The Future of the United States Marine Corps:
With General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

August 18, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording.

8:30 a.m.	Registration
8:45	Panel I: The Role of the Corps in United States National Security Strategy
	Discussants:	Max Boot, senior fellow, National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
		Colonel Mackubin Thomas Owens, USMC (Ret.), U.S. Naval War College
		Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman, USMC, research fellow, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities
	Moderator:	Thomas Donnelly, AEI
10:15	Coffee Break
10:30	Panel II: Operational Challenges for the United States Marine Corps
	Discussants:	Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, USMC
		F.J. ‘Bing’ West, USMC (Ret.)
		Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.)
	Moderator:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
Noon	Luncheon
12:30 p.m.	Keynote: General Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps
1:30	Panel III: The Transformation of the Corps
	Discussants:	Michael Vickers, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
		Colonel Robert O. Work, USMC (Ret.), Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
		Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, USMC; Marine Corps Combat Development Command, deputy commandant for Combat Development
	Moderator:	Thomas Donnelly, AEI
3:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MR. DONNELLY:  I'm very pleased to welcome you to what I think is going to be a really quite instructive and enlightened day.  This is the third in our series of reviews of the state of affairs in the services, and possibly the one that's, I think, likely to highlight the really wide range of stresses the multiple missions of America's military faces these days.

If you went back to the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, I think the summary of what the Marines' lessons learned from that war is "Oh, my God, let's never do this again," in the sense that the Marines perhaps saw, before much of anybody else, what the future in Iraq might be and how stressful it would be to the Marine way of doing business, to maintain a presence, a constant presence in Iraq over an extended period of time.

We should remember that Marine units actually rotate in roughly about twice as frequently as Army units do, that is, sort of the Marine way of doing rotations and this was something, at least from a service perspective, that was entirely unlooked for, unanticipated, and also like the Army, the response of people in uniform to the scientist-based measurements has been, while stressful, quite amazing and quite successful.

The question is what are the lessons we might contemplate, going forward, and we're going to try to wrestle with that today in three panels.  This first panel is designed to take a broad strategic overview, essentially, what missions do Americans need the Marine Corps to conduct for them over the next period of years?

The second panel is going to look at more operational issues.  How might the Marines go about doing their business and executing their missions?

And the third panel is going to look at more programmatic and budgetary issues.

So we're really trying to cover the waterfront in a single day and of course we'll have a speech by the commandant at lunchtime, which will try to weave all these themes together.

And we've got a really distinguished group of folks who are going to be with us today and so I'm going to hereby turn the microphone over to at least two of them.  My colleagues on this panel are Mac Owens and Max Boot, whose bios and writings are in your packets, and are really too extensive for me to try to summarize.  But they're very much here for a reason and Mac, I'd like to ask you to go first and frame the whole day's discussion for us.

So without further ado, Mac Owens, the mike is yours.

COLONEL OWENS:  Thank you very much.  I'm very honored to be here.  I'm really tickled.  This is a great opportunity.  I love AEI.  It's also tremendous, you know, to see friends, people I haven't seen in years, and unlike myself, many of these guys, their suits haven't shrunk like mine have.

But anyway, it's really terrific and a welcome to you all.

With the panel, of course we're talking about the role of the Marine Corps in the United States, the national security policy and strategy, and I guess I want to frame the issue a little more starkly, when I say look, I mean, why is it that the--what are we in the Marine Corps for anyway?

You can put it in two ways.  First of all, does the United States need a Marine Corps, and if it does, does it need a Marine Corps that's larger than most of the armies in the rest of the world?

Now whenever I try to address this question, and I have done this before, I like to put it in the context of something that Sam Huntington wrote about back in 1954.

We talked about the strategic concepts of the service.  He says the strategic concept is the fundamental element of a service.  Its role or purpose in implementing national policy.  A service's strategic concept answers the ultimate question: What function do you perform which obligates society to assume responsibility for your maintenance?

And he pointed out that when a service didn't have a strategic concept of when it was fuzzy, that service would tend to flip and to flop.

It turned out he was writing about the Navy in 1954, after which, you know, it was, in some respects, kind of a rough period for the Navy.  There was nobody for it to fight.  It had sunk the Japanese navy and the Soviet navy still on the horizon.

He was dealing with that issue.  But I think it's a useful concept and it's one I want to use to talk about what we're doing today.  I guess if you say that the Marine Corps cannot justify its strategic concept, then we don't need a Marine Corps.  We don't need the virtues and the capabilities that Marines provide.  Then we don't need a Marine Corps.

On the other hand, if we do need the things Marines do, then somebody's got to do them.

Now you can give it to somebody else or you can leave it as it is and let the Marines continue to do it.

And of course if you give it to somebody else, then of course that presumably could get in the way of what else that service is--a lot of people would say, Well, why can't the Army do some of the things that the Marines can?  And of course that's a possibility.  But it would seem to me that if you need the strategic concept, that is, the things the Marine Corps does, then you have to reinvent the wheel to create a capability with the Army that already exists.

But the question is, okay, what is it that the Marines do?  What is the strategic concept?  And, you know, I would argue basically that, right now, it's centered on the idea of providing a flexible expeditionary force that can come from the sea on short notice, and can sustain itself from the sea, and then return to the sea when the operation is done.

Now the Army, to a certain extent of course, is also going to come from the sea.  I mean, after all, as Colin Gray said on one occasion, if the United States is going to be a land power any place but in North America, it also has to be a sea power.  That is, ultimately, any time we deploy an Army, Army forces anywhere, most of their sustenance is going to come from the sea.

So what differentiates the Marines from the Army in this case?  Now the Army's strategic concept I think is fairly stable, has remained stable for the last 60 years, and I think will probably continue for the foreseeable future, and that is to fight and win wars, land wars.

And you know, this seems to be the centerpiece of what they do.  You know, today's Army is Emory Upton's army, it's an army that has given up kind of its constabulary focus and has focused primarily on trying to defeat foreign enemies.  I don't see that changing, although of course they may have to as a result of some of the things going on in Iraq.

The Marines' strategic concept, on the other hand, has evolved over time, and I think this is one of the virtues of the Marine Corps, is the adaptability and flexibility and ability to integrate in the face of necessity.

If you go back, you know, to the beginning of the 20th Century, and Max Boot of course has written a lot about this, one of the primary things that the Marine Corps did was provide essentially colonial infantry for doing small wars.

Then in the interwar period, with the concern about the rise of Japan, the likelihood the United States would fight Japan, the Marine Corps adapted to the strategic requirement of the Navy.

That is, to fight all the various modifications a war plan warrants, and so evolved into an amphibious force designed to seize Japan's naval bases, and of course they did that mostly during World War II.

In the Cold War period, they evolved one more time moving away from sort of a strictly amphibious assault focus to a broader concept of amphibious operations, and the Marine Corps reinvented itself as a force in readiness, and I think that's really, they're on the cusp of that right now, and that will probably continue.

What this does, I mean what Marine Corps is able to do, has been able to do during this period of time, is to provide a capability of responding, on short notice, with tailored, task organized forces, to any crisis across the spectrum of conflict, and, once again, part of this is the idea of going from a narrow concept of amphibious assault to a broader concept of amphibious operations, that is, the use of the sea for national purposes, and I think that's basically where we are today.

Today, I think--I hope I'm not wrong on this--but the Marine strategic concept I guess can be called expeditionary maneuver warfare.  The ability to use the commons of the sea, especially the sea, as a maneuver space and a base, to be able to apply force when and where the United States wants, and to do it on relatively short notice.

One of the concepts arising out of this of course is the concept of sea basing, and there's a lot of debates going on but of course it's a difficult thing to do and it's also fairly expensive.

So I mean, that's one of the things that may provide a limitation in the future to what we ask the Marine Corps to do.

Now what about the Army, on the other hand?  OF course the Army, as everybody knows, I think is moving to a more expeditionary focus.  Reorganization--and the Marines will look at some of the new Army organizations and say those things look suspiciously like MAGTFS, Marine Air Ground Task Forces, the same sort of task organizing to do particular jobs.

So, in some respects, you can say that the Army seems to be moving in the Marine Corps direction.

Now of course this whole concept about expeditionary is meaningless.  I mean, the fact is, if everybody can get to the battlefield faster, that's a good thing, but we do have to ask the question from the standpoint of the Army especially--if the Army is focusing more on the expeditionary, getting there earlier, is that going to ultimately interfere with its ability to do what it has been doing over the last 60 years, and that's to focus on fighting land combat?

I mean, as you know, one a the things the Marines can duplicate the Army to a certain extent, and they have in Al-Anbar province and Fallujah, and places like that.

But a Marine expeditionary force of course is not a corps, it's not designed to fight the operational battle, and I think that's a big difference between the two.  The question is how far does the Army want to move in the direction that it is, to basically become more expeditionary?  Will that be at the Army's, at the cost of the Army's ability to do what it has been doing so well over the years?

Now a number of people will say, well, you know, the Marines, the Army, these are redundant.  Now redundancy is interesting because the fact is that redundancy is good in warfare, and some of the people who criticize redundancy confuse effectiveness, military effectiveness with efficiency.  Efficiency is a term from economics and engineering that says basically you want to achieve the greatest output with the smallest input.

Well, in reality, we don't want to fight wars like that, so the fact is it is always nice to have some redundancy, and we do it in our communications, we do it in just about everything we do, and what we're trying to ensure is we do not have a failure, a catastrophic failure of one system or one part of the effort.

