it sort of depends on which person you’re talking to in the senior levels.  We’ve probably got to encourage a little higher degree of consistency across the top tiers.  But on balance, I’m still extremely impressed with the kind of people we have in, and grateful that in a time of war we have some of the country’s smartest people inside that army. 

What they have to do is so extraordinary.  They have to be good at war fighting, peacekeeping, running towns, writing constitutions, and creating economies.  The number of things that a commander of a division going into Iraq had to do in the space of 6 months was out of control.  Part of the challenge here is that we’re asking superhuman things of very mortal people, in times when their humanity is most revealed – in times of stress and times of war.  It’s all the more reason that your question is right on the money.

Frederick Kagan:  There is no way to disagree with that, Mike.  It’s very well said.  It’s always a problem to get up and criticize these people who are tremendously admirable and have devoted themselves to our service.  Only the need of the desperate challenges that we face really brings the necessity forward to do that.

Male Voice:  I’m [indiscernible] with NTV television.  Given the examples of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would you suggest a better way to fight a radical Islamic insurgency?  Do you think the creation of a semi-autonomous body like a counterinsurgency command that also incorporates peacekeeping duties is a good idea?  Or in one other extreme example, do you think that a resilient and determined Islamic insurgency could ever be defeated if it also has reasonably strong popular support?  Would you have to do what you did to Japan in the Second World War?

Frederick Kagan:  I think we’d like to keep the discussion focused on the question of transformation in the American military, and not stray into issues about how to go about fighting the global war on terror.  The part of the question I’d like to address is the part about developing a counterinsurgency or peacekeeping force.  This is an idea that’s been brooded about for some time in a number of places.  I don’t really see how it could be workable. 

The presumption is that you could define military situations where you can be sure that military capabilities of a certain narrow band are all that will be required.  Unfortunately, what we see in Iraq and just about insurgency is that that’s not true.  There are circumstances in which very low levels of policing functions are all that’s required, and that can shift very quickly to situations where you need very high-end military capabilities, either to defeat enemies more serious than you thought they would be or to prevent them from becoming as serious as they might be. 

I don’t actually see how you could do that in general terms.  Any peacekeeping or counterinsurgency force that you would send in would need to be backed up with conventional force that would provide that kind of capability.  Then all you’ve done is create redundancy.  You can raise the question if it’s possible to train a conventional force to do counterinsurgency well.  I think the answer to this is yes, and I think we’re seeing in Iraq.  I think that the young soldiers that we have on the ground in Iraq are showing it, and we had them on the ground in Bosnia and Kosovo.  This is an Army and Officer Corps going into Iraq in 2003 that had considerable experience in these attacks. 

Most of these Officers had gone through Bosnia and Kosovo.  They knew how to do peacekeeping operations.  That’s why when they went into Iraq, even though the command was confused and there was no good plan for the Phase-4 operations, the young soldiers on the ground immediately started doing stuff.  They immediately started working with the local leadership and civilian population.  They immediately started trying to improve the situation, based on their own understanding.  They were able to shift from that to major combat operations in a heartbeat.  That capability is tremendously important.  Lastly, I would say that as small as the Armed Forces are relative to the challenges we face, I don’t think it’s in any way feasible that we could carve off a portion of that say we’re only going to use it for counterinsurgency.

Michael O’Hanlon:  I agree.  I’ll be brief.  There is only one point that I would potentially add to this.  I’ve been wondering if it might be beneficial to have a couple of brigades that specialize in counterinsurgency – not because you could ever rely on them to do a mission by themselves.  As we see even in Afghanistan, there is a much greater need for force structure than a couple of brigades could provide. 

This becomes a center of excellence, a center of doctrinal focus to the extent that you can make it part of the mainstream of the Army combat concept; and that you have Generals running these brigades, whatever their rank may be.  You may keep a certain amount of focus on the mission even 10 or 20 years from now, when a lot of people will want to forget Iraq; the same way the Army decided to forget Vietnam in the 1980s.  I think the Army went too far in the 1980s. 

