SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
Page 1 TOP OF DOC
20–132
2005
[H.A.S.C. No. 108–38]
ARMY TRANSFORMATION
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
JULY 15, 21, 2004
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Page 2 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
One Hundred Eighth Congress
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD P. ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
KEN CALVERT, California
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
ED SCHROCK, Virginia
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
JEFF MILLER, Florida
Page 3 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JEB BRADLEY, New Hampshire
ROB BISHOP, Utah
MICHAEL TURNER, Ohio
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan
PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
Page 4 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
STEVE ISRAEL, New York
RICK LARSEN, Washington
JIM COOPER, Tennessee
JIM MARSHALL, Georgia
KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida
MADELEINE Z. BORDALLO, Guam
RODNEY ALEXANDER, Louisiana
TIM RYAN, Ohio
Robert Rangel, Staff Director
Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Curtis Flood, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2004
Page 5 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
HEARING:
Thursday, July 15, 2004, Army Transformation: Implications for the Future, Part I
APPENDIX:
Thursday, July 15, 2004
THURSDAY, JULY 15, 2004
ARMY TRANSFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE PART I
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Bartlett, Hon. Roscoe G., a Representative from Maryland, Committee on Armed Services
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Keane, Gen. Jack, United States Army (Ret.)
Page 6 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Macgregor, Col. Douglas, A., Ph.D., United States Army (Ret.)
Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert, United States Army (Ret.)
Towell, Patrick, Visiting Fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Keane, Gen. John M.
Macgregor, Col. Douglas, A., Ph.D.
Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert
Towell, Patrick
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Page 7 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
ARMY TRANSFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE, PART I
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Thursday, July 15, 2004.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:08 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Roscoe G. Bartlett presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MARYLAND, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. BARTLETT. The Chairman will be a few minutes late, so we will begin.
The Committee meets this morning to begin an in-depth look at the Army's transformation plans. Today we will hear from a distinguished panel of outside experts who bring varying perspectives but considerable expertise to this question.
Next week, the Committee will receive testimony from the Army's senior leadership who will provide an update on where they stand on this plan as well as explain in greater detail the multiple aspects of this effort.
Page 8 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me first welcome our witnesses this morning. General Jack Keane, who retired last year after 37 years of distinguished service. General Keane last served as Vice Chief of Staff in the Army and is well versed in the difficult choices facing the Army today.
Thank you, sir.
Major General Robert Scales, who served over 30 years in the Army before retiring from his position as the Commandant of the Army War College.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Colonel Macgregor is the author of Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights, a provocative study of Army transformation.
And we have a special guest this morning, Cameron Macgregor, midshipman, the son of Colonel Macgregor.
Welcome, sir.
Mr. Pat Towell, visiting fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and no stranger to this Committee from his long stint as Defense Correspondent for Congressional Quarterly.
Welcome.
Page 9 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Both President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld have embraced transformation as a guiding concept for reshaping our military forces for the new security challenge facing our Nation. Arguably, the Army has emerged as a most visible and aggressive effort to implement this vision. The questions before the Committee are varied and complex, but they include, precisely how the Army is transforming? Is it moving in the right direction? And is it wise to attempt such radical change while the Army's troops are continuously engaged in combat?
We may find that the Army has no choice but to significantly change to meet the demands of modern warfare, but we also have an obligation to determine what will be gained and what will be lost as the Army undergoes this lengthy and difficult process. Change is always difficult.
We understand that some have criticized the Army for being too bold in changing when it is fully engaged in combat in Iraq. Others, including some at the witness table, have said that the Army's plan is too timid to meet the challenges of today's security environment.
While part of the plan involves procurement programs, the more critical proposed changes rest in the Army's culture, doctrine, and organization. In any case, we have a duty to carefully review this important initiative as the most fundamental change facing the Army since the end of the draft close to 30 years ago.
Our witnesses today have either operated within or studied the Army intimately. Since none of them are presently officially connected with the Army, they are well placed to provide their frank and unvarnished views of the changes the Army is undergoing. I encourage my colleagues to engage the experts before us with tough questions about the Army's plans, which involve the Reserve components as well. With the active and Reserve components as stressed as they are, is the Army on the right track? Will the Army plan adequately shape the force of the challenges of tomorrow while providing sufficient resources and protection for the soldiers who are sacrificing so much today? Are the hard lessons of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom incorporated in the proposed plan? We have the responsibility to find the answers and ensure that the Army is on a prudent course.
Page 10 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As I said from the outset, there is much to understand and discuss. So I look forward to today's testimony and the coming discussion. But first let me recognize the Ranking Member, Ike Skelton of Missouri, for any remarks he would care to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
Let me welcome our friends who are on the panel. General Keane, General Scales, Colonel Macgregor, I have been waiting a long, long time to ask questions of the gentleman who has been asking me questions for years. I have a list of them all just for you. We welcome you and thank you for being with us.
The topic of this hearing could not be timelier. Last week, we heard testimony from the Vice Chief of Staff, General Cody, who told us how thinly stretched the Army is. Members of both sides of the aisle asked some tough questions about the Army's capability to meet all the demands we have asked of it. And, to his credit, General Cody gave us some pretty straightforward answers. Some of them are very encouraging, but some quite concerning.
But when the subject of additional force structure came up, as it always will and as long as I sit on this Committee, as well General Cody acknowledged that the Army could use additional soldiers than this Committee has provided in the short term. He stressed that the key to building a more capable Army was not so dependent on force structure. Instead, he argued that it was a question of organization.
Page 11 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I know that we will touch on this issue, but one thing that concerns me about the reorganization in the testimony we have had over the past months and years, we are so dependent upon contractors. Where do the contractors fit in all of this reorganization? It is obvious we can't go to war but for them. So we have to do more than just look at those in uniforms.
And, now, the Army is embarking on this radical transformation into a modular brigade structure, and the demands are the greatest that I have seen on the battlefield. We are stretched dangerously thin, and I figure the Army has just one chance to get this transformation right, and to do it and fail while we are at war may very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and the camel being the United States Army.
So in your testimony today we look forward to those answers. And one of them will be, on the way to transformation, are we breaking the Army?
One last thing, Mr. Chairman, if I may. Recent news reports on this subject caused me to raise this question regarding the welfare of our soldiers. Now, while it is not in today's scope, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention my concerns that our soldiers might miss the opportunity to vote in the upcoming November elections. It is inconceivable to me that, while they are on the mission to promote democracy, they may very well find themselves disenfranchised at home due to an overly cumbersome absentee voting process. And I think it would be wise for us to take a look at that in this Committee, maybe even a hearing on that, because we don't want them to be doing one thing and not being able to participate in democracy here.
Page 12 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me welcome you again. We look forward to your testimony.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you. And I personally appreciate your concern for the voting opportunities for our military in the coming election. There were some serious problems in the last election, and I was just reading recently that perhaps we have not invested enough energy into solving these problems and that they may be repeated in this upcoming election, which would be too bad.
We are very honored to have such a distinguished panel before us. Without objection, all of your prepared statements will be entered into the record, and so you may proceed and rest assured that there will be more than adequate time during the question and answer period to expand on any of the issues that you feel deserve more emphasis.
Mr. BARTLETT. General Keane, the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF GEN. JACK KEANE, UNITED STATES ARMY (RET.)
General KEANE. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Minority Member, distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me today to share views on a topic of importance, Army transformation, and also just to be back before this Committee.
I spent 4.5 years sharing thoughts and ideas with you, and it is good to see old friends again. I mean that sincerely.
Page 13 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I also apologize, I did not submit a statement for the record. I got this notice shortly to come here. And I have prepared some brief oral remarks, so I hope you indulge me a little bit.
To understand Army transformation, it must, in my view, be understood in the context of transforming an Army which is at war. We have been at war almost 3 years, a war much different than any we have fought in the past, but a war similar in that it is a clash of ideas and values much as that we have fought with communism and Nazism in the 20th century. We are at war with a political ideology, with political objectives rooted in one of the great religions of the world.
Clausewitz taught us as a first principle, to win a war you must understand the nature and character of it. In other words, you must be able to define your enemy. This is critical, because only then can you adequately address the challenge and ensure you are using the best application to defeat it.
We are caught in a civil war inside Islam between moderates and traditionalists against the radicals. The radicals desperately want to stop Western ideas and values from contaminating their ideals, such ideas and values as universal suffrage, separation of church and state, capitalism, which redistributes wealth, and democracy, which protects the rights of the minority and guarantees personal freedom.
While the radicals have taken hostage one of the great religions of the world, we cannot underestimate the importance of this religion to them. It provides the passion, the intensity and the staying power of the movement. They capitalize on the pathology of fear, economic depression and culture inferiority which runs rampant in the 22 Muslim nations. This enemy is radical Islam, and its manifestation is al Qaeda. Its manifestation is Iran. It is the foreign terrorists linked with the Baath party terrorists in Iraq. It is the radical Islamist movement in the 22 Muslim nations. It fuels the hate, and it funds the terror in the Middle East. They have killed us and will continue to kill us in order to stop our influence in their region of the world.
Page 14 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
While this movement is similar to communism and Nazism in terms of the clash of ideas and values, it is more dangerous because of the combination of fanatical terrorism and the desire to use weapons of mass destruction against us. Nazism was defeated by brute force, and communism was defeated by resolute nations with a better idea. It will take a combination of both force and a better idea to win this war.
I think there are two important considerations.
First, it will take much more than military means. Yes, we must kill those who would kill us, but it is much more a political, economic and cultural fight if we are to eliminate the root causes.
Second, this is a long, long war which will dominate the 21st century similar to the war when communism dominated the 20th.
Only after properly defining who our enemy is and what the nature and character of the war is can we understand how hard this is, how big this is, and how long it will last. It is in this context that we are transforming an Army. It makes transformation not just a reality but an imperative. It also makes transformation exponentially more difficult. But we have been here before, and we should be encouraged by our previous success.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the Army was a little stronger than 200,000 and was a frontier Army without a single division construct. In less than 3 years, the Army formed 64 divisions, trained them and deployed 48 to the continent of Europe.
Page 15 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Prior to World War II, hearing the drumbeat of war again in Europe, the Army began to plan to mobilize an even larger Army than in World War I from a base of a little over 300,000. The Army would then mobilize over 100 divisions. Forming large numbers of divisions was no longer transformational, but changing how they would fight certainly was. Enlightened Army leaders realized that Germany could seize the entire continent of Europe, and we, the United States, would not have a foothold similar to France in World War I from which to start our operations. Thus was born the transformational idea of an amphibious assault using the now famous Higgins Boat as a launch platform. We reorganized, changed our training doctrine, changed our culture to conduct such an operation.