So I think it's not a problem that there's some overlap, cause you would expect that it would be.  Now of course that's, I think, where the Marine Corps stands.  I think the Marine Corps can defend and justify its strategic concept, and I think that it's providing a force that is a utility to the nation.

Now there's a big question, and again you guys that are involved in it know it a whole lot better than I do, but apparently there's a debate going on within the Marine Corps right now about whether the Marine Corps should continue, really, to focus on the power projection from the sea, sea-basing sort of things, or whether it should focus on small wars, and of course the term that is floated around here is 4th generation war.

I know Tom Hammes is here and will be speaking a little bit later on.

But interestingly, for those of you who know your Marine Corps history, that in fact is a modern version of a very old debate.  It's a debate that went on in the 1920's between Smedly Butler, on one hand, and people like John Lejeune, on the other, with Butler pushing for the idea of the Marine Corps as an independent corps of colonial infantry, whereas of course Lejeune was very much an advocate of power projection and amphibious operations.

So we don't know.  I mean, there's also this issue of the degree to which the Marine Corps is going to play in special operations.  The Marine Corps has been directed to play in special operations, as you know, by the Secretary of Defense.  The question is the level.

But I guess I would stop here, and of course a lot of this stuff can come up in questions and answers, by suggesting that the strategic concept of the Marine Corps calls for an expeditionary force that can come from the sea on short notice, and I think that's a valuable capability and I think it complements and supplements, especially the Army's strategic concepts, and the fact is that we need both.

So with that, I will stop.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thanks, Mac.  That's a very useful vocabulary for carrying on the discussion.

Max, what do we want the Marine Corps for?  What's the strategic concept?

MR. BOOT:  Good question.  I'm glad we're all here to talk about that.  Thanks very much for inviting me, Tom, and thanks to all of you for coming.

Now I have to preface my remarks by saying that in the course of writing my last book, which Mac referred to the savage wars of peace, I gained great respect for the Marine Corps, and I just loved reading and writing about these great characters of the Marine past, people that, like some of the ones that Mac referred to, Smedly Butler, or there's Herman "Hard Head" Hannikan, or "Chesty" Puller, all these great swashbuckling adventurers who never had much by way of weapons or manpower but nevertheless cut a wide swath through their enemies.

I have to say that recent generations of Marines, and the current Marines serving today have certainly added to the honor roll of those earlier Marines in places like Nazariya, Fallujah, and Ramadi, which deserve to be remembered with Hue City, Terrowa, and Bellow Wood in the annals of Marine glory.

What I particularly like about the Corps is that it's a thinking person's service, which may seem counterintuitive to some people whose idea of the Marine Corps comes from popular entertainment, from watching movies like Full Medal Jacket or TV shows like Gomer Pyle, for those of you who remember that, which very unfairly depict Marines as being either bumblers or homicidal maniacs, neither of which is in fact the case.

In fact, the Marine Corps I think has really been the intellectual service in many ways, because it's had to be.  It's constantly been under siege throughout its history from penny pinchers on Capitol Hill and from the other services.  It's had to fight for its very survival and so it's had to think really hard about what does it want to do, what is its mission, what is the utility that it's providing to the nation.

And it's often come up with great ideas.  For example, just recently, in 1996, without anyone asking it to do so, the Corps perceived a mission that wasn't being performed and decided to form its own chemical, biological, incident response force, realizing this was something that somebody had to do.

Now most other government agencies that I'm familiar with tend to run away in horror from new missions and the Corps tends to embrace them, which I think was part of the reason why it's so justifiably popular right now with national decision makers, and why you see, for example, General Pace becoming the first Marine chairman of the Joint Chiefs, at the same time that you have two other Marine four stars as head of Strategic Command and European Command.  I think that's really a tribute to the strategic thinking that the Marine Corps has done and the utility that they offer the nation.

But while the Corps has always been good about carrying out its mission, its mission has changed pretty drastically over the years, as Mac alluded to, and really changed more than any other service.

The Corps began life in the 18th Century as basically shipboard guards, primarily designed to protect officers from the enlisted rabble aboard naval ships.  Then in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, it assumed this new mission of becoming State Department troops or "soldiers in the sun," America's imperial constabulary, quelling disorder and administering government in places like Haiti and Nicaragua.

Then, in the 1930's, again as Mac referred to, the Corps acquired a new mission, seizing advanced naval and air bases, which in turn set the stage for the Marines' greatest glory in the island hopping campaign of World War II.

Since the, those two missions, imperial constabulary and amphibious assault force, have existed in uneasy conjunction.  The Marine ethos I think has remained mainly one of the 9/11 force, the break the door down force, the amphibious landing force, the shock troops.

But in practice, its missions have usually had more to do with pacification and humanitarian assistance.  It has excelled at those missions, I would add, from Vietnam to Somalia to Iraq, but I'm not sure that the Marine Corps has yet made the full mental leap to reembrace its old role as imperial constabulary.

I remember, a few years ago, visiting Camp Lejeune and seeing a big demonstration for VIPs of amphibious warfare in action.  It was all very impressive with the Amtraks and hover craft and landing craft, and Cobras and Harriers.  It was a terrific demonstration and just watching it, I thought it was glorious, but I also wondered, Was this a glorious anachronism?

Was this like watching the cavalry on parade in the 1930's?

When was the last time the Corps has actually staged a landing of this type?  If you discount smaller operations like those in the Dominican Republic in the '60s, or Grenada in the '80s, you really have to go back to Inchon, in 1950, for a full-scale amphibious assault against the defended shoreline.

Such an operation was contemplated as part of Desert Storm in 1991 but rejected on the grounds that it would simply be too costly, that modern America could not bear the kind of casualties the Marines has suffered in the Pacific in World War II.

I tend to agree with that judgment.  We should certainly retain some amphibious assault capability and who knows? maybe Marines will have to reenact the Inchon landing in a second Korean War.

But I very much doubt we'll be reenacting the Sands of Iwo Jima any time soon.  The costs are simply too high and given the capabilities of our air power, the needs are not likely to be as pressing.  I suspect it will be judged more expedient to secure a contested shoreline with aerial assault so that Marines will not have to swim ashore under fire and suffer the devastating casualties of wars past.

In light of that, I wonder if it really makes sense to spend $7 billion to buy a thousand expeditionary fighting vehicles to replace today's Amtraks.

Now I agree that 30-year-old Amtraks desperately need to be replaced, but do we really need a slightly updated version with only slightly improved capabilities?

It seems to me the problem with any kind of amphibious vehicle is that you're inevitably going to sacrifice firepower and armor for the sake of being able to swim.  Hence, it's going to be less useful to Marines patrolling Iraq or Afghanistan, where there's not a lot of swimming to be done.

I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense, as an interim step, to buy more armored vehicles that are available on the world market, that might provide greater protection to Marines from IEDs and RPGs.  You could buy vehicles like the Israeli-made Rhino Rhiner or the South Carolina-produced Cougar, which I know is being bought already, but in very small quantities.

And in the longer term, perhaps, the Marine Corps should work with the Army to develop Marine variants of the future combat system vehicles, rather than making this big buy of the expeditionary fighting vehicle.

Speaking of Marine procurement and at the risk of getting myself in truly deep water with all the Marines present here today, I have to say, honestly, as a friend of the Marine Corps, I wonder if the MV22 Osprey really, truly, honest to goodness, makes sense.

It's a nice aircraft, if it works as advertised, which is a big if, but even if it does, at $100 million a copy, which is the GAO estimate, it's a pretty steep price to pay, especially when most of its missions could be performed almost as well by MH60S Nighthawks which cost about $25 million apiece.

In other words, you can buy four Nighthawks for every Osprey, and the Nighthawk can carry more armaments and almost as much cargo as the V22, while descending faster and presenting a smaller target for enemy gunners.

With the money you save, you could easily also buy enough intercepter body armor and Cougar-armored vehicles for the entire Corps, at least the portion of it serving in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Now I have to say while I'm not sure that the Corps is making the right move with these two major weapons purchases, I might add that it's a lot more on track, by and large, than a lot of the other services, such as, I could think of the Air Force, for example, which persists in buying the F22 whether we need it or not.

The great thing about the Corps is that weapons systems are much less important to the Marines than the people who operate them.

 Clearly, the Corps's greatest advantage is the high quality of its fighting men and women, and the fact that it simply has a lot more of what the U.S. armed forces needs in the future, which is plain old infantry.  It ain't glamorous but we need a lot of riflemen to control a hostile country and to impose our will upon the enemy, and the Army has gotten so bulked up, with even most of its infantry divisions becoming de facto armored units, that they just don't have a lot of dismounts to offer.

That's a gap the Corps has been filling and will continue to fill.  That needs to be I think the crux of the Marine mission in the 21st Century and this will require some reorientation of how the Corps does business.

Now General Mattis, who's hiding in the back of the room there, and will be presenting later on this afternoon, has been doing a tremendous job at Combat Development Command, with his ideas about fostering knowledge of foreign languages and foreign cultures, and I trust he'll go more into that this afternoon.

I also think that the Marine Corps agreement with Special Operations Command, to get Marines involved in Special Operations missions such as training foreign forces is a great idea.  That's exactly the kind of gap that the Marines can and should be filling.

I would argue that in addition to all that, the Marine Corps needs to "beef up" its civil affairs, intelligence, military policing, and CIOPS functions, all of which are so vital to missions like Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, and all areas where the Corps has found itself, to some extent, depending upon Army support.