Hopefully, this time we won’t do the same thing.  The Army basically decided that the lesson from Vietnam is not to fight that kind of war again.  I think it would be a tragedy if that kind of lesson emerged from this situation.  Institutionally, is there a way to reduce the likelihood of that wrong lesson being learned again?  Perhaps a brigade or two of specialized counterinsurgents would be useful, as long as they keep training and people rotate through so you don’t just create a niche capability that feels different from the mainstream Army.  It may be worth considering that sort of change.  That’s as far as I would go.

Frederick Kagan:  I wish that I’d said that too.

David Hern:  David Hern, I’m with Defense Daily and Space and Missile Defense Report.  You both said that perhaps one should view Rumsfeld as a tragic figure, and it’s true that Iraq is not a model of success.  But is it possible though that he did pursue and promote some programs which were well considered, at least in hindsight?  For example, look at missile defense.  It’s true that it did antedate him.  It began under Ronald Reagan, but it gained new impetus under Bush and Rumsfeld.  This year we’re confronted with North Korea popping off missiles that could reach Japan or South Korea.

 We’re also looking at China, which has passed a law saying they will invade Taiwan unless it submits to rule from Beijing.  They have 800 radar-guided missiles.  Perhaps it’s well that we have a Stealth Raptor, a Stealth combat ship, a DDG 1000, and some other Stealth platforms that Rumsfeld has pushed forward.  Perhaps he does have some successes...

Frederick Kagan:  Yeah.  I don’t think that either one of us would condemn the Defense program that Rumsfeld has put through unreservedly or without exception.  I certainly do agree that ballistic missile defense is tremendously important, and if anything has continued to be under-resourced.  Rumsfeld has certainly been trying to push that forward.  As I noted, we can have debates about the relative merits of various technological platforms.  I suspect there are problems with various planes we are talking about buying and some of the systems we’re talking about buying. 

No system is perfect; that doesn’t particularly trouble me.  I think we’re going to be very happy to have a lot of the stuff that Rumsfeld has either bought or worked to develop.  What I’m really concerned about is that this stuff doesn’t bring with it a notion of how to integrate it into a military that can achieve the desired objectives.  We can have all of this stuff and be able to go one-on-one with the Chinese on planes versus missiles, or however many we need to go to win, and we can still fail to achieve our objectives. 

The problem that we’ve had in Iraq is not that we can’t match the enemy’s military capabilities.  That’s not going to be the problem we’ll have Iran, and it’s frankly not the problem we’ll have in North Korea either.  The problem in all of those cases is that we don’t have organs in the American government that can sit down and say this is the desired political end state - this is what will have to happen in order to make that end state come about; this is the political component, this is the economic component, this is the social component, and this is the military component.  We can only do the military component of that.  We don’t have resources in the government to do the broad-based political planning that we really need. 

This is not just Rumsfeld’s fault either.  But what I’m concerned about is that Rumsfeld has always defined his legacy in terms of transformation, and transformation has frequently meant 1 of 2 things:  It either means whatever we did that worked, which isn’t very helpful, or it means a very particular program of buying very particular kinds of equipment.  Neither one of those is going to get us to where we need to go.  While I’m sure we’ll end up being pleased that we have a lot of capabilities, if we don’t figure out how to bring them all together to do what we need to do, it’s not going to end up winning us wars.

Michael O’Hanlon:  I want to get at what I mean by “tragic.”  What I mean by tragic is not incompetent.  In fact, that’s the point.  This is a very talented person, who does have a lot of accomplishments.  The list you gave understates his accomplishment because those were primarily the programs he inherited from others and simply continued.  On some of these other things we’ve mentioned, there were some new things he did. 

The Global Posture Review, for example, was one.  We’ve redefined much of our overseas military presence.  I think that even though the diplomacy of instituting that change was mishandled, the overall reorientation of American forces around the world makes good strategic sense.  I’m a supporter and big fan of it.  I’ve already mentioned that I’m a fan of the new way the Navy is doing its deployments overseas, of the Navy putting more attack submarines on Guam, and the Army going to these new structures with lighter forces.  The Air Force has done some interesting things, beginning under Clinton and continuing under Rumsfeld. 