We have enlightened leaders today who are also changing an Army while we are at war. There is one major difference from the great military transformations of the 20th century, and it is the reality that we are attempting to fight a long war which threatens our Nation's values and do so on the backs of a small, very professional volunteer force. We have never done this before.
It remains to be seen whether the Army can withstand the stress of a long war and sustain its capacity to recruit and retain the quality force. This voluntary force of our era is just short of 30 years old. It has served us well, never having lost a battle or a war. But its continued success is not preordained.
In April of last year, after we toppled Saddam Hussein, Secretary Rumsfeld convened a Saturday session on the challenges ahead for our military. While most of the other services had redeployed, the Marines were in the process of redeploying, the Army was still deploying into Iraq. The other services' challenges were rooted in recovery and resetting the force, and they stated them clearly to the Secretary.
Page 16 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I provided him only one challenge that I believed was utmost, and that was the challenge of sustaining a quality volunteer force which conditioned a long discussion thereafter. It was my number one concern for the Army then, and it remains so today.
We should be encouraged by the results so far. The active and Reserve forces are retaining their leaders and soldiers, and they are meeting their recruiting goals with some shortfalls in the National Guard and Reserves. Can we sustain this in a long war against radical Islam? I don't believe we know that answer. My view is we can if there are not significant increases in force levels. Force level increases up to 50,000 will be challenging but are probably achievable. Increases beyond that may require return to conscription.
Let me be clear, I am not advocating a return to the draft. All who have served in both a draft and volunteer force know full well the extraordinary advantages of a volunteer professional force. We must admit that it is a possibility if we cannot meet our required force levels.
The other major challenge facing the Army is that it must maintain the capability to defeat a major Army and participate as a member of a joint force in a regime change, thus providing a realistic deterrence.
It is not too different than the issue the Navy is facing. The Navy, think about it, must maintain the sea lines of communication, and they want to deter a large blue water Navy from dominating those sea lines of communication. While doing that, they know that most of the time in the era we are operating in they are going to be providing support for land operations. And the tension, the intellectual tension is to deter the blue water navies while fighting in support of land operations and configuring yourself for the capacity to do both.
Page 17 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Army is facing similar intellectual challenges, because it must recognize that most of our efforts will be against forces who are using asymmetric means or indirect approaches to defeat us. Our enemies in this war know they cannot defeat our military, but that is irrelevant because they believe they can punish us, break our will, and they are convinced they can defeat our people.
The Army's major challenge in this long war from a transformational perspective is to fix the current force and to do so as rapidly as possible while sustaining the force in the war. Our history that I noted briefly should encourage us that it can be done, and I know the Army leaders believe that it can.
Second, we cannot abandon the concepts and programs for a future force, because, to do so, we would lose our technological dominance.
In peacetime, armies change slowly and deliberately. That is a reality. In war, we must do so rapidly as our predecessors did in the last century. In peacetime, we subordinate effectiveness to economy, and we subordinate joint collaboration to competition for budgets and programs. Our energies are devoted to preserving force structure and to preserving the program of record. Resource risk is spread across budget years and programs.
Today, while we are at war, that construct must change. The immediate demands are urgent, and fielding capabilities in the near-term may outweigh the protection of the program of record. In other words, we should take the risk off the backs of our soldiers.
Page 18 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What needs to be done? I believe the changes Pete Shoomaker and Secretary Brownlee are implementing are on the right track. The most important change is not technological but cultural, and it is moving to an expeditionary mindset that to do so only in a joint context. For years, our mindset was decades of planning and preparation against set piece enemies with all the certainty and prediction it implies.
Today, it is uncertainty and ambiguity which is the norm, not the exception. Our enemies shift resources and activities to remote areas, and they seek refuge in the four corners of the world. We must adapt with short-notice operations in austere environments and with incomplete information. As we have learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must fight for information. We must develop a culture throughout the Army, not just in special operating forces, not just in 18th Airborne Corps, which I had the distinction to command, that we can go anywhere in the world at any time in any environment against any foe to accomplish the mission. We must do this in a joint context where we are truly integrating our operations and achieving a level of joint interdependence.
We saw the beginnings of this in Afghanistan with our Special Operations soldiers having at their disposal, using digital computer-based communications, all the modern air power platforms and weapons in the Coalition arsenal. We saw it in Iraq with a simultaneous three-pronged joint attack against Saddam's regime which was much more than the much publicized attack from the south. The synergy of this joint attack was one of the most powerful in our history. Jointness is moving more rapidly because of technological advances from the strategic level of war to the tactical level faster than our organizations' doctrine and training are able to cope with it.
Page 19 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Therefore, we must change all three rapidly: Our doctrine to fight in an uncertain, ambiguous world against an adaptive and elusive enemy. Our organizations must change. They should be centered around the brigade and be more cohesive and much more versatile. We must organize at the tactical level and garrison how we intend to fight in the war. These organizations must be combined arms, multi-functional units. They must rely on joint capabilities, not just organic capabilities.
Most importantly, these units must be networked. In doing so, we must increase the infantry intelligence, military police, special forces and civil affairs functions of the Army, and we must increase the tactical survivability of our light forces. We must reorganize the Guard and Reserve to reflect the new mindset and to reduce the active Army's dependence on both of them early in the conflict.
Lastly, we must change our training to reflect the new realities. The National Training Center should, frankly, be more like the Joint Readiness Training Center: 24 hours, 7 days a week, warfight all-around battlefield, fight an elusive, adaptive, and resilient enemy, focused on armored forces to be sure but with all the nasty things that go with indirect asymmetric warfare. Home station training must also reflect this realism.
I am confident we can make these changes. The Army leadership is moving in that direction. The task, however, is urgent, and they cannot do it without the support of the American people and without the support of the Congress of the United States.
Thank you for allowing me to address you today, and I look forward to your questions.
Page 20 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HEFLEY [presiding]. Thank you, General Keane.
General Scales.
STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. ROBERT SCALES, UNITED STATES ARMY (RET.)
General SCALES. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here today.
Mr. Skelton, I have been looking forward to answering your questions again, sir. And thank you for the invitation.
I would like to present three very brief themes in my remarks that center around three subjects. Number one is an infomercial for landpower. Number two, some brief comments about technological transformation. And, number three, some more detailed comments about what has increasingly become termed as cultural and cognitive transformation.
First, the infomercial. Take a close look at the photos of young American service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you will notice that almost without exception they are ground soldiers. And this isn't a new phenomenon. Mr. Skelton knows that I am a historian, so I can't give any testimony without a brief piece of history.
If you look at the era of limited warfare since World War II, this continuum of American involvement in limited liability wars from Korea through Iraqi Freedom, you will notice that 81 percent, or four out of five, service men and women who have died in combat at the hands of the enemy have been infantrymen, not soldiers and Marines, but infantrymen. Something like 5 percent of the force is suffering—80 percent of the dead—at the hands of the enemy.
Page 21 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What is also interesting in this period of limited wars is that the greatest killer of Americans on the battlefield is the mortar, a simple iron tube that throws a grenade up into the air. The enemy today, of course, is taking mortars and artillery shells and turning them into explosive devices. The principle is the same.
Second in priority are small arms and automatic weapons. No American has died from enemy ship fire since World War II or from enemy air attack since Korea. The last major American sea battle was Leyte Gulf in 1944. The last serious air-to-air engagement was Linebacker II in 1972.
In 1994, a French journalist asked Ho Chi Minh how he could possibly expect to win a war against the world's greatest super power, and he replied prophetically, quote, ''They will kill many of us, and we will kill a few of them, and they will tire of it first.''
Al Qaeda has learned from the Chinese and the North Vietnamese the immutable lesson that America's greatest strategic vulnerability is dead Americans. Thus, the killing of Americans from a strategic context has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end. The formula is simple and repeated time after time after time: Kill enough of us, and we will go home.
So putting aside humanitarian considerations just for a moment, it would seem logical from the above that we in the defense intellectual industry and those of us interested in prosecuting this current conflict would put as a first order of priority the protection of those most likely to die, those who do the dying and those who do the killing.
Page 22 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So the question is really left in sort of two parts. First of all, if all of us in this room believe that Iraqi Freedom or the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are aberrations and the day will come when we will return to large-scale conventional technocentric warfare, then our numbers are fine. If you believe that what we see in Iraq and Afghanistan today are harbingers of the future, then it is clear, I think, to me and to General Keane and to others sitting at this table that the land forces of this Country, the Army, the Marine Corps, the Special Operating Forces, and the close combat aspects of the Army reserve and the Army National Guard are simply too small to fight a mission that is going to be protracted possibly for the next 50 to 100 years.
A quick word about technological transformation. I agree with General Keane that the ideas that the Army developed in the 1990's, the idea of taking the tenets of knowledge, speed, and precision and applying them to the land battle have finally started to come to fruition in recent years. And since I was part of it, General Keane and I and Colonel Macgregor and people like Don Holder, Huba Wass de Czege, Rick Sinnreich, and Bob Killebrew, were all part of this early transformational effort back in the 1990's. All of us, I think, have been encouraged to see that at least the Army is beginning to change its structure and acquire the material to be able to match the concepts and the doctrine that were developed in the 1990's to fight this new style of warfare.
As we will probably discuss in the Q-and-A sessions, I have some issues with some of the details of this process of transformation. But as a longstanding proponent and cheerleader for this effort, certainly, I am four-square behind technological and structural transformation.
Page 23 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me end my remarks with a few words about cognitive and culture-centric warfare and cognitive transformation. More than a year after the Iraqi war began, we have soldiers, senior leaders returning home from that conflict talking to Doug and to General Keane and myself, and there seems to be a consensus among them that this conflict was fought brilliantly at the technological level but inadequately at the human level. The human element seems to underlie virtually all of the functional shortcomings chronicled in official reports and media sources. Just read down the list. Information operations, civic actions, civil affairs, cultural awareness, soldier conduct and, most glaringly, intelligence from national to tactical.
I asked a returning commander from the Third Infantry Division a few months ago about how well situational awareness was during his march to Baghdad. Here is what he told me. He said, quote, ''I knew where every enemy tank was dug in on the outskirts of Talil. Our only problem was my soldiers had to fight fanatics charging them on foot or in pickups and firing AK–47s and RBGs. I had perfect situational awareness. What I lacked was cultural awareness. Great technical intelligence, wrong enemy.''