I suspect that in the future, a core mission of the Corps will be doing the kind of things that it did in the past, such as setting up foreign constabularies, such as Smedly Butler's Haitian gendarmerie, or "Chesty" Puller's Nicaragua national guard.

In order to become more proficient at those kinds of missions, I think another area where the Corps could "beef up" its competency is in the foreign area officer program, another area where the Army has made more of an investment than the other services, and where I think the Marines could usefully put some energy and personnel.

And I would also urge the Marines to think hard about whether you want to stick with the six to seven month deployments or go to a one-year tour like the Army.

Now I can see good arguments for both positions but one major concern that I have is the question of whether six months is long enough to figure out what's going on in a complex place like Iraq.

Perhaps that problem can be addressed by sending units back to the same places that they previously garrisoned.

But the larger question that I want to raise and the larger difficulty that I see is that I think a lot of Marines still have the idea that their job is to bust down the door and then leave and let the Army take over.  That's just not possible in today's world, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Marines have to undertake long-term pacification missions alongside the Army, and I predict they will have to do a lot more of those in the future as we confront the continuing demands of the global war on terrorism or whatever we're calling it this week.

If the Marine Corps is going to do what it does best, reinvent itself for the strategic needs of the moments, it will have to go back to the future, back to the era when Marines were soldiers in the sun, chasing bandits and pacifying violent lands.

The war on Islamic fascist terrorism is not going anywhere any time in the next few decades and the Marines will continue to have a leading role in that.  So I think they need to think about how to reorient the Corps, and I know there's a lot of thinking already going on about how to reorient the Corps, to make that a vital competency of the Marine Corps, going forward, and not to have as big of an emphasis on the amphibious assault mission, which I think is in some ways a carryover from World War II.  Thank you.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you very much, Max, and you've set the stage for a red carpet entrance from out of the crowd by Frank Hoffman.  Frank, why don't you come up and continue the discussion.  I see you have PowerPoint.  Is that correct?

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Yes.  I'm a PowerPoint Ranger.  I'm sorry.  [inaudible] these other gentlemen.

MR. DONNELLY:  We'll grant you leave on a one-time basis to--

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  A little bit of leave.  I apologize for being late today.  If I look uncomfortable it's not because my boss is in the back taking notes on me or because I'm sitting on the right of three very distinguished--

MR.       :  [inaudible].  Push the button.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Sorry.  If I look a little uncomfortable, it's not because my boss is sitting in the back making me nervous.  I'm only a contractor, so I don't have a lotta tenure.  It's not because I'm sitting to the right of some very distinguished gentlemen, although it's very odd to be sitting to the right of Max Boot, Tom Donnelly and Mac Owens, if you're familiar with their writings.  But unfortunately, I'm a little bit sick today and I had to go back to my house today, so I could be sick again today.  So I've already left my breakfast behind, I'm a little bit behind the weather, and I can't leave anything else, so we can just proceed on today.

It is a great pleasure to be here.  I was particularly impressed with the series so far, and particularly the Army event that I watched and have read the transcript a few times, the very intellectually rich environment.  If the QDR is only half as intellectually rich as that particular discussion, the nation will be well-served.

My post today comes in three parts.  I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategic environment because I think this panel needs to set that up a little bit, I'm going to give a little bit of critique about where OSD is coming from.  I'm going to throw out three alternative Marine Corps.  You've heard a little bit of that today.  That's, in essence, the debate that will hopefully set the stage for this afternoon's discussion.

I think General Mattis will clean up with that, and I'll put together a little synthesis.

Of course we all understand how OSD is looking at the threat environment, the four emerging threats that's driving the QDR, some of the thinking in the building.  I think this is a very useful framework, at least in the beginning, cause it's gotten us out of some paradigms or some thinking about future warfare.  In the past we've looked at major conflicts, you know, MRCs and MCOs, we looked at as state-based, looked at it in very conventional type of thinking.

This kind of framework gets us out of that and we get to stop thinking like some of the rubrics of the RMA and the transformation debate, where we're pretty much focusing on wars as we would like to to be rather than they're really going to be, and this thought process is going to get us there.

However, I do have some limitations or some critiques about what OSD is doing.  It is good to think about long-term science and technology threats in a disruptive area, largely a function of what DARPA and the science and technology investment and defense industrial base must focus on.

It's good to think about what the Department of Homeland Security has to do and what needs to be done to secure this nation's borders and protect against catastrophic attacks.

It's good to think about conventional threats cause there are going to be major power competitions in the long range, if history is any guide.  But it's particularly useful of course to think about your regular threats, whatever those are, if we don't have a good idea, and it's a particular area, the conflict domains, the spectrum of conflict that we historically have not done very well at.

But I do have a few problems with orienting on this which I think a lot of people in the Pentagon are--of course this is threats, this is not a strategy.  This isn't putting together a collection of instruments, means, to satisfy American interests.  It's just threats, and it's oddly a threat-based approach, and what Mr. Rumsfeld has called a capabilities-based planning system, somewhat of an odd--there's an assumption in the lower left quadrant where OSD has stated, several times, that there's some conventional overmatch, and that we have some tradeoff space, cause there's some excess, and there may be some but I don't think it exists in the ground domain, to the degree that it perhaps should, cause we haven't invested in that.

There's some arguable distinctions in these little boxes, the way they've grouped kind of things, I think it's somewhat of a concern or a problem if you just focus on these as separate type of threats, cause I don't think that's going to be the future of warfare.

I think we need to look at this as a menu, a menu of options, that what Freddy Craig calls the next Lenin, I might call the next Mike Collins or the next Osama bin Laden's going to use as a la carte type of thing to approach us.

If you're not familiar with the quad chart and the threats, go ahead off to your local DVD store and get these four movies and you'll understand the domain of what we're really trying to talk about.

Let me switch and I'll talk about the three different Marine Corps, which you've heard a little bit about today, and I'm always looking for strategic guidance.  I've gone to the Navy War College.  I was a student of Dr. Owens, I owe much to that education, but I really get the most from the great American strategist, Yogi Berra, who said the future ain't what it used to be.

There's three different kinds of Marine Corps and the first one is I would call the forcible entry Marine Corps, and it's not the kind of Inchon, or here, you know, the D Day kind of approach.  I can make an argument, push back a little bit on what my good friend Max Boot had to say, that there is an argument that can be made, that in the 21st Century there are going to be major power competitions with states who have significant anti-access capabilities and are going to try to keep us out of some particular area, using weapons of mass destruction, missiles, or other cheaper forms of anti-access.

And I can make an argument that in a strategic competition with such a power, that there are strategic rationales at some level, that you might want to keep.  That's why we have a nuclear deterrent, why we have a nuclear force, and why we have some other capabilities in our national arsenal.

It's not that we've used them very much but that they produce a strategic reaction in our opponents, and I could argue that there's a need for forceful entry capability to provide the nation strategic independence, to come and arrive and achieve our interests in some place of our own choosing.

We can argue that it's very good to counter your opponent's strategy, you should focus on your opponent's strategy, and there are strategies or countries out there following an anti-access strategy, and defeating that and defeating their strategy is a means to securing our interests in the future.

Having the capacity to go where you need to go, being assured in entering a region, gives great assurance to friends and allies and potential coalition partners, that not having that ability doesn't do, and at the same time it also deters aggressors who think that they very successfully blocked us out and can achieve what they want to achieve at their time schedule.

I think it's also a very good cost-imposing strategy.  Someone who has to defend against the United States coming anywhere along their coast, at any time, day or night, means they have to spend money on things that they'd probably not rather do, and if we didn't have that capability then they could focus on things they like to do and they could focus on an integrated air defense system, and for people who are focusing on air base maneuver, they could defeat us that way.

Lastly, I just think it generates options and the more options we generate and counter other people's operations, the faster the dynamics in combat go to our favor.

So you could have a forcible entry in the Marine Corps, a sea-based type of capability, not the sea basing that I think the Defense Science Board and some Marine futurists have taken, where they pretty much, you know, really let their vision run a little bit long, and got very innovative but also got very expensive, something the nation could not afford.

But there's a sea-based forcible entry capability that I think one can envision, that the Navy and Marine Corps can come together on, that's achievable, at realistic costs, and would give the nation a great capability and provide the kind of operational flexibility and independence that the CINCs need out in their theaters.

For those who think you know what sea basing is, this is not sea basing--this is not sea basing, not something as grand as that, although that's some people's vision, it's a much more operationally-focused kind of capability.  This is my forcible entry Marine Corps.

The end strength would be roughly today's size.  We focused very much with the Navy, hand in glove with the Navy.  We would focus on kicking the door down, that would be our orientation of forcible entry in Marine Corps.  We'd have a full amphibious fleet of 36 capable ships, of 3.0 MAB [?] capability, which has been the Marine objective for at least two or three decades, the entire time I've been with the Marines.

This forcible entry Marines would be fully capable of operating in a WMD or an MBC environment, cause that's part of the anti-access strategy that we're trying to defeat.

I would, in essence, procure the entire Marine Corps program of record, if I was an advocate for this particular option, I might trade off some fixed-wing aircraft cause I think there's other services that might contribute to that, particularly the Navy.

Corresponding with a forcible entry Marine Corps would have to be extensive Navy investments in things, quite frankly, I don't think the Navy's achieved what it should--mine countermeasures, small boats, special operations, and naval surface fire support.  In essence, you'd have to, you know, buy the DDX.

Another Marine Corps.  Max talked to this.  The small wars Marine Corps.  This is an option, has some favor amongst some of us.  This is a Marine Corps that would be totally postured for the upper left box, the irregular warfare type thing.