What I mean by tragic is that for such a talented man who has made so many good decisions, and who has a style of leadership that often works, on the issue that wound up mattering the most he made one of his mistakes.  It’s sort of like a .750 hitter striking out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th in the last game of the World Series.  That’s tragic in the sense that a very talented person underachieved at the very moment that turned out to be the most crucial.  It’s almost Shakespearean, if you’ll permit me that kind of metaphor.  It’s almost as if you had a person who was so gifted, but nonetheless made a big tragic mistake on the issue that wound up being the most important for his own legacy and probably for our country.

Marty Sullivan:  Marty Sullivan from Commonwealth Consulting.  Fred, I infer from your comments that you’re not a big fan of the QDR or the QDR process.  Given that much of the QDR is an exercise in protecting existing programs that the Services had, would we be better off to have a risk-based assessment of a national security strategy determining what those goals should be that we want to transform our Services programs to accomplish on a 2-year basis, rather than a quadrennial Defense Review which focuses mainly on material solutions?

Frederick Kagan:  Gee Marty; I don’t remember saying anything about the QDR at all.  No, I’m not a big fan of the QDR process.  I think right now it’s neither fish nor fowl.  It is one thing to say each incoming administration needs to define its vision of the U.S. military and U.S. national security strategy and how it’s going to go about doing that. 

When you have a second term Administration doing a QDR, I think it’s very likely you’ll have a lot more heat than light come out of that.  If the Bush Administration needed a QDR in 2005 to think about what it was doing in the world, then we’re in a lot worse trouble than I think we were actually in.  Inevitably, it becomes a way of justifying a program that it is already moving on.  The 2001 QDR was a little bit more radical in a certain sense, but public documents have the problem of being sent in front of Congress.  When the Defense Department drafts them, its concern is making sure that the programs it has already decided upon are going to get support. 

I don’t know how to get around that in a process like this.  The efforts during the Clinton Administration have the National Defense Panel come in and do a separate review.  It’s very hard to break away from that.  I would say the solution to the major problem we have is that we need to think more strategically.  We need to stop thinking so much about programs and start thinking about enemies, potential enemies, challenges, and potential challenges. 

If you looked around the world in the 1990s and asked where you think we were going to have trouble, you would have probably said Iraq and North Korea.  Guess what?  We’re having trouble in Iraq and North Korea.  You might also have said Iran.  We’re having trouble there too.  You have said we’re going to have to be worried about China, but probably not yet.  There you go.

 This wasn’t as hard as we made it out.  It wasn’t as hard as people were imagining figuring out what sorts of challenges we were likely to be engaged in 10 or 15 years hence.  I think that we need to remove the veil of mystery from that and say let’s do a real strategic review.  You do it at whatever level of classification you have to in order for it to be meaningful.  Let’s do a real strategic review and figure out what the challenges are that we face today, and what challenges we are likely to face in the future. 

What kinds of armed forces are going to be required, starting from the ground up?  The problem is that’s not the way we do it.  We start with the force structure already in place and traditionally, with the Defense budget cap that we don’t want to negotiate, we say that given those forces what we could do.  That’s fine if the solution to your challenges actually fits within that paradigm.  It’s not so fine if that paradigm isn’t suitable for the challenges you face. 

I would be a lot more comfortable with our Defense program if you looked around the world and asked what kind of armed forces we actually need in the world as it is today.  Then we can talk about what we want to pay for it and what kind of efficiencies we can do.  That’s the discussion that you rarely actually see, and that’s what troubles me most about the QDR and all of the other budget-driven Defense revenue processes that I see.

Michael O’Hanlon:  It’s a good point.  I don’t think that QDRs have been that eye-opening for awhile.  I think they were good in the early period, right after the Berlin Wall fell; the Bush Administration’s Base Force and the Clinton Administration’s Bottom-Up Review, and to a lesser extent the 1997 QDR.  It was the first one called by that term.  Even there, people started to say we’ve already got some of the main force structure pieces; let’s start looking at mind warfare and chemical weapons and vulnerability.  Through 1997, I thought the process wasn’t too bad. 

The problem is that we’ve had so many of these so often it’s hard to do big-think to a calendar with a budget process linked to it.  I’m not sure I would discard it though.  Let me turn it around and say wouldn’t it be nice if a couple other parts of our government would have just one -- what?  He said that we should have a national security risk assessment of some kind.  I think that a number of people have been talking about a Goldwater-Nichols process that would encompass for example the State Department’s capacity for deploying stabilization capacity abroad to do reconstruction activities quickly. 