I think this officer's prescient remarks I think presaged the difficulties that we would encounter during this present cultural phase of the war in Iraq, a war in which the enemy's motivation, intent, will, tactical method and cultural environment has proved to be far more important for success than the deployment of smart bombs, unmanned vehicles and expansive bandwidth. Success in this phase rests with the ability of leaders to think and adapt faster than the enemy, and for soldiers to thrive in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and unfamiliarity.
Page 24 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And we shouldn't be surprised by this current turn of events because we have been working up to this for the last 50 years. Since the Israeli war of independence, Islamic armies are 0–7 when fighting against Western armies in conventional Western style warfare. And they are 5–0—or 5–0–1 if you throw this war in—when fighting unconventional wars against Israel, the United States and the Soviet Union. We are a Country that has spent billions to gain a few additional meters of precision, a few knots of speed or bits of bandwidth. Some of that money might better be spent improving on how well our military thinks and studies war in an effort to create a parallel transformational universe based on cognition and cultural awareness.
War is a thinking man's game. A military too used to solving warfighting problems just with technology alone should begin to realize that war must also be fought with the intellect. We need to think about out-thinking rather than out-equipping the enemy. We need to be able to look at—be able to understand the non-military advantage, to read intentions, to build trust, to convert opinions, to manage perceptions, all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture and their motivation.
So let me offer three or four areas where I believe that transformation ought to follow a parallel path.
Number one, transform the operational and tactical intelligence services from technologically-centered to human-centered organizations. Now, all the recent recriminations concerning the failure of higher-level intelligence to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq cloud what is certainly to my mind, at least as a soldier, a more significant failure of lower-level intelligence.
Page 25 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The kinetic phase of the war ended. Soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe. Today,the enemy's motives often remain a mystery, and the constant casualties due to the inability to understand the enemy and to predict his actions have been tragically too great. The military possesses the technological means to conduct net-centric warfare, but it lacks the intellectual acumen to conduct culture-centric warfare. We must build an intelligence service that focuses on the art rather than the science of war.
We have learned last year or at least commanders returning from the field tell me that the most useful information comes from those—intelligence information comes from those within battalions and brigades that have had to quell resistance in the cities and the towns. Information came from payoffs to local tribal leaders, back-ally deals and things of that sort. With time to build trust, tips by citizens, of course, became more common, and the situation became under control.
The lessons are clear. Computers and aerial drones are no substitute for human eyes and brains. The intelligence function in today's military is too thick at the top and too thin at the bottom. The focus of every agency to my mind in this new style of war must be at the tactical level. In today's operational environment, the information is of little practical use unless it benefits the soldier in contact.
A very interesting point. In the late 19th century, the British army developed a habit of sending bright young officers to different regions of the world to study the cultures and live with the local leaders and learn their habits. Names like China Gordon, T.E. Lawrence, I think all testified to the wisdom of that custom, a custom that the British Army continues today.
Page 26 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Think about a culture-centric approach to future warfare that creates a cadre of what commonly now has been called global scouts, officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), well-educated with a penchant for language and comfort with strange and distant places. These soldiers should be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them.
A culture-centric rather than a net-centric approach to intelligence collection would demand a fundamental change in how intelligence specialists are selected, trained and promoted. A shift in focus from technological to a cognitive approach would give priority to those in the intelligence community able to devote time to the study of war and who are capable of immersing themselves in theaters of war. Our intelligence specialists must be formally—and leaders must be formally educated in the deductive and inductive skills necessary to understand and interpret intelligently the information and the insights provided by the global scouts in the field. I believe they should all attend graduate schools and study disciplines that relate to human behavior, military art, and history, as well as science.
Second, in order to have this technological revolution, we have to reform the military learning system. Every military leader, particularly those whose job is to practice war, must be given every opportunity to study war. Learning must be a lifelong process. Every soldier, regardless of grade or specialty, should be given unfettered and continuous access to the best and most inclusive programs of war study.
What is equally important to my mind at least is that every soldier who takes advantage of this opportunity to learn must receive recognition and professional reward for the quality of that learning rather than being punished for it.
Page 27 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Second, those who demonstrate particular brilliance and whose capability for higher-level strategic leadership is exemplary should be provided a unique opportunity to expand their knowledge to a degree unprecedented in the past. We can talk more about this in the Q-and-A, but essentially, we need to be able to identify those who have particular merit and give them the opportunity and the time to immerse themselves in the art of war, perhaps to expand on the successful programs in the Army known as SAMS, the School of Advanced Military Studies, or the Advanced Strategic Art Program at the senior level.
It is also important to understand that in this process of cognitive transformation the most precious commodity is not money but time. Soldiers are often too busy to learn in an Army that is stretched too thin. An interesting fact: In 1976, the Army sent 7,400 officers to fully funded graduate school. Today, the Army sends 396, half of whom are going to West Point, and the other half are being assigned to the Army Acquisition Command. Compare this with generals like the names of Abizaid and Petraeus, all of whom came up through a liberal arts upbringing. And ask General Abizaid whether he would rather have an acquisition officer on his staff or an officer who has studied Arabic and has immersed himself in Arab cultures. I think you know what the answer will be.
Third, we have to make learning a command responsibility. There is an old saying in the Army, and General Keane is well aware of it, that soldiers do best what commanders demand from them. In the past, responsibility for learning has been relegated entirely to military learning institutions. I submit to you that that needs to be changed to rely increasingly on putting the responsibility for learning on the backs of the commanders. Unit-based learning and leader development must be perceived as a condition for unit readiness overall.
Page 28 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And, finally, I think it is important to understand that sergeants make strategic decisions today as well as colonels. And this transformation from indirect—from direct to indirect leadership, the bar is being pushed down where decisions once made by colonels and generals are now being made by sergeants. And, unfortunately, the educational system, the learning system has yet to accommodate our senior NCOs.
I think we have to be able to leverage learning science to find those best suited to fight culture-centric warfare. You know, the requirement of good commanders, know how to lead in combat. Great commanders possess the great intuitive sense on how to make transition very quickly from active kinetic warfare distinguished by fire and maneuver to a more subtle kind of cultural warfare distinguished by the ability to win the war of will and perception. Rare are the leaders who can make this transition between these two disparate universes and lead and fight competently in both. We must build into our system of learning the ability to identify who these leaders are early, to educate them early so that they can be effective when they rise to positions of prominence.
One division commander in Iraq told me that his greatest worry was that his soldiers comprised, quote, ''an Army of strangers in the midst of strangers.'' during the early months of the occupation, cultural isolation in Iraq created a tragic barrier separating Iraqis of good will from the inherent goodness that American soldiers demonstrated so effectively in places like Korea, Japan and Germany. This cultural wall must be torn down. Lives depend on it. Every young soldier should receive extensive cultural and language instruction. They should make every soldier an ambassador, not necessarily fluent in the language, but comfortable in the culture.
Page 29 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The military spends millions to create urban combat sites designed to train soldiers on how to kill an enemy, but perhaps equally useful might be urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to co-exist with and cultivate trust and understanding among indigenous peoples inside foreign urban settings.
In a strange twist of irony, the demands of overseas deployments today have created a military too busy to learn at a time when the uncertainties of contemporary warfare demand that military professionals spend more time in reflective study.
Let me end with a quick war story. When I was a graduate student at Duke University, I had to give my adviser my topic for the dissertation. And I decided, since I was studying the British Army, that it would be the transition—the technological transformation of the British Army in the industrial revolution of the 19th century. I wanted to know how well the British Army had learned to inculcate the lessons of machine warfare. Then I found out once I got into the dissertation I asked the wrong question. What I discovered was the British Army had become an Army that was too busy to learn. Active deployments all around the world made learning something that was denigrated in the British Officer Corps. An officer who wrote a book was looked down on. Time spent at the staff college was considered to be time wasted. And the great heroes were those who made the headlines by conducting or by commanding forces across the far-flung expanse of the British Empire.
Come 1914, the Germans taught them a different lesson. And I would say that the British Army's greatest failure in those early days of the war wasn't technological; it was intellectual, because the Army had become too active on active service and had not taken the time for reflective study and to learn about their profession.
Page 30 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of General Scales can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you, General Scales.
Colonel Macgregor.
STATEMENT OF COL. DOUGLAS A. MACGREGOR, Ph.D., UNITED STATES ARMY (RET)
Colonel MACGREGOR. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for inviting me here today. I have to echo Congressman Skelton's sentiments earlier. I have always wanted to come over here and talk to you. So this is a wonderful opportunity for me, and I appreciate it.
By the way, I would like to point out that my jointness credentials are permanently validated. If anyone questions them, look behind me.
Now, I am much less enamored of the direction which the United States Army is currently headed. I have given you a statement. I am going to highlight some of what is in the statement.
Page 31 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The theme of my message today is that the American people and you their representatives who are in a position to do this must field a powerful, standing, professional Army. We don't have that. That is what we need. We have been struggling with this issue since 1991. Today, we are struggling with structural problems, policy problems, rotational problems that have nothing to do with the men who are in positions of authority now and a great deal to do with the last 14 years during which we clung tenaciously to old structures, old ideas and old policies.
Unfortunately, many of the assumptions that underpin the current transformation have their roots in the past in the 1990's and in the early years of this century. And they are invalid, and they are distorting Army transformation, and they threaten to lead us down the wrong path.
In addition to this point, before I go on, I want to point out that this current reorganization plan, in my view, is inherently quite dangerous. I will talk a little bit about it later on, but I want you to keep in mind that this was conceived last year in the summer when the assumption was that our primary requirement would be to rotate large numbers of smaller brigade formations through many years of peacekeeping duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. It assumed an environment that doesn't exist today. It assumed that smaller formations could cope with what would really be a relatively benign environment. It is not a structure that is being built for war. And that is a serious mistake, because I think that within the next 4 to 5 years, contrary to conventional wisdom, we will find ourselves confronting much more serious circumstances in the Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia.
Now, to start with the distorting assumptions. The first one has already been mentioned, and it is alive and well and continues to be pervasive inside Army transformation. This is situational awareness. It is the key underlying assumption of the Army's future combat system. It is an illusion. Situational awareness promises that information about the enemy and its intentions will always be available when it is needed and that everyone inside the battle space will create and exploit information in exactly the same way. We can't build networks to do that today. We don't have access to that kind of information. We can't filter it. We can't establish it, and there is no evidence as you have already heard from General Keane and General Scales in either Afghanistan or Iraq that it exists or will ever exist technologically.