This would be a Marine Corps that'd be going back and working within its historical legacy of small wars, in essence, embracing what I would call the "second small wars era," which is how one could define the future environment.

I remember General Krulak, several years ago, talked about the future of warfare, you know, we'd be focusing on the stepchild, the stepchildren of Chechnya, and I would just extend that to it would be the stepchildren of Fallujah, would be the things we'd be focusing on, and that would include extensive urban combat.

We'd be prepared for the savage wars of peace that Max has written so eloquently about.  The Marine Corps would not become a contributor--right now we have out little toe, you know, at SOCOM, and there's arguments for maybe sticking a leg in--but this'd be a Marine Corps that might be the major component to SOCOM or at least make a contribution of at least 30,000 Marines to that particular command.

It would also become the support base, in essence, the platform to try to operationalize interagency operations in small wars.

We talk about employing all instruments of national power but there's only really one that can be both deployed and employed and sustained for  long protracted conflicts.

This kind of a small wars Marine Corps would be what you would want, if you anticipated what the CIA calls in their future study, "Mapping The Global Future," they talk about a pending perfect storm of intrastate conflict, and in intrastate conflict you have to have an interagency or what I prefer to call a multi-agency capability.

We don't have that in this country.  What we have is what I call the fellowship of the interagency ring.  We come to Washington and talk around circles and tables in D.C. but we can't necessarily employ things in the field.

There's several excellent studies out there right now by RAND, Council on Foreign Relations.  The best one's from CSIS, who recently put out Beyond [inaudible], about what would be necessary to produce the doctrine, the structure, the training and equipment for effective multi-agency operations in the field.  And so we wouldn't have the ad hoc things like we have with AURA [ph] and CPA.  And this isn't something that's just nice to have.  A nice quote here from Clark Murdock's and Michelle Florinor's [ph] work.

Ambassador Pasquale [ph] was recently down at Quantico at a conference General Mattis sponsored.  You know, it's not a matter of helping out the State Department or helping the Justice Department out.  This is a capability that the nation needs to succeed in the future.  It's an imperative.

The kind of Marine Corps I would like to see, or one could argue for is, in essence, the age of the imperial grunts.  There's a new book out by Robert Kaplan, I encourage people to take a look at.  He makes a strong argument for this kind of a world.  The Marines would be the master's of the four-block war.  You've heard about the three-block war?  General Gregson's [ph] talked about the four block.  It's not just being in one area where you might be fighting, another street you might be doing humanitarian work, in another street you might be doing peacekeeping.  In the fourth block, you're employing information operations and trying to influence the perceptions of large populations in urban areas, something we find ourselves doing in Fallujah and Ramadi today.  It's something I agree with Max, the Marine Corps is particularly weak in, it has some, you know, not only a reliance on the Army, it's almost a total dependence in that capability.

My Marine Corps, for that kind of a Marine Corps, would be very MEF-centric, I'd get rid of a lot of high-order staffs cause you wouldn't necessarily need those, you need to invest in other areas.  I would create four MEFs that would be dedicated, specifically trained, language-qualified and oriented on specific areas of the world.

I'd have two brigades.  Perhaps both of them would be urban-focused and they'd have particular training, particular equipment to excel at urban combat.  I'd add some foreign training battalions, perhaps four, and activate two civil affairs battalions and two information operations battalions in the active Marine Corps.

I'd also update the Marine Corps excellent 1940's, you know, doctrine, bring it up to the 21st century, and last, I'd make an extensive investment in human capital which the Marine Corps has not yet made but is looking at very hard in the future, and General Mattis will probably discuss that this afternoon.

The kinds of investments are things that people like "Bing" West have been arguing about for years, that we need to do for infantry squads.  We need land forces, we need ground forces, they need to be in sufficient numbers.  They need to be rigorously trained, they need to be superbly led by strategic NCOs.

General Krulak made the phrase "strategic corporals" kind of famous.  We need to actually make that an operational capability and the Marine Corps has some programs it's just initiated in that area.  We need to follow through on those.

We need people with a little older, a little more seasoned judgment, and greater agility to work in a small wars era.

The last Marine Corps as an option, Colonel Hammes might talk about this again this afternoon, Mac Owens talked about it a little bit today, I call it the global war against extremism, after next.  I don't like the term 4th generation warfare, so I came up with my own.  The GYN type Marine Corps.  This is a Marine Corps that's focused on future long-range threats, the hybrid threats, the multi-variant, multi-modal and multi-dimensional kind of an enemy that I expect in the future.

It's represented in writings, you see in China in the unrestricted warfare area, what they called beyond limits combined warfare, where they're planning on using all elements of national power against critical infrastructure in the United States, financial targets, military targets and civilian targets.  That's a world to think about.

A Marine Corps focused on that particular threat, Colonel Hammes can flesh out a little bit this afternoon, it's one that's really prepared for multi-modality warfare.  The Marine Corps would make a major contribution to both Northern Command and for SOCOM.  It's not a Marine Corps that's focused just on overseas type applications.

This is a Marine Corps that does away with blurring distinctions between military and non-military capabilities and gains that occur, home or away.  This is a one-stop-shopping kind of an operation.

The Marine Corps would provide JTF headquarters for both SOCOM and for Northern Command for employment.  Force structure ads.  I would take the concept of information ops or SIOPs and expand it to influence operations, something the Marine Corps is looking at and exploring.  So is the Army.  I'd stand up four battalions for that, to fill out that capability we don't have.

Marine Corps Reserve has one anti-terrorism battalion.  I would create eight, one for each region in the United States for FEMA, and for Department of Homeland Security.

I would have eight expanded sea berths, not the kind of small battalion we currently have, which is a national asset, but again, I would provide one very large asset, again, for each region in the United States, and two nonlethal weapons battalions and field that capability that's so badly needed.

And then to pay for those kinds of things, I would eliminate the forcible entry capability and some of the heavy armor things that exist in the Marine Corps, eventually have to balance off and pay for some of these things.

Again, Colonel Hammes will probably talk to this again today, but in his book, [inaudible], he makes some pretty good arguments.  This is not just a different kind of enemy.  It's just an entirely different kind of warfare and the nation might want to think about how to prepare for that.

And on synthesis, I'm not sure where I come down on any of those three.  I think the debate today might come up with that answer.  I think the commandant will give a presentation today and General Mattis will have, will show how the Marine Corps is synthesizing between those three worlds.  We just can't focus on one, perhaps, and we can't afford to be that badly off.

We might have to take some operational risk and not be completely optimized for one environment.  We have to be strategically smart and make sure we have everything covered.  We can't be too badly wrong and completely miss something.

I'd focus on global influence, a phrase I got from Kaplan's book.  We need to actually, you know, look at supremacy by stealth.  We need to get influence, we need to get people out in the field, we need to get ahead of the game, we need to anticipate crises, not just react with 150,000 people for a number of years after a problem emerges, and there's areas in Africa and areas in Latin America where we can get ahead of the game and not just be reactive to threats.

I'd avoid specialization.  I don't think we can have one of those three Marine Corps.  You need it all.  You need to embrace agility, you need to focus on people's education and their thinking, not just create a single tool for the tool box.

And with that I think I'll wrap up.  Thank you very much.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Frank.  I thank all of you for a really fine and provocative set of opening presentations.

Before we turn to the questions, and I will remind everybody of the three AEI rules for questioning.  First of all, wait for the microphone.  Second of all, identify yourself clearly for purposes of the transcript, and third and most important, try actually to ask a question instead of making a statement.

I'm going to exercise the prerogative of the hall monitor to do a little synthesis and to pose a question to the three panelists.

And I don't know whether I see the glass is half empty or half full, but here's one thing that I took away from it, that, you know, again, is more a personal reflection than anything else.

I very strongly agree with I think both Mac and Max, that almost the real core competency of the Marine Corps is its open-minded intellectual basis.  Alone of the four services, this is the service that's looking for work to do, in the sense of looking for the opportunity to do jobs that the nation needs to have done for it, even if it doesn't fit inside the preferred mode of warfare that the service embraces.

But in that regard, I still have a very strong sense that perhaps in a lesser degree than the other services but still to a disturbing degree, the embrace of what the war in the Middle East, the global war on terrorism, again, whatever the acronym of the week is, has an immediate, and at the same time, long-term commitment that requires a fundamental restructuring of the entire defense establishment.

You know, I'm worried that we're not quite there yet.  To use Mac's term of the return to the sea as sort of completing the cycle.  I don't see any time in the foreseeable future, that at least would involve a significant defeat for the United States, where we'll be withdrawing from the region, whether we withdraw to CONUS, home bases, or to the sea.  That isn't to say this is the only war that the military is going to be fighting but it is the war that we're deeply embroiled in.

So the question for me, or that I would like to pose to you guys, is what does the Marine Corps need to do, in your judgment, to fully participate in on the presumption--and everybody rightly pointed out that you can't talk about the Marine Corps without also making some assumptions about what the Army's going to be like.  But I'll leave that open to you guys.

But what's your best guess, or estimate of how the Marine Corps needs to adjust itself in the most, in the broadest sense, to not just Iraq and Afghanistan but what I would toss out as being really a decades-long pattern of operations across the greater Middle East, the giant swath of the planet that extends from West Africa to Southeast Asia, but perhaps is most intensely--but where the sort of center of gravity is some place around the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf.

So with that really vague and open-ended question, what can the Marine Corps, what does the Marine Corps need to bring to the table in order for the country to be successful in this war?  And we can just go down the line.