It’s the kind of thing that my current boss at Brookings, Carlos Pascual, was asked to do by Condi Rice.  I think they had a great idea for getting it going, but it’s probably at 1/10 of the level of resources it needs.  A QDR process could help underscore that, but within the way State does its budgeting even to the extent that current QDRs are inherently limited by budget constraints.  Nonetheless, it’s hard for you to ignore the need to do the math and show some stream of logic because you’re producing a document at the end of the day, and you’re trying to link it to scenarios.  I think State would benefit from having a couple of its capabilities affected by this sort of a planning process.  In a way, the Pentagon may have begun to outgrow it, but other parts of government could benefit from doing it even just once.

Male Voice:  Cliff [inaudible] from Foundation for Defensive Democracies.  When you look at the challenges and structural problems in Iraq and you think about how best to restructure and restrategize so you can face this sort of enemy better, does it seem to you that it is best to restructure on the job?  Or is it necessary to accept a failure, pull back, replan and restructure with the idea that if there’s the political will the next time you face such a problem you will be able to do it more effectively?

Frederick Kagan:  Well, there are 2 questions embedded in there.  Let me rephrase the first one a little bit.  Should we try to restructure forces based on lessons we’ve already seen while we’re fighting, or should we wait until we’re done, hopefully having one there and then do it?  And the other question is, do we need to recognize that we failed then pull out, and try to regroup for the next one? 

The second one I can answer unequivocally.  No, I don’t think we can simply accept that we failed and pull out, because the consequences of failure are unacceptable.  I don’t think that the situation is so clearly a failure that it is prudent to ensure it will be a failure by pulling out at this point.  I think that the stakes are so high and the situation is still sufficient at play that it would be unwise. 

As for the other question, we certainly need to be thinking about what we should be doing differently.  It might be that we do need to restructure the government as we’re fighting.  The Army has actually been restructuring itself as we’ve been fighting.  This modularity program that we mentioned earlier has been going on even as we’ve been engaged in the war in Iraq.  I’m not entirely sure of the wisdom of that.  It has certainly entailed significant expense and a significant diversion of resources of all varieties, especially mental and moral ones on the part of soldiers who have had to reorganize, learn new ways of doing things, and then deploy to Iraq with very marginal benefit in my view. 

I’m not sure it was particularly wise in that regard, but that’s a particular reform.  The reform that I’m talking about is really a reform of how you think about war before you fight it.  That’s not something that is going to help us in Iraq right now.  The die is cast with the way we fought that war, and the die is cast in the problems that we’ve created for ourselves by doing it that way. 

Now the challenge is different.  Now the challenge is getting out ourselves out of a mess that I think was avoidable; or at least avoidable to some extent if we had done this better.  The question is how we do this better or think about it better in the future.  That’s something that we probably need to be thinking a lot about now and probably trying to reform.  The thing is, you don’t know when the next one is going to come down the pike.  I’m not really comfortable saying we should just wait because I don’t want us to get in a situation where we make a similar series of mistakes and another mess that could have been avoided.

Michael O’Hanlon:  I agree with that.  I’ll just make the same point in a different way.  I am more encouraged by what General Dave Patraeus is doing at Fort Leavenworth, changing Army doctrine on counter insurgency, than I am encouraged the Army’s approach of going to these new kinds of brigades and the whole modularity concept.  I support the latter, but I think that’s a marginal benefit. 

The more important thing is to get the counterinsurgency doctrine right.  You could say that it would have been nice if we’d done it before the war, but it’s still better now than three to four years from now.  I think it’s really a way of saying you have to try to do your best as you go.  At least the Army is trying.  Alas, as much as the great reformers of the post-Vietnam era did a great job of building an Army that was capable of winning Desert Storm; their historical legacy is now going to look a little more mixed.  They are not going to appear as wise for they how they underplayed the importance of counterinsurgency.  It would have been better to get that right in the 1970s and 1980s, but at least we’re trying to make up for lost time. 

The tragedy of Iraq is that it’s probably too late to get the kind of outcome we should have been able to get.  Whatever we can salvage now is still better than complete defeat.