Page 32 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Right now, you need to update a PAC-III missile 16 times a second to ensure that it strikes an incoming missile that is moving at roughly a kilometer per second. That is not enough to move the volume of information through the networks that is required to sustain and operate the future combat system. It won't work.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite unparalleled intelligence assets, most of the fighting on the ground was characterized by the participants as resulting from meeting engagements, battles in which American forces unexpectedly bumped into the enemy.
Another flawed assumption is the belief that strategic speed, that is speed of deployment, is worth sacrificing protection and firepower. What the Army does after it arrives in a theater, work of crisis or conflict is much more important than how fast it gets there. Getting a light force to the same place in a few hours or days sooner does not have the same effect. In fact, it may produce a speedy defeat rather than a decisive victory.
The current emphasis on light infantry, Large quantities of light infantry with nothing more than the weapons they can carry after they dismount to attack from either up-armored HMMVWs or strikers will sustain heavy losses. I think we have got plenty of evidence for that today in Iraq. Light infantry is not designed to lead penetration attacks into urban areas or against any prepared enemy defense and should not be used in that role.
Let me turn to some of the current initiatives. The Stryker Brigade initiative. The current Stryker Brigade Combat Team lacks the joint command control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, firepower protection, mobility, and organic logistical support to be a full dimensional warfighting organization. And its operational utility will continue to be limited to peace support or paramilitary police operations.
Page 33 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Army's sole striker is a C–130 deployable full spectrum combat vehicle with very low operating costs. This is not true. It is incapable of the close fight. It has no stabilized weapons, no digital database, poor mobility and weak armor. It is a niche capability. We need some number of these vehicles. We need them for peacekeeping. We need them for the right kind of environment. We do not necessarily have to permanently equip with them.
Frankly, in peace support operations, the block III light amphibious vehicle (LAV) with its stabilized 25-millimeter chain gun with stand-off engagement capability, though lighter and never designed for close combat either, is actually more lethal and less expensive than the Stryker carrier. Given the size, weight, and volume of wheeled armored vehicles, the Stryker Brigade is not suitable for strategic airlift and will deploy as a unit via a sealift as seen quite recently with the Stryker Brigade currently serving in Iraq via ship in Kuwait City Harbor.
Army light-infantry forces arriving from the air or the sea must include heavy- or true medium-weight armor, Abrams and Bradleys or platforms similar to the M8 Armored Gun System, Tactical Reconnaissance Armoured Combat Equipment Requirement (TRACER), Russian Transport Vehicle for Combat (MTLB) equipped with hybrid-electric engines, band tracks, stabilized weapons systems. These platforms and systems are capable of augmenting light infantry and punching directly through enemy forces with devastating effect. It is what our light infantry needs.
The Modular Brigade Program. The Army's plan to reorganize the Army's 10 division force into two battalion brigades with reconnaissance units, half of whom are mounted in up-armored HMMVWs is a dangerous action and unsupported by either contemporary battlefield experience or rigorous analysis. Because no thorough plan to fundamentally restructure how the Army supports fighting forces was developed in parallel, the more numerous two battalion brigades actually result in a personnel requirement for more support troops. Organizationally, the concept increases dependency on external support from Army division and corps echelons as well as the larger joint force and defeats the very idea of independence in mobile, dispersed 360-degree warfare.
Page 34 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In practice, modular means stand alone. Ask a Marine, he will explain it to you. And these new formations will not be capable of independent operations inside a joint expeditionary force as a result. The concept in fact looks like an attempt to equate a near-term requirement to rotate smaller formations through occupational duty with the transformation of the Army into a new warfighting structure.
But the two missions, ladies and gentlemen, are not the same. They are not the same at all. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army brigades in the Third Infantry Division had to be significantly reinforced to operate across Iraq in an environment where units fought in all directions or 360 degrees. This resulted in the expansion of brigade combat teams in the Third Infantry Division from 3,900 to 5,000-plus troops. These formations resembled an outline of formations that I have detailed in two books, Breaking the Phalanx, and Transformation Under Fire, not the two battalion brigades in the Army's new program.
In my view, you should suspend this action and demand that alternative force designs be examined in simulation as well as in the field. The Army should not suboptimize for an occupation mission in Iraq. If there are shortfalls in equipment and resources, once we design a force that we think is for full-spectrum warfighting, then the bill should be presented to you, to Congress, to the President. But the Army should not constrain its thinking on the grounds that it must transform within the limitations of the current active component and some of the Reserve component.
You have already heard a great deal about culture, and I will spend a little bit of time on it because I agree with both General Keane and also with General Scales that culture is critical. And we have got a serious problem with it in the United States Army. Whenever an Army chief of staff makes a pronouncement, regardless of whether the pronouncement is based on sound analysis and accurate data, every officer in service knows that, in order to be promoted, he or she must sign on unconditionally for the party line. In this cultural setting, there is no argument, no debate and no experimentation.
Page 35 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Today, senior leaders dealing as they do with life and death should be as utterly realistic and ruthless in discarding the old for the new as General Marshall was from the time he was elevated from one star to four stars in June of 1939.
General MACGREGOR. But the historical record makes it clear that senior officers are not always realistic. They have preferences, they have preconceived notions. Comfort with the status quo breeds distrust of change. Victory over weak and confident adversaries creates the illusion of strength and capability when the reality may be quite different.
One experienced observer of Army transformation remarked to me recently that current programs remind him of the Queen's declaration in Alice in Wonderland: First the verdict and then the trial. Experimentation is simply designed to demonstrate the rightness of whatever the chief of staff or any four-star general happens to say.
Ladies and gentlemen, our soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains are, in my view, among the best that we have ever had. However, they now have much more combat experience than most of the senior officers commanding them, but they are not being listened to. As long as this culture is allowed to persist, it will militate against the agility of mind that is so critical to success in both nation state and subnational war.
It is important to remember that the balance of force on the ground is much less meaningful in defeating insurgencies. The success of counterinsurgency operations depends much more on the ability of mind than on any other single factor. And it is the absence of this agility of mind that I suspect constrains us most today in Iraq.
Page 36 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I want to point out what transformation really ought to do for us. Transformation must result in an Army organized, trained, equipped and led to create a sense of futility in the mind of any current or future enemy by systematically crushing him, using every asymmetrical advantage we possess. That is what we want from Army transformation.
Today if you bring in soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains, majors and lieutenant colonels, they will tell you our battalions are too small; we need battalions of 800 men in order to have the density of combat power where it is required. They will tell you that the brigades in which they are serving are too small. We cannot effectively deploy and maintain an independent, tactical capability at less than 5,000 men.
We can do many things if the requirement is simply to police an occupied area in what is perceived to be a benign area. You can organize, do that in many, many different ways, but we should not suboptimize to do that.
We don't know what the future holds, and I hesitate that anyone in this body today would suggest for a second that we have nothing to fear from any serious adversary for 10 years. The question is not just one of numbers. It is a question of the composition of the force. We need more combat power. We need less overhead. We don't need additional headquarters. We need more combat troops. Adding more brigade headquarters that are already inadequately staffed, commanded by more colonels, diminishing the combat power at the disposal of those commanders, chopping up existing divisions into smaller pieces and saying that we have got something better and more than we really have is not the answer.
Page 37 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We need to go back to the drawing board, take a clean sheet of paper, and figure out what it is that we are going to need to dominate any area of the world that we are required to dominate on the ground.
And in closing, I have to echo the sentiments expressed by General Scales. We live in a world today where we have very few enemies in the air and very few enemies at sea. That does not invalidate the criticality of air and naval power. On the contrary, we should be very grateful that we enjoy that asymmetrical advantage. But most of our enemies are, in fact, on land.
We have got to build a force that can do two things, dominate that enemy, whether it is someone running down the streets of Fallujah with an rocket propelled grenade (RPG) on his back, or someone else across the border preparing to load a low-yield nuclear warhead onto a tactical ballistic missile.
All of those things are there. We have got to have forces that can take casualties and keep fighting. We have got to have forces that are invincible and irresistible. We must equip them with the right platforms in land warfare to guarantee that they cannot be stopped; that provide the accurate, devastating firepower, as well as the off-road mobility that is needed.
We are not embarked on those programs right now. We have got to get out of this industrial age mindset that talks about producing thousands of anything. We live in a world today where technology is racing ahead at breakneck speed. Three- or four hundred of something makes sense, rapidly prototype, but to move beyond that right now is a very hazardous exercise. We may well end up having lots and lots of obsolescent equipment. We will go down the road. We went with the Sherman tank; 40- or 50,000 Sherman tanks that can't fight in Europe, because they can't stand up to less than 500 operational German tanks. We don't want to repeat that kind of mistake.
Page 38 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So we need to run these prototypes. We need to find out what will work. We need to pour things into the force. We need to horizontally integrate things as they become mature. We need to get them into the hands of captains, sergeants, lieutenants and soldiers and find out what they will do.
We need to accept the fact that our preconceived notions, and we all have them, may be wrong; that a soldier will come back and tell us what we thought would work doesn't.
We need to give soldiers things that are readily accessible and not gold-plated, not overly expensive. We need to break through the bureaucratic inertia that stands in front of us. These are the things that must happen for this transformation to take effect and move down the right road.
I don't know what the future holds, but I know we need a diversity of capability, and I know that we are going to fight more capable adversaries in the future than the ones that we have recently met.
Thank you very much.
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you, Colonel Macgregor.
[The prepared statement of Colonel Macgregor can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Page 39 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Towell, welcome back. I thought you had disappeared and had forgotten about us. I spent most of my career up here answering your questions. Now I want you to know the tables are turned, so you have the time.
STATEMENT OF WILLIAM PATRICK TOWELL, VISITING FELLOW, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS.
Mr. TOWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Skelton, members of the committee. I was trained as a behavioral scientist. I should not be surprised that actually sitting down here at this table rather than that table has been as hard to deal with as it turns out to be. But I am very grateful for the invitation.
The focus of my remarks—forgive me, the prepared statement that I submitted is a condensed summary of a much longer report that we have just completed on unit focus stabilization, one facet of the transformation plan. I would like your permission to submit that report, which I hope we will have within coverage the next couple of weeks for possible inclusion in the record.
Mr. TOWELL. The focus of my remarks is considerably narrower than the other three. I am going to talk about one element of transformation. Unit-focused stabilization is the specific policy that General Schoomaker has launched, but it is an instance of a much broader class of manning policies that are generically referred to as unit manning.
The basic idea is that you take personnel out of their individual entry training, you assign them to a formation, the modular formation in this case will be a brigade, and they stay there for 3 years at a time. They will marry up to a cadre of officers and NCOs, and then that brigade stays together for about a total of about 3 years and then disbands.