COLONEL OWENS:  Well, I guess of all the panelists, I'm the one that's most wedded, I think to, you know, sort of the older naval paradigm in the Marine Corps, and I think that it's important for a variety of reasons, not to say that, you know, that's all the Marine Corps should do.

I want to correct something that Mac said here.  I thin it's a frequent error that people make when they talk about this idea of amphibious operations and I've been fighting against for a long time.  The confusion of amphibious operations with amphibious assault.  Amphibious assault is what we did in World War II.

In a lot of cases, we didn't have any choice about where we went ashore.  You know, we didn't many--there aren't many good beaches on which to make landings, and of course the enemy can figure those out as well as we can, and so they would be there.  The broader understanding of amphibious operations is the ability to use the sea as a maneuver space and to land where the enemy ain't.

I mean, any of you who saw, you know, Saving Private Ryan, you know that the traditional understanding of an amphibious assault is you assault a defended beach, you overcome the defenders--

[Start tape side 1B.]

COLONEL OWENS: [continuing]:  Okay.  The whole idea of the broader understanding of amphibious operations is that you're able to do that without going through the defended beach, that it gives you flexibility to go a lot of different places in the world, and to take on a variety of opponents, a variety of enemies, and at the least it makes them have to plan, as Frank said just a second ago, it makes them at least have to plan for this.

I think we want to be real careful about not making the mistake that you could say we've been making five years ago.  If any of you read Tom Barnett's book, Pentagon's New Map [?], he makes the point that one of the reasons we were so surprised by 9/11 was that we'd been focusing, and cause we wanted to, on the great powers, you know, the rise of China, these sorts of things.

As a result, these guys could literally fly in under the radar.  Well, now, you could almost argue that the pendulum is swinging the other way, to now we have people saying this is all we're going to have to worry about in the future.

Well, there's no question we're going to have to worry about it for some time, but you don't want to get in a position where, you know, let's orient everybody towards constabulary operations at the expense of nothing--or of everything else, because at some point we're going to be strategically surprised again, that China is going to rise and you're going to need these sorts of capabilities.

I mean, the fact is whether we like it or not, Tom's point is absolutely right, that for most of the time we can count on access because of the lies and so forth, but let's say okay, if that's an assumption, if that's your going in assumption, what happens if that assumption is wrong? and at some time in the future, if you haven't dealt with this ability to do the sorts of things that the brains in the Navy work on primarily, then you're going to be at some sort of disadvantage.

At the same time, I mean, I think the Marine Corps is in pretty good shape because it does have a culture.  Part of its culture, unlike that of the Army, is fighting small wars.

As a matter of fact I think Max's point is well-taken, that there's an uneasy balance between the two, but the fact is at least it's there.

As I mentioned before, you know, the United States Army is Emory Upton's army.  That's an army that designed to fight, you know, foreign countries, to ignore and forget about constabulary operations, and, you know, as a matter of fact, I remember during the '90s, the Army referred to these as nontraditional missions.

Well, the fact is the United States Army, for most of its history, did these sorts of things, so they are traditional missions.  It's just the mindset changed.

Of course I think like everybody else, the Army is recognizing they are going to need a constabulary force and are making changes and adaptations.  But I think the fact is the Marine Corps needs to keep its broad naval orientation, the ability to get lots of places and operate, you know, on short notice, but at the same time recognize that, you know, we're not going to come here to fight, you know, Marine, you know, a guy who's in a Marine tank company who's not Irwin Rommel, okay, and we're not designed to fight land battles.

We need that flexibility.  We need the ability to anticipate, not to predict the future, but to anticipate bad things happening down the line.

And as a matter of fact, I think General Mattis was up at the War College not too long ago and he gave a great talk up there, and I hope I've got it right, but you said look, we're really bad at predicting the future and the best we can hope for is we don't get it too wrong.

And I think that's a good point.  The Marine Corps and the services, in general, have to take the point of view that we don't know what's going to happen in the future.  Otherwise we'd all be rich.

The fact is we don't know and we have to provide a hedging against a number of possibilities and I think that's what you get from the Marine Corps with its current and I think future strategic concept.

MR. DONNELLY: Max, let me try to guild the question a little bit, because it does seem to me that sort of in this theater, there are actually plenty of opportunities to use the water as a mode of maneuver and you find a pretty heavy Marine presence, say, in the Horn of Africa, and there are other parts within this theater of operations where this kind of capability could be quite useful.

But, again, in this broad war to transform the greater Middle East or, again, you use your own term of art, what role for the Marine Corps?

MR. BOOT:  Well, you know, I completely agree with Mac.  I mean, I'm not suggesting that the Marine Corps should be exclusively reoriented to constabulary operations any more than the Army should be.

I mean, obviously, it's a question of balance and you do want to keep some of that amphibious operation capability, you do want to keep some of that heavy warfare capability, but I think that when you're looking at the broad spectrum of American military power, I think a disproportionate share of that heavier capability is going to reside in the Army and that makes sense because they have the heavy armored divisions, they have a lot of the training and equipment for those kinds of operations, and as Mac alluded to earlier, you know, they'll be coming from the sea as well.

I mean, how else are they going to get anywhere?  It has to be from the sea, and clearly, the Marine Corps does--I mean, I'm not suggesting the Marine Corps not have any amphibious capability because obviously they're going to be coming from the sea as well, so they obviously have to have that and they have to have some "break the door down" capability.

What I'm suggesting is not a 100 percent reorientation, which obviously doesn't make sense and does leave you open to other strategic risks of the kind that Frank and Mac have talked about.

What I'm suggesting is kind of a shifting of balance and a shifting of emphasis, not going a 100 percent constabulary but moving a little bit more towards that direction because I think that's a de facto recognition of the kind of missions the Marine Corps is actually undertaking now, and has always undertaken for the most part.

Whereas I think that the, you know, the heavy amphibious assaults or, you know, perhaps now amphibious operations, are very much the exception, not the rule, and of course you do want to keep that exceptional capability, you do want to be able to deter--all that kind of stuff is actually true, but I think you also want to be better prepared for the actual missions that you're undertaking and, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the kind a missions that the Marines are undertaking in places like Afghanistan and Iraq really have nothing to do with amphibious operations, and I think that will probably be, continue to be true.

I mean, there will certainly be an amphibious component in operations, you know, on the Horn of Africa, or what have you, but it's not going to be like coming ashore at Iwo Jima.  They're not going to be facing those same level of defenses.

The easiest part is going to be coming ashore.  The hardest part is going to be what you do once you get there and how you pacify these guys, because they're not going to be--I mean, a lot of these enemies that you're facing are not going to be hitting you with a heavy missile barrage as you're coming ashore.

They're going to let you come ashore as they did in Somalia and then they're going to hit you with RPGs.

So that's the kind of threat that I think you have to realistically plan for and obviously, as I say, keep the capability to come ashore against a heavily defended shoreline, but also "beef up" your capability to deal with the kind of problems that you confront across the greater Middle East where our challenge really has to do with pacification, nation building, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, whatever you want to call it, the full gamut of closely-related missions, and I think, again, the Marines have been excellent at those for the reasons that we've all talked about because I think Marines do have this adaptive mindset, they do place people over weapon systems and they do have this kind of small wars tradition which I think is very helpful in the kind of missions they confront.

But I think there's also this heavy overhang of World War II thinking, of the "break the door down" force, and I think there needs to be a little less of that and a little bit more emphasis on the kind of things that I talked about before such as civil affairs, intelligence, military policing, psychological operations, and also sort of long-term logistical sustainment in a place like Iraq.

I don't think that the mindset has to be anymore or should be anymore that Marines go in but then they're really looking to get back onboard ships and they look upon being, floating around on ships as being the rightful place where they belong and being, you know, on land as being this kind a weird period where they're just waiting to get back on to ship.

I think they have to realize that they're going to spend most of their time ashore and while they're sometimes going to have those amphibious operations, that's going to be the exception, not the rule.

MR. DONNELLY:  Frank, you gave us three Marine Corps to choose from.  Now you've got to make a bit of a choice and tell us, you know, where to bet most of your chips amongst your three Marine Corps.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I'm a small wars Marine Corps.  I'll be unequivocal about that.  There is a little bit of tension in the Marine Corps in that regard.  There are folks who are 100 percent forcible entry and see the Marine Corps at kind of a tactical level, coming ashore, breaking the door down and getting back on ship, and boring around, and I don't think that's the Marine Corps that we need.

But it is a degree of emphasis.  There are some national capabilities that the Marine Corps does very well at.  The best one we have and the one that needs to be invested in the most for this kind of conflict, however, is in the mental agility of people, it's in learning how to work with NGOs, working with other instruments of national power, getting in interagency, it's investment in education of officers.  It's just not paying lip service to it and saying we're going to have a, you know, an Arab class for one hour before you deploy, or even a week.

It's a serious investment, and money for that needs to come.  It is a protracted enemy, it's implacable, he's cunning, is going to be around for a long time.  It's just not the Middle East.  It's in the Philippines, it's in Indonesia, it's in Africa.

We're going to face that aspect there all the time.  But it's not in terms of 50,000 manned deployments for a year either.  It's the imperial grunt, it's getting out small detachments, it's trying to work that kind at many different levels in a society.  A lot of training.

Do I agree with Max?  The things that Marine Corps has done a little bit of in the last year or two in terms of we have added some civil affairs capability, we have added foreign military training capability, we have worked with SOCOM.  I think those are all initial steps that need to go two and three steps down the road.