Frederick Kagan:  Here’s an important corollary now:  No, we can’t decide that all future conflicts are going to be asymmetric counterinsurgencies; it’s all going to be like this, the way they decided in the 1970s that we weren’t going to fight anything that looked like Vietnam.  The military has general purpose forces that have to be general purpose.  They have to be able to do everything that they might be called upon to do. 

I mention this because there are powerful movements within the military and analytical community that are attempting to simplify the problem in the other direction, and say it’s all about asymmetric warfare and networked enemies.  This is all we’re ever going to have to do, and we need to design forces that can do this.  Well, we can do that and then find we are facing a conventional enemy or a different kind of enemy that we aren’t foreseeing right now, and be totally unprepared for that.  That’s why you have general purpose forces.

Anna Mulrine:  I’m Anna Mulrine with U.S. News.  Given the talk tonight about striking out with bases loaded and about the possible need to restructure the government, would you all say that this includes a need for a new Secretary of Defense?  Would that be helpful, and what would a new Secretary bring to the table?

Frederick Kagan:  I don’t think we want to get too heavily focused on what we need to do in Iraq.  That’s not the topic of this talk, and I don’t think we need to talk about whether we can change the Secretary of Defense right now.  I think the question here is what the right transformation program is.  How should we proceed from now – not so much in terms of Iraq, but in terms of the future of the U.S. military?  In that regard, I think we are definitely going to need some new blood to think creatively about where to go from here. 

Secretary Rumsfeld has been committed to a particular vision of this for 6 years.  I think he is very unlikely to be able to turn around now and say he’s going to operate on different basis.  From that standpoint, a real turn around in transformation policy is going to require some new people and new thinking.

Norm Olson:  Norm Olson.  You referred to transformation and new thinking.  You said that you agreed on the fundamental [inaudible].

Frederick Kagan:  Well, I would give the same advice to any candidate and to any President.  As I said, this is not a partisan political issue.  I think whoever takes over in the White House in January of 2009 is going to face a series of monumental challenges:  A military that has burned out its personnel and equipment to almost an unprecedented level; a military that is adrift intellectually; a military that committed to a lot of very expensive programs that it no longer has an intellectual basis for bringing together into some sort of vision; and a military that is badly seared and scarred with what will have been a very painful military undertaking, whatever the actual situation is at that time. 

That is going to pose a tremendous challenge to the next incumbent in the White House.  It is going to require an enormous amount of effort and intellectual creativity to find intelligent solutions to that problem.  I would recommend that we go back to the beginning of the entire intellectual process and say:  What is war?  What is it about?  And what are the major challenges that we face in war today? 

I would submit that when you do that you will see that the major challenge we face in war today, apart from the damage done to our military in the past few years, is finding a way to convert military success into political success.  That needs to be the center of gravity, the target we need to find in any future transformation program.  Find a way to develop processes, procedures, doctrines, or whatever that can help us do that.  That’s the advice that I would offer.  Mike?

Michael O’Hanlon:  I agree with that.  The way that I would put it is to say the most important thing to do is not about transformation.  Let’s break the streak of 4 straight Presidential elections having to be about transformation.  Let’s make it about getting healthy within the force.  Let’s make it be about integrating our different tools of national power, making other parts of the government more capable of some of these kinds of missions we’re involved in. 

Let’s make it about broadening our national security policy to the point where we have an ability to fight the long war in the hearts and minds sense.  The Rumsfeld challenge that he put out in 2003 in his famously leaked memo – how do we know we’re not generating a larger 2nd generation of al-Qaeda than we’re currently destroying?  I don’t know want to downplay the military side.  Any coauthor of the book Hard Power doesn’t want to downplay the military side, but I do want to get away from transformation as the mantra by which we have to measure our success. 

I’m the author of Hard Power, but I’m a big fan of Finding the Target.  I think the basic message that it’s made is central.  We don’t always have to be about redefining war.  Sometimes thinking about how to make our country more secure in the strategic era we find ourselves may be a better way to ask the question.

Frederick Kagan:  Mike, thank you very much.  I really appreciate your time, comments, insight, and encouragement.  It means a great deal to me.  Thank you all very much for coming.

[Applause]

[End of transcript.]