Page 40 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Unlike other aspects of the transformation plan, this isn't new. This isn't an effort to capitalize on new technology nor to address new strategic developments in the strategic arena we face. This is an idea that has been on people's to-do lists for longer than the professional lifetime of anybody in this room, and it has been proposed over that 50- or 60-year period to address a chronic problem that the Army has wrestled with, at least since the end of the second war, and that problem is personnel turbulence.
The way the Army's personnel system has been organized, and one of the cardinal premises, has been that you want to move people who are your potential leaders 30 years on. You want to start moving them around early on, through a lot of wickets, through a lot of job wickets. You want to give them a feel for different pieces of this amazingly diverse institution. And you want to move them through the extremely demanding and extensive professional education system that the Army—all the services, but we are talking about that one—that the Army requires that its career people go through.
The consequence of that, nobody sets out with malice aforethought to say, let us have a continual churning of people through the maneuver units, but the practical consequence of that imperative at the heart of the personnel system is that you get a continual churning of people through the battalions and companies that make up the maneuver, that 5 percent of the force that General Scales mentioned that is actually out there at the point of the sphere.
That has two adverse consequences. First, there is no time—the argument goes there is no time for the people, in the small units that are actually out there prowling through the back allies of Fallujah and so forth, to form bonds of mutual confidence and trust that result in the unit developing cohesion, the emotional, the psychological staying power that will shore up individuals under the stress of battle. I know that Macgregor and the fox, is no longer in a foxhole, or in whatever they call them these days, and that, you know, there will be more. The strength, the staying power of the unit will be greater than the staying power of any individual soldier in it. So the first casualty of turbulence is an inability to build sufficient cohesion to deal with the stress of combat.
Page 41 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And the second is you just don't have time for the team as a team to train to higher levels of complexity. You are continually repeating the primary grades, because every 6 months you have enough new people come in that you have got to start over. You are not able to train on a progressive schedule that would bring a battalion or a brigade over a 3-year period to the levels of tactical sophistication which theoretically you could reach if you kept everybody at once there and want to pursue that kind of an accretive, progressive training schedule.
The proposal is important enough in its own right to warrant your attention, but it is also important because there are implications for other values in the policy, in the multipersonnel process, including some which—that have been very important to this committee and to Congress.
There are going to have to be trade-offs to do this, and one of the trade-offs General Schoomaker has been very frank about, we are trading breadth of experience for depth of experience. It doesn't matter for the kid who is in the driver compartment of the Bradlee. As General Schoomaker said at breakfast, I don't sit down and have breakfast with service chiefs. I am an emeritus member of the Defense Registry because I was a member for 25 years, so I still get invited to them.
And General Schoomaker was having breakfast with us about a month ago. He said, look, I have got a kid in the driver's compartment of a Bradlee at Fort Stewart. What is the percentage, just because we hit a personal, an arbitrary time lift limit, 18 months, 24 months, I then move that soldier, at the cost of $7,000, or $20,000 if he has a family, move the soldier to Fort Hood so he can broaden his experience to do what? To sit in the driver's compartment of another Bradlee, and he is only going to be there for 3 or 4 years.
Page 42 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
One of the fundamental facts of the demographics of the Army is, particularly the enlisted junior ranks who are most of your trigger pullers, most of those people are not going to stay for more than 3 or 4 years. Some will; some very good ones will. Some very good will take the skills and the maturity that they acquire in that 3 years in that marvelous institution, and they will go out and become great citizens and constituents and so forth.
There is no point on broadening the experience of the Bradlee driver. That is not the issue. The issue is the people who go on to become the NCOs and officers, the people who in 30 years on or 25 years will be the division commanders and vice chiefs of staff. So we are making a conscious decision that the assumption that the Army has proceeded on in decades, that it is important for those future leaders to get a lot of experience in different pieces, we are going to have to trade that, trade that off.
The second thing is we are going to tradeoff, almost surely we are going to have to tradeoff the way we have designed the professional military education system as it has evolved through the immediate levels of the community, the staff college and also the War College.
The Objective Force Task Force late last year put out a white paper sketching what it sees the Army being like in the year 2020. It foresees almost no residential education. In other words, the idea that officers—you know, fast-burning 05s on their way up, the group from whom the future Jack Keanes and Bob Scales and Doug Macgregors will be picked, going off for 9, 10 months of the year, getting away from the chaos of day-to-day command responsibility, and having a chance to think, to contemplate the art of war. Yes, yes, to play golf, too, right.
Page 43 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I remember I was at a media day up at the Army War College some years ago, and Tom Brokaw was the keynoter. And he remarked that the helicopter came in and landed on the middle of the golf course. He said, ''War College is hell.''
So, yes, they do that, but they do other things. They do things and they pursue a curriculum that has a considerable rigor in part because of initiatives taken in part by this committee under the leadership of Mr. Skelton back in 1988, 1989—I have forgotten—something.
That is going to change. It has already changed for the more junior officers, the captains. Command course for armor officers, which was formerly a residential program of 4 months, 5 months, something like that, that has changed to a residential program of 4 weeks, and 2 weeks running around as a server controller at one of the combat training centers, and the rest of it you do by distance learning.
So while you are out there in your day job, your commander is supposed to give you time to do all of this distance learning stuff to get you ready for that 4 weeks you are actually going to spend sitting around with your peers, you know, thinking about and trying to learn how to become a more competent senior officer.
Some of those changes, those prospective changes, may be of merit in their own right. I am as hard-line a Tory as you will find on the merits of liberal education. My 4 years at Georgetown were a transforming experience in my life, and then the brief period that I spent as a teacher before I got into my previous line of work over in the corner, I tried very hard to make some of that experience valuable to some other people. I hope that I learned in that liberal education enough to be willing to consider evidence that perhaps there are other ways to impart those benefits than by the traditional, you know, 4 years off in a monastery someplace.
Page 44 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Or to take the case of the War College, perhaps the benefits, not just the book learning, but the innumerable intangible benefits of the senior war colleges, maybe there is another way to give book feel, fast-burning young 0–5s those benefits without sending them, taking them out of the field Army and sending them off to Pennsylvania for 9 or 10 months. I am happy to consider evidence to that effect.
General Scales in his postmilitary career has been involved in some work in distance learning and information technology that is some very exciting stuff going on. I am happy to learn of the case. There may be a case for doing this in its own right, but the risk is that we get bludgeoned with this because we don't think we have the alternative.
There may be cases where we look at the trade-offs and decide the trade-off is worth it, the benefits of stabilizing personnel, locking people into an assignment for 3 years at a time; and the price we pay is we can't give them the breadth of experience, we can't give them as much. We look at it, we churn it through. We say, yes, okay, there is a cost, but it is worth it. Fair enough.
What is important to avoid is the case where we just drift into these changes without thinking through the trade-offs and thinking through the cost and benefit.
I don't doubt that General Schoomaker and Doug Macgregor and General Keane, when he was vice and began this process actually, and the many distinguished commanders who have advocated unit manning, the general policy that we were talking about here, I don't doubt that they understand these nuances, particularly when we are dealing with something as subtle as soldiers, combat and motivation. Tremendous deference is due to the judgment of experienced combat commanders like these, who have been there and seen the elephant, and thought it through, and they have decided this is worth it.
Page 45 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
If those people, and the list is long, and ''Shy'' Meyer, Donn Starry, the officers, the aging cohort of officers who rescued the Army from the depths to which the political system took the Army after Vietnam and built it into the marvelous fighting institution that it is today, their judgment is worth a lot. If they think that is important, that ought to be our starting point. That is the point of departure.
But I want to raise just a couple of questions, because I think the decision is being made without adequate ventilation. There isn't enough visibility to the trade-offs and to the potential costs, and I think the decision—the policy is important enough in its own right, and the trade-off, the potential costs, are important enough that it warrants oversight.
I don't think it is any derogation of the Army's leadership judgment to say that I look at the plaque up here on the front of the dais. You people have an interest in the oversight of this institution. And I think the questions raised by unit manning are important enough that you should do it.
There are two aspects of this policy that I want to highlight, because they address the Admiral Stockdale question. What am I doing here? Why am I sitting here after 27 years over in the corner table alongside three of the preeminent soldiers of my generation, and I am the one talking to you about combat readiness and so forth? There are a couple of factors of this policy that I think give me a handle on it that I hope I can leverage in a way that is useful to you.
Page 46 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
First of all, to an extraordinary degree the argument for unit manning, for unit stabilization rests on a general understanding of historical cases, particularly the experience of U.S. and German troops in the Second World War and the experience of U.S. Troops in Vietnam.
There has been a lot of historical work done on the Second World War in the last 10 or 15 years that I think paints a picture substantially at variance with widelyheld views about what was going on and how effective and how cohesive German and U.S. Troops were. I think it paints a picture different than what—different from what I thought a year ago. I thought I knew this stuff, and then I read some of the work that has been done the last 15 years, much of it, interestingly, by serving Army officers, getting dissertations back before they came into the field. These are not mail-order degrees, these are dissertations supervised by some of the preeminent military historians in the country, Alan Millett of Ohio State and Russell White at Temple. So there is a historical record out there.
Second, this has been tried before, at least a half dozen times since 1950, most of them on a small scale. But one that was on a big one involved nearly 10 percent of the maneuver force in the Army, Project COHORT, launched for the same purpose, to shore up cohesion within the small units, the combat units, under the auspices and the sponsorship of General ''Shy'' Meyer.
In 1979, when the Army was probably at the lowest ebb it was after Vietnam, improbably a gifted leader came along, ''Shy'' Meyer, as chief of staff. One of his assignments was Project COHORT, which was an implementation of unit manning, the same philosophy as this unit focus stabilization.
Page 47 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And so it was examined obsessively by the Army; feet, shelf feet and shelf feet of analyses, mostly by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; tens of thousands of interviews, and observation of hundreds and hundreds of battalions and companies over the span of several years. So there is a documentary record out there that can be gone through, the historical record of the World War II and Vietnam war cases, and the Walter Reed analyses of COHORT.
I can't tell you beans about maneuvering, commanding a company or a battalion. I can't tell you anything about conducting myself under fire. I have never been there. But while you show me a 5-foot shelf of turgid government documents, I know how to do that. I did it for a long time. So that is the skill set that I bring to the table.
And I would like to give you just, in a nutshell, the conclusions that I draw from reviewing this background. There is a conventional wisdom about unit manning that I think is oversimplified and that overemphasizes one aspect of a very complex relationship, the relationship between personnel stability and combat effectiveness. Those two, those two factors, are, I believe, more loosely coupled than conventional wisdom holds it.