So I would take some investment out of the assault type of mentality and I'd like to see the Marine Corps commit to that and make a subtle shift instead of being--I think we're almost 80/20 today, more maybe to 50/50 in terms of its attitude, and have people embrace that as a mission and something to excel and be very good at.

MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  I will begin to turn it over to people.  We've got two here, so we'll start there and work around to stage left.  We'll start with the gentleman--actually, we'll start with the lady just cause we're traditional guys.

QUESTION:  I like that.  Okay.  G.S. Marconi, Marconi Works International.  I agree with Professor Owens about difficult to predict the future, so that definitely the next level is anticipating the future.  But it is also about directing the future, the adaptation, the evolution, which is really a shaping function.

So where does the Marine Corps fit within shaping?

COLONEL OWENS:  Well, again, I mean I think that--I'll just jump in right here--I mean, that's part of its naval function.  I think that traditionally, one a the arguments that the Navy has made, sometimes with more support than others, is that, you know, naval forces are very adept at shaping, helping to shape the environment because you can, you know, use naval power like a rheostat, turn it up, turn it down.

I mean, when you use airpower, airpower is either on or it's off.  Okay.  Naval power, on the other hand, you can use as a way of signaling and the like, and certainly the ability to bring Marines ashore is part of that.

So, you know, I mean that's one a the ways.  Of course there are the other things too.

You certainly shape an environment when you're involved in being on the ground, so certainly the Army has made the point that their presence in many theaters of war has been very much of a shaper as well.

But I'd say that, you know, from the traditional standpoint, the Marine Corps in its naval function--or shapes is part of the naval function.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I kind of disagree with mac a little bit on the naval emphasis.  I don't think naval forces out at sea shape very much.  I think you have to be on the ground, you have to sleep with people, you have to eat some of their food, you have to try to understand them, you don't necessarily have to know their language but you have to work with them, have some empathy, and have some understanding of what's going on on the street, and some of those streets are going to be a thousand miles away from a shore.

It's nice to send sailors and Marines ashore and, you know, make a contribution to the economy in the bar area, or other areas.  I wouldn't know.  I haven't been deployed for a long time.

MR.      :  No comment.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Yeah, we're on family TV here.  But floating around on the outside certainly sends a capability and a signal to traditional governments, but if you want to work local areas in small countries, you're going to have to get in there and sleep on the ground, and that's the essence of what Bob Kaplan's talked about in his imperial grunts and the essence of what, you know, in Mac's book is a history, is people working the problem down at the street level.

MR. DONNELLY:  Max, any--you're allowed to pass.

MR. BOOT:  A bit ditto.

MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  And now we'll do the gentleman.

QUESTION:  Thank you.  I'm Rick Whittle [ph] with Dallas Morning News.  I was interested in Mr. Boot's comments on the V22, which he seems to think is [inaudible] and I was wondering how Col. Hoffman and Mr. Owens feel about the aircraft.  How would it fit in with your view [inaudible]?

I wanted to ask Mr. Boot if this aircraft doesn't make sense for the Marine Corps, why do you think the Marine Corps leadership [inaudible]?

MR. DONNELLY:  Why don't we come this way, just to be different.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  Work from the right.  The wedding to it is in essence, to some degree, some costs.  There's a lot of research, there's some national treasure, and more than money involved in that.  It's a reflection of the Marine Corps' innovativeness, in pushing the envelope on some things.  We are very selective when we're looking for accelerators in technology.

We are very focused on the human dimension.  The capabilities we see in that aircraft, when it was envisioned a long time ago, offered a tremendous degree of reach and speed.

I've heard someone today refer to some marginal capabilities in terms of its capabilities but I'm looking at the order of twice as fast, two and three times as far.

If you want to operate in the nonassault mode, if you just want to get from the ship, which might have to be further out now, and just dump Marines on the beach and call that amphibious assault, then you can do that with helicopters, and you can go get a helicopter probably at a third of the cost of what the Marine Corps may have to pay for the Osprey.

But the range and the speed are the characteristics that support the concepts that were started in the '80s and the '90s for amphibious capabilities in the 21st Century.

Now how much we'd need of that--do we need 12, 15, 20 squadrons?  Are they going to cost 80 or $100 million apiece?  I mean, these were issues that weren't contemplated 10 or 15 years.  You know, now we need something.  We're on the verge of bringing around this kind of remarkable kind of combination technology.

It's high cost, it's complex, it doesn't seem to be as important to moving towards a middle in terms of a balance for me.  I'm particularly concerned about manned portable anti-air defenses in the 21st Century, something cheap.  People can start distributing rockets at five and seven thousand dollars apiece and knock down American helicopters.  I'm not going to be interested in cramming 20 Marines in those and flying over a lot of areas where I might lose them.

So I'm open for reconsidering the scale to buy as we look at shifting from concepts we've been working at for 10 or 15 years, the concepts that now kind a face us for the near to mid range.

But you have to balance that.  I think it's got some capabilities.  It's not the cost and it's not quite the optimum machine I need now.

COLONEL OWENS:  Look, I mean, one of the things that at least cause--of course tradeoffs in all decisions, and of course we'll probably have to do some rethinking about this.  But the thing the Osprey does is expand the area of amphibious operations.

I go back to my disagreement here with Max.  Amphibious operations is not an amphibious assault.  You want to be able to go where the enemy ain't, and where you want to go and the enemy ain't, something like the MV22 is what you need.  Now again, I keep quoting General Mattis.  Another time he was up at the Naval War College, and, you know, he's a very remarkable guy.  He's actually commanded a naval task force, and one of the things he was responsible for doing was seizing those advanced air bases in Afghanistan and he said--I'll say to speak for you, General, I'm sure you can speak for yourself--but that if he'd had the Osprey, he'd be able to do that in one jump.

Instead, the Marines had to go through a politically sensitive, you know, putting the troops on the shore in Pakistan, you know, at nighttime, erasing the footprint before the next morning to do this.  It was very politically sensitive.

Something like the MV22 would have given the ability to do that in one jump, and again, it gets back to our ability to say we now extend the range of an amphibious operation in the sense that I'm using it, which is to use sea power as a very flexible means of applying force where and when we want it.

MR. BOOT:  Well, you know, I certainly agree that the Osprey has some capabilities that helicopters don't.  Obviously they can go further and faster.  But they don't carry a lot more cargo and they're actually less armed than helicopters, and they also present a bigger target profile.

They've got those wings and everything.  So we're seeing how vulnerable helicopters are in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  We're losing a lot of them.  Certainly we lost a huge, huge number in Vietnam, and the problem has only increased, because as Frank alluded to, the spread of manned portable anti-aircraft missiles all over the world, with tens of thousands of them being in circulation.

So, you know, I'm not sure that we want to put a lot of money into very few Ospreys.  I think it may make sense to have more redundancy and achieve roughly the same capabilities with much cheaper helicopters, especially when you can extend their range with in-flight refueling.

I mean, and ceratinly in an ideal world, if you had an infinite amount of money to spend, it may well make sense to buy the Osprey.  But when it's four times as expensive as a helicopter, I'm not sure it delivers four times the capability and, in some ways, it doesn't even deliver the same--it presents greater vulnerabilities.  And so I think this kind a goes back to the question of how much emphasis do you put on this kind of amphibious operation and I think that the Marines would be better off buying more intercepter body armor, more GPS devices for every infantryman, more satellite radios, and personal digital assistance for every infantryman, for every individual Marine, wiring them into this network, giving them greater capabilities, also giving them greater protection by buying the Cougar armored vehicle or some version of that, so they have greater protection from the kind a weapons they've likely to face.

I think if you look at what are the most pressing needs of the moment, I don't think that the Osprey is the most pressing need, although in an ideal world it'd be nice.  I think there are other things where the Marine Corps could probably more usefully spend its money.

MR. DONNELLY:  Let's kind of work our way around to the gentleman in the middle, and we'll get over here.  We've still got 20 minutes, so I think we're doing okay.

QUESTION:  My name is John Schusler [ph]. I'm with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.  I have one correction for Mr. Boot.  The last major amphibious operation was Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and that was amphibious deception, where you had two MEFS that held down approximately five to seven, or perhaps more, Iraqi divisions.  That's a very important capability that comes about because of the credibility of Marine forces and forcible entry.

My question concerns other missions that the Marine Corps has that haven't been addressed today, specifically defense of advanced naval bases and naval capabilities overseas, and the Marine security guard mission.

We see the chief of naval operations talk about developing expeditionary naval infantry or an expeditionary naval infantry capability.  The State Department is employing private security companies for enhanced security of State Department personnel overseas.

So are these two missions that the Marine Corps should abandon or should the Marine Corps perhaps enhance their capabilities in those areas?

MR. DONNELLY:  Frank.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I implicitly discussed the advanced naval base concept in trying to promote sea basing because I don't know why it is that you would want to put, quote, advanced naval bases other than at sea.  So I probably talked myself out of the mission by advancing sea basing as a concept, so I wouldn't have those vulnerable places to have to waste Marines defending somewhere along the line.

However, if you look at the power projection problem, leaving CONUS, going through places, say, Italy, other areas where we have intermediate airfields, there is something to be said, that that needs to be thought through.  Something I didn't talk to on the last slide, kind a dealt with a presentation I gave to OSD on future base posture.  I said I wasn't really interesting in investing in some of the little lily pads they were buying.  They've underestimated the cost, they've overestimated the savings of bringing things back home, and all they've done is trade known political vulnerabilities for bases we have with current friends for unknown vulnerabilities in small countries like Uzbekistan and other places in Asia, who, before we've even built the airfields have already denied us the use of some of these facilities.