Over the years very complex relationships have gotten simplified down in the way that things happen. When an idea, when a policy proposal sits on the shelf around this town for a long time, it kind of loses nuance, becomes a multigeneration Xerox, eighth generation of a Xerox copy. All you are going to get are the most bold lines. You are going to lose all the nuance and detail.
I think the conventional understanding is that that relationship is more rigid than it really is, and that it will accept us to force trade-offs that we don't have to take. I think the lesson of the more recent historical studies of forces in World War II and the historical record of Vietnam, once you get beyond the bar stool conversation, shows that well-led U.S. units routinely could accommodate a much higher level of personnel turnover than you would have in peacetime and yet remain effective. It wasn't easy, you had to manage it, but it was doable, and I think that has an implication for us as we contemplate these trade-offs.
Page 48 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think it may well be that it won't be the case that you—therefore, you keep hopscotching the Bradlee drivers around. You leave them where they are. It doesn't mean that you can afford to swap out the executive officer, the operations officer, and three of the four maneuver battalion commanders in a brigade all within a 30-day period. It doesn't mean that. But it may mean that before you decide to do a root and branch redrafting of the professional military education system, for example, you might think about whether there is some way within the 3-year life span of a basically stabilized brigade, maybe you can trade, allow the S–3 to go off to Carlisle for 9 or 10 months. I think the history, the short record, shows that the linkage is looser than conventional wisdom holds.
The second lesson is the lesson of COHORT, and that is that stabilization by itself is not the silver bullet. They did stabilize troops at Fort Ord. They locked them in for 2 years, and for the first year everything was going fine. You got the kids in the squads, platoons and companies, and they performed at a high rate. They outran the conventionally organized units in their performance in every respect.
By the end of the second year, it had all gone to hell, and, really, it is almost heart-breaking to read the Walter Reed analysis of what happened. There was a lot of noise in the system, a lot of exogenous demands were placed on that formation that muddied the water. For one thing, at the same time they were implementing this new personnel policy, they were trying to design on the fly an entirely new type of formation, light infantry formation. They were starting from scratch with a Table of Organization & Equipment (TO&E), for what that ought to be, so they had to do all of that.
Page 49 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
They were charged as one of the units of the rapid deployment force, so they had to maintain a readiness for certain types of field missions. They became all too favorite a spot for the drop-in, the fly by the Washington bigwigs who wanted to see what all the excitement was about, and over time what happened was there were far too many field exercises that were, in fact, demonstrations for visiting firemen.
And the troops sensed that instead of doing what they really wanted to do by area count, they really wanted to keep charging up that hill, they wanted to pursue that aggressive accretive training, they mastered the third-grade stuff, and they wanted to go on to the sixth-grade stuff and high school. They really wanted new challenges, and they weren't getting them.
Part of the problem seems to have been there wasn't a training syllabus there for them. Nobody thought that through. Nobody thought through the implications of what if it works? What if the bonding of the troops works as we hope it will? They are going to want something more than we are ready to give them.
The training regime wasn't in place, and the leadership in all too many cases was not—was not ready to lead these high-powered, demanding kids. You had sergeants and company-grade officer leadership who were ready, who could deal with soldiers, who were less demanding than the COHORT soldiers turned out to be. And the lesson in COHORT that I draw is you don't want to overfocus simply on stabilization. You need to look at the other things you need to harvest the promise of personnel stabilization and turn it into combat effectiveness. You need the training. You need the leadership.
Page 50 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
My fear is that by overemphasis, because the conventional wisdom overemphasizes the one factor, particularly if the crunch comes in money terms, some of this is going to cost money, the training may well cost money; selection, being more selective in picking your leaders and perhaps training your leaders up before you assign a unit, that may cost money; and somewhere down the road when the crunch comes, someone is going to see that and say, oh, it is a stabilization, stabilization. No, it is not, but I am afraid it might get lost in the shuffle.
In the late 1930's, James Thurber wrote a delightful and very insightful little set of vignettes, called ''Fables for our Times,'' and one of them is the story of a bear who habitually came home staggering drunk, and he stumbled around the house, and accidentally broke the furniture and punched out the windows until he finally fell asleep on the floor. His wife, Thurber says, was very alarmed, and his children very frightened. Eventually the bear reformed, became a great temperance crusader. He would tell the visitors the evils of booze and how much his own life had improved since he had sworn off the sauce. And to demonstrate his improved well-being, he would perform vigorous calisthenics and cartwheels all through the house, accidentally breaking furniture and knocking out the windows until he fell asleep in the middle for the floor. So his wife was greatly distressed, and his children were very frightened.
The moral of the story, Thurber says, is you may as well fall flat on your face as bend over too far backwards. Even a good thing—the lesson of Thurber's tale is that even a good thing has to be kept in perspective.
That is my message in this testimony. It isn't hard to imagine that it would be a very good thing to considerably reduce personnel turbulence in Army maneuver units. The important thing is to keep it in perspective, not overdo it.
Page 51 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Towell can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Mr. HEFLEY. I think we have had exceptionally good testimony this morning from all four of our witnesses.
Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. I feel like I received a firehose of knowledge this morning. We could have a full hearing on any one of the testimonies today, and I appreciate it. Because I have so many questions, I will do my best to limit my comments to just a few.
I was impressed, General Keane, by your statement that we must define our enemy, and it appears so often that we have not done that very well.
I am also concerned, and it may be very sadly true, that we are in for a long, long war which will dominate the 21st century. It is interesting to note historically—and a Major by the name of Nagle wrote a book comparing the British experience in Malaysia against our experience in Vietnam, and based upon literally the centuries of the type of occupation and small wars that the British have been doing through the years.
Page 52 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General Scales, I couldn't agree with you more on the knowledge. We have been doing a lot of work together on the military education, and you have been a major part of that. We appreciate it so much. I am concerned, from my observation, our wonderful officer corps does seem too dang busy to learn. And I don't know how you fix that. Between the wars, between the First and Second World War, we had these Army officers, no billets for them, so many of them would end up in schools or as instructors. The poster child is Troy Middleton, who spent 10 years in the classroom, between wars, either as an instructor or as a student. He was, of course, the commander during the Battle of the Bulge, the corps commander, if I am correct.
Colonel, you remind me of the historian Littleheart's comment: The only thing more difficult than getting an old idea of a military mind is putting a new one in. And I hear—I think that is correct.
And, thank you for your excellent presentation. I hope we can keep these things in perspective as we move forward. It is our job to raise and maintain the military. Hopefully we can do it correctly.
Let me just ask one question, because I know other questions will come up. Colonel, how would you have prepared our Army for the aftermath that we are facing today? You may or may not know, I sent two letters to the President and the rest to the Pentagon, one on September the 4th, 2002, another one 2 days before we actually began the invasion, on being careful of the aftermath because of the cultural problems.
I spelled out pretty much what is happening today. Not that I am a seer, but it wasn't brain surgery to know that the Middle East is the Middle East, and we are getting our tow end of that. So how would you have prepared if you had the knowledge at the time? How would you have prepared our Army for the aftermath that we are fighting today. And I will leave that. That is my only question, because I know others have questions.
Page 53 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Colonel MACGREGOR. Preparing the Army for the aftermath involves a different force mix than the one that we ultimately used to prosecute the war. It begins, first of all, with an understanding of the enemy that you are actually facing, to which General Scales referred to earlier.
One of the problems that we have had, goes back to 1991, was a tendency to always impute to the Iraqi enemy a level of capability that he never possessed. Iraqi forces in 1991—and I was under fire, I personally led an attack in a battle called the 73 Easting. Two cavalry troops and I annihilated a brigade, a full-strength Republican brigade, 93 tanks, over 100 other armored fighting vehicles in a little less than half an hour. Why? Because we were a European force. We had superior technology, but we had a different culture, a different way of life, and we were dealing with large numbers of people who were tribal, family-oriented, completely disinterested in cooperating in the sense that we think of it.
But we tended to gloss over those things in 1991 and pretend that there really had been a great and powerful army in front of us when there never really was. And we grossly underestimated ourselves, especially at the level where you do the fighting, and that is one of the reasons that when it all ended, we decided to enshrine the old Army that had won this great victory in perpetuity as the answer to all future fights, which, after all, would always have to look like Desert Storm.
That is part of the problem, this cultural mindset that says this worked, and habitually senior officers historically want to go back to whatever they thought worked and will use it again.
Page 54 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And some of the same assumptions about what the Iraqi enemy could actually do were very prominent in the many, many months that led up to the ultimate campaign. There were always debates about what can they really do? What have they really got? The truth of the matter was they had very, very little, they were extremely weak. There was an unwillingness to consider the possibility that this entire campaign would come off very quickly, and that you would be faced with the problem that you are talking about.
So the first question is what do you want to use for a force mix? And one alternative that we absolutely dismissed that we should have kept in mind was to take a different force. It was very heavy in armor, mobility, advancing very, very rapidly, straight into Baghdad, ignoring everything that we possibly could on the way up there, avoiding any fights with the Iraqi Army because we had an interest in preserving as much of it as possible so it would be available to work with us in the aftermath. That was number one.
Once that force arrived, moved right into the city very quickly in the hopes of capturing as many of the top people as possible before they could blend into the population and disappear, the top cadre; and to understand that the top cadre was the problem, that most people in Iraq ultimately became members of the Baath Party for the reason that most people in the German Democratic Republic became members of the Communist Party there or the Communist Party in Poland or even the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, because it was the only game in town. And if you didn't join it, your children didn't go to school. Your family wouldn't eat. You wouldn't have a job. Not for any committed ideology or any other reason.
We could have at that point then prepared thousands of light infantrymen to be flown in quickly to Baghdad for the purposes of immediately going onto the streets and enforcing a new order. We could have given new rules of engagement to our soldiers early on and said, once you get to Baghdad, by the way, here is a map. This is where we want you to go. These are the various ministries we want you to capture and occupy. And we are going to send a couple of tanks and a couple of Bradlees to each of these key buildings.
Page 55 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And our PSYOPS personnel and civil affairs personnel, who, by the way, did a brilliant job all the way up to Baghdad, should have had very, very explicit instructions to ensure that the population was informed of what was expected from them so that once we arrived, the police understood that we expected them to stay on duty, to assist us in enforcing order; that the population understood what would and would not be accepted; that if, in fact, you committed acts of criminality, you were going to be shot, but if you showed up on the streets with a weapon, you were going to be shot. Very specific rules of engagement.
Now, this is not new, as you know as an historian. The Russians did this in Eastern Europe. The Germans did it in every country that they occupied. We did it as we moved into Germany. We had thought these things through, we had issued directives, we had told people where to go. This was not done.
By the way, those things that happened in 1944 and 1945, for instance, as we moved into these countries, did not all happen because President Roosevelt or Secretary of War Stimson gave specific instructions; he gave instructions in the broad strategic sense. Those things were done by the general officers who were in hand, who had the responsibility to think these things through and make these things happen. We focused inordinately on a campaign to get there, and once we arrived, we hadn't thought through any of these things. A 30-day period , as you know, ensued of essentially chaos.
So the first part was organize the force to get there quickly, a force that can't be stopped, a force that for all intents and purposes makes resistance futile. Then position the large quantities of light infantry that you absolutely need in the aftermath, as the British taught us repeatedly, to make those patrols, make sure the rules of engagement are done, and then have a rotational system set up to get the people who are out on the patrols out of there after 6 months.
Page 56 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The British in Northern Ireland, for instance, in Ulster, where they made a host of mistakes from which they learned a great deal, initially had people in Ulster for a year, and they had problems with post-traumatic syndrome, suicide and retention, and they finally realized that there are a vast difference between the intelligence analyst who sits in Londonderry, or, in our case, the intel analyst who sits in Baghdad or in Qatar, who must be there for a year because he is tracking the 10,000 Iranians who are infiltrating over our borders into Iraq to create chaos—he has to be able to track those people, he has to be able to understand what they are doing—and the soldier who day after day after day must go onto the street, never knowing who is going to walk up to him, put a pistol to his head and blow his brains out, or whether he might walk past an Improvised Explosive Device (IED).
We didn't set up a system so that we could rapidly get people doing those kinds of jobs while keeping the continuity at the level that was so critical to our success. In essence, we didn't think through most of these things, which is remarkable, because we have a history of having done these things very well.
We actually did these things very well during the Korean War. During the Korean War, for instance, Douglas MacArthur was criticized very heavily by the Truman administration's State Department because his first action, once we landed at Inchon and had retaken Seoul, was to reinstall Syngman Rhee, the unelected leader of South Korea. The State Department said the man is not elected, he can't hold this position, get rid of him. We have to have democratically elected person. General MacArthur said, ''That is true, and that will eventually happen, but Koreans must be governed by Koreans, not American, and we have to fight and win this war.''
Page 57 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We forgot that Arabs ultimately must govern Arabs. We could have rounded up not exiles from outside the country, but people right there, general officers who did not fight, who were willing to cooperate with us. We could have forced to reconstitute as much of that Army as possible, as quickly as possible. It was the only national institution in the country, and we didn't do that.
Mr. SKELTON. My last question: Why didn't that happen?
Colonel MACGREGOR. Sir, I can't answer that question.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Skelton, would you yield a moment?
Mr. SKELTON. You bet.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I would suggest to you that that information and that suggestion was given to Ambassador Bremer. I can tell you because members of this committee did it, in Baghdad after the war, and in detail, and indicated to the Bremer regime, keep these people in uniform, keep them, put them to work, get the biggest Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) operation that you can get going. Don't bring in foreign corporations, don't bring in other people to do these jobs, keep these people paid and working. Those suggestions were made.
The thing that irritates me—and I appreciate your yielding—the thing that irritates me, people said that, who anticipated, who knew? I am telling you those suggestions were made, and they were made directly to Ambassador Bremer, and they were ignored by the administration.
Page 58 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Colonel MACGREGOR. Well, first of all, I appreciate that insight, but I think we are talking about two things. We are talking about preparations that the military needed to make, independent of whatever should have happened later on. In other words, there are many, many things that we needed to think through, because the warfight itself was always going to be relatively short, and we didn't do that. We had a lot of time to think about it, many, many months.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Just one further point then. The suggestion was made before it started, here is what would happen. There would be a lightning strike from Kuwait into Baghdad, and then the war would start, and that was rejected out of hand. I can tell you, that is the specific language that was said, was said by me among others, and I wasn't the only one, that said that was going to happen?
What we said is that because of the capacity of the United States Armed Forces, we would move from Kuwait to Baghdad with lightning speed, and then the war would start. So nobody can say at this stage, with any kind of veracity, I can assure you, that we were all in the dark about this, or that we didn't anticipate it. Members of this committee, I can assure you, did their homework ahead of time, paid attention to people like yourself, and had made those observations. The problem is the politics of it prevented that from being implemented.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Schrock.
Page 59 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCHROCK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for being here. And there are so many comments that you all made, it would be hard to pick a couple, but you have given us a great number of things to think about, and some of the things that you said could have been said at a hearing during the Vietnam War. It just sounds—so many of the things sound so familiar to me, and I think, gee, why haven't we learned some of these lessons? And, General Scales, and General Keane, you really touched a nerve on that one.
You are an Army colonel, but you have obviously raised a good son who—I am a retired naval officer, by the way—who decided to go into the Navy. I admire you for that. I thought he might have been going to the Naval Academy, but I don't think that is the case, because I saw a wedding ring on his hand.
Colonel MACGREGOR. No, sir. He is at the Naval Academy.
Mr. SCHROCK. Are you married? Oh, okay, all right. Wrong observation. You are going into a great institution, and your father has raised you well, I can assure you.
In the 2005 Army, the statement described a rebalancing of the Reserve and Active Duty forces, which entailed restructuring 100,000 Reserves and National Guard billets to increase the military police, civil affairs and Special Forces, and these are skills which are in notably short supply in Iraq, as you have all discussed, in choosing which specialties to increase and to decrease. Could we be in some way preparing for the war that we have just fought? That is number one.
Page 60 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Number two, do you believe that some aspects of this transformation may fall into that same trap?
And number three, is it conceivable that there are other areas where a different type of conflict may demand greater levels of other types skills, different types of skills, and if so, how can we anticipate which skills we might need in the future?
That is an awful lot, but if you can all comment on that, I would appreciate that.
General Keane.
General KEANE. Sure. Okay. I will start so my colleague can have an opportunity to add it.
First of all, at the outset we have to be clear about the performance of the Army Reserve and the National Guard, and the stress and the commitment we are asking for them is absolutely marvelous, that what we are receiving from these young men and women, many of whom, if were here to talk—I mean, they did not envision the length of these commitments and the intensity of the commitments that they are involved in, but nonetheless have really stepped up to the plate.
While I was on Active Duty, we essentially gave, before we went to war in Afghanistan, just about every National Guard or Reservist just about 30 days from alert to mobilization. And despite the fact that we probably knew we were going to war in Iraq for somewhere near 7 or 8 months, we gave them on average about a week. And I saw thousands of them, some who had only received notice and they were gone in 24 hours from their employers. They were not able to prepare their employers properly. They were not able to prepare their families properly in their rush of equipment to the port, and had none of the configuration that we would have liked. And that whole world war or Cold War mobilization process we have got is broke, and I know that the institution knows that, and they have got to fix it. So that is a start.
Page 61 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The skill matches that you mentioned is wrong as well. We had created an overdependence on our reservists and the National Guard to help the Active force early in a war. Now, it was done for a lot of reason. We don't need to address those to take up the time. But the fact of the matter is we cut too much into the Active, and we cannot even deploy to what essentially was a small-scale contingency in Afghanistan by a relatively small force without an overdependence on our Reserve components.
You have got to stop it. We should be able to do small-scale contingencies without that kind of a call-up, without relying on National Guard or Reservists. The Active professional force should be able to handle it. The Department knows this, and we have got to fix it, and the skill matches in there are wrong. We obviously do not have enough military police, intelligence, civil affairs, et cetera, and those numbers have got to change.
The other thing is as I left Active Duty and get more introspective, and you can look back on your institution a little bit more, you know, without the humdrum of 15-hour days and 6 days a week and a war on your hands, it probably would be useful for us to relook the entire model. You know, I— because the Army model of attempting to organize around the divisions in our National Guard and Reserves, and train those to a level of competency, and then in theory move them to a combat zone, the level of preparation it takes to do something as difficult as that exceeds the norms in the world that we are working in in terms of the conflicts we have. It is an old model. It is not useful anymore.
And I look at our other sister services, and there is no USS Reserve or National Guard ship reserve out there in the Navy, and there are no fighting wings in the Air Force either that fight as Reserve or Guard wings. But yet we hold onto this in the Army, and we organize around it.
Page 62 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I think a more practical approach would be to organize much smaller organizations that can be inserted and integrated with Active component organizations, and, therefore, their utility would be more pragmatic for us earlier. And in certain skills I think why would you organize around an organization to train. What you are really going to use is you are going to use those—the people as fillers, Apache pilots, Black Hawk pilots, and the rest you could clearly integrate into and expand Active component units and do it rather readily.
So I think some of the model for all of this needs to be relooked as we move forwards. Some things immediately, as I said, have to be fixed, and then I think we should take a hard look at what the future is.
Mr. SCHROCK. And I agree with everything you said, but the political process gets in the way of a lot of that. I believe your former boss General Shinseki made it clear that he felt when he was asked how many people he thought it was going to take to maintain after Saddam was toppled, how many people you would have in the country, and he was roundly criticized for that.
So it seems like that when Active Duty people at the higher ranks give their opinions on what they think based on the training they have had, they get criticized and removed. That is a problem as far as I am concerned, and now that you have all——
General KEANE. Well, with regard to the Reserves, the issue—where I guess it gets politicized—and, by the way, the cooperation that we have in this institution, the Army, among the three components, the Active, Reserves and the National Guard, has never been better.
Page 63 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCHROCK. I agree.
General KEANE. I mean, I dealt with this intimately myself. We are at a level now where we can have genuine disagreement without getting a divorce, and, in the past, that is where it always led to. Noncommunication, fractional relationships. Now we have disagreements. We understand it, but we still rally around the decision that is made, and that is not the way it was just 4 or 5 years ago. But the fact is that when you look at the organization of the Guard and Reserves, their flags are very important, and this is where it begins to get politicized because of the association with State militias, the adjutant general and Governors.
You could keep the majority of the flags in terms of organizing yourself for training, but just make certain that you are organized to deploy forces differently in combat, but hold on to the flags as a repository for staffs and organizations that are provided oversight and direction and guidance for training. I think there is a way to deal with the political issue that is real, and if you don't see it as real, you are not going to be successful in making change. You have to tip your hat to it.
Mr. SCHROCK. And I agree with it. The Army or all the services, the generals as such, disagree and come to some sort of a conclusion; but when it comes to the whites, the suits, the civilian people, that is where the problem is, and they need more—I think attention needs to be paid to you all.