So I'm looking for sea basing to try to, you know, maximize flexibility, maximize my influence and not get tied down and have to defend things.

The security guard battalion issue is, you know, something related to the State Department.  We've supported that since 1948 and I see that as a mission that will continue.  But the Marine Corps has made investments in the Marine Corps Security Force Battalion with the FAST [ph] companies for some time.  My proposal on the, you know, GWAT [ph] after next Marine Corps, had a discussion in there about increasing anti-terrorism battalions for domestic use but those actually were for deployment while they were on the active duty, so that they could go overseas, work in areas, critical infrastructure areas, immediate staging bases.

I'm more interested in nuclear facilities, chemical plants and biological plants in the future, which is why I put that in that aspect.  So it's been addressed a little bit, just where you want to put it, where you want to put your emphasis again.

MR. DONNELLY:  Does anybody else want to--okay; go ahead.

MR. BOOT:  Fast comment.  I mean, you can suggest that what happened in Desert Storm was an amphibious operation, but it was, as we know was a deception, and the reason why it was a deception was because the decision was made by General Schwarzkopf and General Boomer, that actually putting those Marines ashore would be unimaginably costly and not necessary.  I mean, there was, as you know, serious discussion about doing that, but it was basically decided that the cost would be too great and I think that's fairly well-known in the world today, and so I wonder about whether the value of that deterrent has gone down, the value of that threat has gone down simply because potential enemies realized what the costs are, if you're doing it against a truly heavily-defended place like Kuwait under Iraqi occupation.

You know, I think the issue of the Guards is an interesting one because the extent to which the State Department and other government agencies have to rely on private security now, especially in places like Iraq where we have about 25,000 private military contractors running around, is really an indication of the fact that we don't have enough infantrymen in the United States military, and the Army, and in the Marine Corps.  The Marine Corps, as a percentage basis, has a higher number of infantrymen than the Army, but overall, we just don't have enough of those folks, and what we're doing is we're basically taking the retirees from our services, and the retirees from the British and South African and other services and employing them to provide private security in places like Iraq, and all over the place with the State Department, obviously.

Now I can see the imperative to do that.  In fact if we're not going to increase force size, I think you almost have to do that, but I think the larger argument is you should increase force size and I wonder if we're getting false economies here, because what you're doing is you're paying these folks an awful lot of money and it's true that you may not have the same kind of long-term retirement or medical plan or other benefits, if you have to pay for with active duty service people, but you also don't have the same degree of control over them, and obviously there have been problems with clashes between regular service troops in Iraq and some of the contractors.

And I just wonder if it's really, if you're really saving money when those contractors are getting four or five times what ordinary service people are getting in the Marine Corps or in the Army, and you're basically just competing against yourself by paying contractors to hire away people that you've trained and that you've relied upon for many years.  So I wonder if that's a false economy there.

MR. DONNELLY:  I'd like to redirect, briefly, on the idea of sea basing, which if it's not an aircraft carrier and not a floating city, but what in the heck is it?  I mean, this has been such an amorphous concept, and Frank, you raised the issue of vulnerability.  It does seem to me there's an inherent tension between building something that works effectively or efficiently as kind of a logistics and operational hub and if it's, you know, if it's big enough it's going to be a target, and it's also thereby likely to be vulnerable, particularly to those nations who were developing enhanced strike capabilities.

I'm not perfectly sure where the niche that this thing is supposed to fit in, and I'll leave it to you to better define, you know, exactly what it is, but I guess the question is I'm not quite sure why I want one of these things, other than kind of the general, sure, I want an invulnerable place from which to operate; you know.  It's hard to say no to that.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  It's hard to say no.  And that's what it is.  It's hard to refer to it as an "it" because it's not a single entity, it's an aggregate of capabilities, of different types of ships.  Amphibious ships, which I would think would be more the centerpiece.  There's the "prepo float" [ph], the Army and the Marine Corps have, and then we have some technologies in high-speed lift, intra theater kind of connectors that can get things ashore, and it's the aggregate capabilities of interfacing those.  Right now, we have to take everything to the beach and dump it, and that makes a big target, and if somebody's got WMD or got any capability of attacking things, just lots of IEDs or mines, you pay a cost for operating that way, and that's the way we operate today.

The sea-basing concept in my operational kind of sea-basing concept is much built around kind of existing legacy kinds of ships with advanced logistics capabilities and advanced interfaces between those kinds of ships, so the Army can bring up a ship with a battalion or it can bring a battalion from air and put it on a ship, people can access their gear and they can be deployed, either aviation mode to surface modes and get ashore some place.

And that capability is distributed, the
Army, and the Marines, Navy assets working around a theater can be brought together in a package, in a tailored capability that the CINC wants at the time and place the CINC wants it, not because there's a base a thousand miles away, it's the only place that somebody will give us permission to work out of.

This is working against both the tactical and operational vulnerabilities of people that can strike us, and I'd argue that being at sea and moving around at 125 miles away from somebody's shoreline is a lot harder problem than hitting me in some airport that I used to own until the Army or the Marines came in and took it away from me, and now that I know where, exactly where they are, that's the kind of capability I want.

And it also works against the political vulnerability problem.  You know, in the Cold War we had alliances and we had a lot of relationships with people and there were reasons people worked with us.

Now those reasons aren't there any more.  In fact, you know, some people are pushing away against us.  Their costs, politically, economically, and threat-wise, go up if they work with America and so people aren't giving us the kind of bases.  We're not going to have that access, and you offset that by having some ability to work out at sea, have some independence from political issues and some reduced vulnerability to tactical threats.

MR. DONNELLY:  That was still the most, the clearest and most articulate definition of what it is, that I've heard so far.  Let's try to get a couple folks on this side of the room and we'll start here with a gentleman in uniform, in front, and I think there were some hands farther back.

QUESTION:  Good morning, gentlemen.  Major Aaron O'Connell, Yale University International Security Studies.  Major force structure changes take time, at least 20 to 30 years, so I'd like to ask each of you for two numbers, which may be a little too specific than you can give, but I'll ask it anyway.

Having your druthers and assessing the threat environments as you assess it now, in 20 years from now how big would you like the U.S. Armed Forces to be and how big would you like the Marine Corps to be in terms of personnel?  Thank you.

MR. DONNELLY:  I want to go so badly, that I'll go last.  Again, let's go down the line from Frank to Max to Mac.

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  [audio drop] forces no bigger than today.  I would shift some things around today, some of the investments.  You know, I'm an infantry officer, retired.  We know we need land forces.  I know we need effective ground forces.  I disagree with those who are proposing for a 100,000 man increase.  I don't think the demographics of the country or the political interests of the country will sustain it.  I don't think we can afford it.

I don't think we can afford more than we're currently spending for defense today.  I know that's not a popular opinion, particularly perhaps in this building.  But the level of interest in these kinds of wars and in the kind of defense spending is going to come up pretty harsh against some realities and demographics around 2010.

So I'm not going to build myself a force that I can't afford to sustain for the long term.  I'd trim off some of the programs, you know, to pay for some of the things that I need for sea basing, for some of the capabilities, reduce the FVEY [?], reduce the V22 by investing in the squad leaders of the future, invest in the strategic NCO.  Those are lots of small things, not a big profit margin for the defense industry, but there's enough there for them to get by, if you're buying Ballou [ph] Force Trackers, if you're buying networks, radios and body armor for people, and that's where I'd put the investment.

The size of the Marine Corps?  I'll be kind of specific.  I spent a decade in the Pentagon, kind a working that issue as a force structure analyst.  About 175,000; maybe even a little less.  They're all going to be a little older.  They're all going to be a little more mature.  They're going to go to squad leader school--required.  Probably double the number of officers that go to education.  We're well below the Army in terms of--although we might be more intellectually agile.  I'll take that.  But we do not invest in the education of officers to the degree that the Army does.

We need more advanced schooling.  I think something like 25 percent of all Marine field grade officers get to go to a career level school, and I would double that, and that takes end strength.  So you need at least the 175 for the long haul.

MR. BOOT:  I wouldn't make any change in the force size of the Air Force or Navy.  I think that's fine, the way it is right now.  With the Marine Corps, I think it's also not too terribly out of whack simply because the Marine Corps, out of all the services, took the smallest hit after the end of the Cold War.

I mean, I would probably still increase the size of the Corps a little bit, 25-, 50,000 Marines more, something like that; not a huge increase.  I  would make the biggest increase in the size of the Army, which I think needs to go much closer to its 1990 force level than it is today.  So, in other words, probably another 100,000, 200,000 soldiers, assuming that we can recruit them.

I think given the kind of missions that we face in the future, they're going to be very manpower-intensive.  I mean, I think there's certain things that technology allows you to do with many fewer people and there's certain things it doesn't.

I mean, clearly, on the high-end side of conventional combat, we can achieve much greater--we can kill a lot more people, blow up a lot more things, using a lot fewer people than ever before.  That's clearly what smart munitions and the tremendous advances in air power and naval power have allowed us to do over the course of the last decade, where you see the tremendous success that a much smaller force was able to have in Operation Iraqi Freedom in the initial invasion stage as opposed to the force that we used in Desert Storm.

A lot of it has to do I think with the networking, the technology, the smart weapons, all the rest of it.  So I think there's been a real force savings in terms of what we're able to do in terms of the high and conventional combat phase, but there's just not a lot of savings, if any, I don't think, on the more demanding counterinsurgency, nation building, peacekeeping, that kind of the--the post, what happens after the end of major combat operations.  That still requiems a lot of riflemen standing on street corners talking to locals and trying to impose your will upon them and trying to change the kind of government that they've had, and there's just no way to short-circuit that with a lot of fancy gadgets and high technology and standoff weapons systems.

So I think you need to have a lot of those grunts who are available for deployment.  I just don't think we have enough right now, as we're seeing in a huge strain that the Marine Corps and Army are suffering as a result of our huge deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

MR. DONNELLY:  Mac.

COLONEL OWENS:  In some respects, I think it would be great to have a bigger Army.  I think that it would be a good thing.  But I agree with Frank, that I'm not sure the demographics would support it.  I think it would be very tough to get that.  That being said, there are additional things we can do.  I mean, you know, I get plenty of Army officers at the Naval War College, and a lot of them say look, a lot of the problems we have with deployments are self-generated.  They have to do with the way we've done things over time, and we need to change it.

I think that's probably true.  There are better things that can be done internally to improve the rotational basis and the like.

There's another thing too, which is a lot of your effectiveness on the ground has less to do, is less a function of the number of troops than it is with what you have them do.  It's entirely impossible to envision, you know, a larger force in Iraq whose biggest job is defending themselves and defending their logistics bases, and so forth.

It's what a friend of mine refers to as a self-licking ice cream cone.  Basically you get a bigger force but you basically spend more and more of your resources basically trying to defend your bases.

So the effectiveness can be enhanced, I think, by what you do with the troops.  The sort of things I think we're doing now, which is going on the defensive much more frequently, and also by changing the rotational structure.

MR. BOOT:  Can I just make one point because both Frank and Mac have mentioned the demographic problem.  I'm not sure if there is a huge demographic problem, although I guess there might be the question of certainly we're--the Army's certainly having a lot of problems recruiting right now.

But I think the way you can escape that problem is to do something that I've proposed before, which is to not limit your recruiting only to U.S. citizens or permanent resident, legal aliens, as we currently do.  I think you could certainly recruit people who are not legally here at the moment.  You could certainly recruit people who are not here at all.  You could certainly recruit foreigners.  In fact, we already make a lot of use of foreigners in places like Iraq where we, they're being hired as independent contractors.

We're actually hiring Gurkhas and others, and I'm not sure why, if we're able to hire them for private security missions, we can't just recruit them into our own military and why, for example, if there's a Gurkhas regiment in the British army, why there couldn't be one in the American army.  That kind of thing.

I think there's a huge number of people who would be happy to serve in return for the kind of pay that American soldiers and Marines get, and also in return for the promise of American citizenship, which I think would be a very powerful inducement on the model of the French Foreign Legion.

So I think that's something that we need to think very hard about and I think makes a lot of sense.

MR. DONNELLY:  Frank, did you want another--

LT. COL. HOFFMAN:  I just want to talk about the demographics and  I was going to make mention of the French Foreign Legion, which I won't have to now since Max did.  I thought the country kind of got over the mercenary things when we beat the Hessians a few times up in my hometown area up in Washington Crossing, Pa., and we wouldn't be interested in hiring mercenaries.

The demographics, though, are there.  The demographics are changing in the country, who wants to join the military, how big the country is, the population rate, and also the demographics of what this country's going to spend on nonmilitary spending in 2010 to 2015.

If we don't change some of the fiscal policies in the country, the tax policies in the country, the demographics are going to drive spending in another way.  Rather than buying the two or three thousand extra recruiters and people working the training base now for all these young people, many of which might not speak English or have other qualifications like, you know, security clearances we might want to use for foreign people, I'd rather send those, you know, people we have now to school and invest in their training and education and not have to buy a lot of recruiters trying to chase less people.

And I'm very, very concerned about the dilution of standards for education, high school completion, the disciplinary aspects that I see in some of the services.  It's a tough market out there.  I'm sure it'll change as soon as the war's over.  But a much larger service.  You know, the need for that assumes we're going to do business the way we have in the past, and I don't think we're going to repeat all the strategic mistakes that have required us to have the investment we've made in Iraq today.

MR. DONNELLY:  I'm sorry, I particularly apologize to the gentleman in the far back.  I promise that he will be recognized early in the next round of Q&As, when we get there, if he still wishes to ask a question.  But all time for debate has expired, as we used to say, and I'm sure they still do in the Congress.

I Just wish you'd join me in a round of congratulations and appreciation for the panelists.

We're going to take a really brief break and then hop right in with the second panel absolutely as fast as possible.  So don't go far.

[Break.  End of tape side 1B audio.]

MR. KAGAN:  I'd like to welcome you to the second panel of the AEI conference on The Future of the United States Marine Corps.

I'm Fred Kagan.  I'm a Resident Scholar here at AEI.  We have with us two-thirds of an extremely distinguished panel to discuss this.  Once again, the biographies are available to you and I won't take time going through what would be an extremely long process of listing all of the activities that these two very distinguished gentlemen have undertaken.  But we have with us today Lieutenant General John Sattler, Mr. Bing West, and we do not have with us at the moment Colonel Hammes, but we are eagerly hoping that he will arrive at some point in the course of the panel.

In the first session we covered the ground I think pretty well and rather abstractly talking about roles and missions and the sorts of challenges that the Marine Corps faces today and into the future.  I would like to focus this panel on what the Marine Corps is actually doing today.  The Marine Corps has been a critical part in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operating Iraqi Freedom.  The Marine Corps remains extremely committed to those operations.

The Marine Corps has drawn a lot of lessons out of those operations, and it's worked very hard to do that.  I think as we proceed into the future, before we start thinking about exactly where we're headed, it would behoove us to think about what lessons we can actually draw concretely from the sorts of operations that the Marine Corps is undertaking today.

To speak to that question and to whatever else they would like to say, I will now turn it over to General Sattler and Mr. West.  I think we'll start with General Sattler.

GENERAL SATTLER:  I'm the one-third that's not distinguished.

[Laughter.]

GENERAL SATTLER:  Two-thirds of a distinguished panel are going those comments are typed, they weren't written out.  I apologize, so I'll reconnect here.

It really is a tremendous opportunity to be here today.  I'm going to go and push the notes off to the side and I will home in on lessons learned and what we've done as far as the Marine Corps goes to capture the lessons learned, and a large part of that has been on the back of Lieutenant General Jim Mattis who is going to speak on a subsequent panel here.  He has taken the opportunity to bring the noncommissioned officers from the grassroots on up to squad leaders, the ones who fought through the town, went mano a mano, opened the gate, gave them the opportunity to go to the front door, reached the front door, once in the building gave them the opportunity to then clear all the rooms on the bottom floor which now is the opportunity to go up the staircase and clear the upper deck.

Keep in mind that during this urban fight we did not have nor did we want to raze the town.  The whole objective in each and every one of the fights, and I'll home in on the Fallujah fight, was to return the city of Fallujah to its rightful owners, the Fallujahan people.  Therefore, there was no attempt to carpet bomb, no attempt to fire indiscriminately.  Every round that was fired from an artillery piece or a mortar was a controlled round, and every piece of ordnance that was dropped from the fixed-wing aircraft, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, didn't matter, was in fact guided and put on the exact building that it needed to be dropped on in proximity to friendly forces.

So what General Mattis did is he brought in the noncommissioned officers and let them from their perspective on the ground, dust and dirt blowing over the top of them, what did they see were the most important lessons learned, what would they like to see changed, what could have one better and how could he as their commander facilitate them to do better.

He also brought in all the senior leadership in the May time frame back to Quantico to talk about small unit excellence and what do we need to do at the unit level from the battalion commander on down, and he actually brought regimental commanders on in, to talk at that level from the regimental commander all the way down to the squad leader up on stage in a forum talking to the senior leadership of the Corps, senior staff and noncommissioned officers, and talking to their fellow NCOs.

So we've captured these lessons learned, the tactics, the techniques and the procedures, that are sometimes learned in building one and then they're implemented in building two.

That's how fast this is.  It's adapt and win.  You have to be adaptable, and the corporal and the sergeant, the 19- to 22-year-old, 21-year-old, on the first row of buildings did things differently as they took down the second row, and that changed on the third row.  They just got better.

The way they incorporated some of the lessons learned, how do you bring the tanks, because keeping in mind during this particular fight we had two battalions of soldiers, two tough mechanized battalions from the U.S. Army, one from the 1st Cav and one from the Big Red One, the First Division, that spearheaded both of the Marine Regimental Combat Teams.

So we were at the same time working that joint operation and put six battalions of Iraqis in on top of that, so now it's joint and combined and it's all being done in a town that's about 3-1/2 miles by 3-1/2 miles with fixed-wing support, rotor-wing support coming in from all three services from the carrier battle group.  If you showed up and you had a capability and you could put that capability in the fight, someone took charge of you and you were in the fight.

Then we also have the British, the Black Watch Battalion, came on up and cut off the Euphrates, the rat lines that led down along the Euphrates river.

So you go back to the sergeant's perspective.  What lessons did he learn that he could now bring back or she could bring back, because a lot of the convoys, remember there was no rear area, there is no rear area in this fight.  Every time you go outside of a gate you're in the combat zone and a lot of the convoys, almost all of them are being run by combat service support warriors and there's a great mix or men and women in there.  So this was not just a male war, definitely not just an Infantry war, and it will remain that way for the future.

So how do we take those lessons learned, bring them back, capture them and not put them in a shiny document with a nice pretty cover so it sits in the dentist's office and when you're waiting to get a root canal you read the first two or three pages?&