I know my time is up, so, yes, sir, General.
Page 64 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General SCALES. Very quickly, when you look at structures, Congressman, you have to balance them with the nature and character of the war you are fighting. Recall in the first Gulf War, the Reserves and the National Guard were called up, went to war for 6 months and went home.
This is a different war. This is a war that may last a century.
Mr. SCHROCK. I know.
General SCALES. And history tells us the evidence of hundreds of wars is that long wars are best fought with professionals, so you are left with two choices. Choice one is increase the size of the professional force, or two is in essence to professionalize the Reserves.
Mr. SCHROCK. Right.
General SCALES. And essentially that is what you have done. Particularly the National Guard and Army Reserve have bifurcated into two different groups. You have the old-line traditional militia on the one hand, and on the other hand you have a long-term professional force that is a long-term professional force by any other name. The only problem with that, of course, as you know, is that if you don't have the support to maintain a Reserve force in the field for long periods of time, they become the canary in the mine.
Mr. SCHROCK. Yes, that is right.
Page 65 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General SCALES. Precisely. So you have two choices: Either increase the size of the professional force to accommodate this new era of warfare, or you professionalize a part of the Guard and Reserve. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle.
Mr. SCHROCK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Ortiz.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you for your testimony this morning. Mr. Skelton mentioned a few minutes as ago that the Army is breaking or is broke. I seem to believe that. I mean, with all the deployments, and then you hear from the Pentagon that they are trying to move people from the Air Force and people from the Navy and put them into the Army. What kind of training are they going to get? I mean, it is a big difference from, you know, being in the Navy and the Air Force and then moving them to the Army.
Sometimes I wonder if we are putting too much on our plate. We talk about the branches coming up. We talk about transformation. We talk about bringing troops from Korea, bringing troops from Europe. I mean, sometimes I feel that maybe we are putting too much on our plate that we won't be able to digest or do something prudent or do something fair. Maybe you can touch on that view.
General SCALES. That is absolutely right. One of the classic mistakes military organizations make is chasing too many missions with too few soldiers. It is a two-pronged problem. Number one is the Army is too small; the Army and Marine Corps, the ground forces which consist of those four components, the Army, Marine Corps, Special Operations forces and the Army Reserve, simply too small.
Page 66 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The second point, exactly as Doug Macgregor is talking about, is that many of the forces that we do have are—are not proportionate to the demand. I mean, let's face it. We have an Army. The infantry force in the Army today is about the same size as the New York City Police Department, and no wonder we are chasing missions. This is an organization that would fill half of Redskins stadium, and yet they are deployed to 120 nations in the world. Every division of the Army is deployed and will be deployed again, and the Marines are in a similar fix. This is not rocket science.
So there are two choices: Increase the size and capabilities of the force, or decrease the number of missions. My view is, and I think my colleagues share that, that Afghanistan and Iraq are not flashes in the pan. They are not something that we will wake up to some morning, and that type of war will be gone, and we can get back to the war of— wonderfully netcentric types of wars that we all used to love in the Cold War. Those days are over. So we have to wake up, make the commitment that is as much human as it is technological, because that is the type of war we are fighting right now, and make the adjustments now. Otherwise, the canary in the mine is the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard. We are seeing fractures there already. Over time that sort of thing can always spread.
Colonel MACGREGOR. If I could very briefly?
Mr. ORTIZ. Yes, sir.
Colonel MACGREGOR. The strategic reorganization that is currently under way, that is bringing forces back from Germany, bringing forces out of Korea and so forth, all of this is years overdue. These things should have happened a long time ago. We are now doing them under great pressure because we have no choice in order to extract the manpower that we need.
Page 67 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Wartime is a good time to make some of these changes. War should do for armies what the business place does for business, the marketplace. I don't think that is happening right now. I think we are simply reacting on a case-by-case basis, essentially to put Band-Aids on gaping wounds. This is why I think before we start talking about adding troops, and I think we do need to add troops, we need to ask what kind of troops, where do they belong, and how do we do it? We also need to keep in mind that since 1991, the overhead in the Department of Defense, I am talking about your senior officer headquarters, single service headquarters, joint headquarters, all of these things have actually grown. At the same time the numbers of people in the armed services who do anything have gotten much smaller. Some of you may—you have heard something about the Thunder Run. There was a Lieutenant Colonel Twitty, who commanded a mechanized infantry battalion task force that was with the brigade from the 4th Maneuver Company Division that drove into Baghdad.
Colonel Twitty only had three maneuver companies, because in 1998, the Army cut 25 percent of that manpower. At the time the justification was we need the money to pay for digitization, something else that was never validated in true experimentation, by the way, because I watched it. That aside, we made that decision to cut the 4th Company. Colonel Twitty explains, you can read this in the article that was in the Wall Street Journal at the time, that he had to constitute the 4th Maneuver Company that he didn't have from whatever headquarters and logistical assets that were within his unit, and he talks about being very nearly being overrun at a couple of locations because of ammunition shortages and the fact that the 4th Company, which was ad hoc put together at the last minute, wasn't really designed to do the job.
This brings me back to my earlier point. We need a higher density of capability at a lower level. If we are going to add to the force, let's make sure that is where we add it. Don't add to the overhead. Every time I turn around, we are adding another headquarters, we are adding another flag billet to an existing headquarters, We are standing up some new bureaucratic entity. This is all nonsense.
Page 68 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
If you look at the British Army—and the British Army by no means is a model for us, believe me, but they have done a few things right. And one of the things that they have done in the British Armed Forces, they got rid of, for instance, their single service war colleges. They couldn't afford them. They don't have them anymore. They are gone. Everything is joint in terms of the war college.
Second, they had to squeeze out fewer combat from fewer spaces. Hard decisions; do you deploy and fight, do you really go anywhere and do anything, or do you sit here at range control at Fort Hood? What do you do? And when the answer came back, well, in Cheshire this man really doesn't have to be in uniform. They eliminated him, and they replaced him with a permanent civilian.
Now, some of that has to happen. We need to look at that. Our focus needs to be in these formations to build this standing force that we desperately, desperately need. So that is the third thing.
The third point I want to make is to go back to something that was said by your colleague that was very important. If I took 500 policemen off the streets of Calgary, Canada, and I send them some morning to Rio de Janeiro, and I said, get on the streets of Rio, police these neighborhoods that are among the worst in Rio, they would fail. Of course, they would fail, they don't speak Portuguese. They know nothing about Brazil. They don't understand the people. And then if I said they are failing, let us send 5,000 more, that is the solution. If you sent 5,000 more, the criminals and the people living in those neighborhoods would begin to build alliances against the foreigners in their neighborhoods. This is the fallacy of flood the country with American soldiers.
Page 69 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In fact, from the very beginning a lighter presence than the one that we had was needed. Again, I go back to the British Army experience in Ulster. They started out by incarcerating thousands of Irish Catholics without proof. They broke into Irish Catholic homes to find weapons. They abused the Irish Catholic population. The IRA was a very small entity with only minimal support. The British Army managed to recruit thousands for the IRA.
After a couple of years of this blundering and figuring out that they had made terrible mistakes, they backed off. They stopped it. They realized that breaking into people's homes to find one weapon in one city block wasn't worth the effort, that that wasn't going to work, that you needed a lighter presence, not a heavier one, and a more focused presence so that you could ultimately separate the people from the population that you were really interested in defeating, because the mass to—the population was the sea in which they swim.
Now, if we go into Iraq, when we got into Iraq, we were organized into these large division sectors. Reasonable? Take a major general and say, you are the governor general. You are now in charge. Make things happen. And what does he do? He does the best that he can with the money that he is given. Soldiers, most of the time, though, know what are their principal resources? Bullets and guns. How much do they know? How much do they understand? Do they know the local sheik? Do they know the local and tribal and family relationships? Do they understand the consequences for things that they may have done?
For instance, in the Muslim world, if you show up and you have no hair on your head, people think that there is something satanic about you. I do, too, by the way. No, I am only kidding.
Page 70 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
My point is these kinds of cultural things are important. They are very important, how you speak, how you act. The British warned us about these things. We could have opted for a lighter presence. And, by the way, the U.S. Army has a doctrine called Internal, for internal defense; things that we have done very well in Latin America, by the way, with a much lighter presence, with fewer people who do, in fact, understand. We could have maintained strong mobile reserves to deal with real opposition. That was another alternative as opposed to flooding various areas, and at the same time we could have concentrated real combat power in those areas where we knew we had problems, as opposed to putting people in places where, quite frankly, as we were told repeatedly all through 2003 and the spring of 2004, there was no problem. There is no problem in northern Iraq. The people there are Kurds. That is not a problem area for us. Our problems are in the center, and to some extent in the South.
But my point is simply there are alternatives to the way we did business. We didn't examine those very carefully. Now we are beginning to back away. I am not sure where we are headed right now. I don't see a coherent strategy aimed specifically at crushing the insurgency and turning things around. I can't detect it. But I do know that what we have been doing hasn't worked very well, and it was always unrealistic to expect American soldiers from Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati to show up in Iraq and to supplant the local police and to supplant the local military. We don't do that very well. My Arabic is terrible.
Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. I apologize for having to not be present at all of the testimony and the previous questions.
Page 71 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I was very much intrigued by some observations that General Keane made and General Scales made, and I would just like to ask a question relative to that. General Keane noted that we had to fight the Nazis because they were going to take over all of Europe, that was their stated goal, that we had to fight the Communists. We won that war in a different way, but we had to fight them because they were going to take over the world. And we now have Islam, and Islam is fighting with us because they feel threatened by us. They felt threatened because their culture, they felt, was at risk. And General Scales emphasized over and over again how important culture was.
And my question is could we avoid a lot of bloodshed and a lot of fights in the future if we could somehow get the message over to them we were not a threat to their culture? Except for the fact that they control most of the world's oil, as far as I am concerned, they can go their way and do what they darn well please, and I don't care. Now, how can we convince them that we are not a threat to their culture so we don't have to spend this 50 years or 100 years or something you suggested fighting in this war?
General KEANE. Well, the simple answer is we are absolutely are a threat to their culture. Capitalism is a threat, democracy is a threat, personal freedoms are a threat. The values that we hold dear are a threat to the 7th century model that they have, which was an expression that you saw in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Mr. BARTLETT. If we aren't pushing those on them, I understand, I believe that we have a vastly better model, and I think that we ultimately will—will dominate. But why do we have to go to war over this? Why can't we let them do their little 7th century thing in their part of the world and we do our 21st century thing in our part of the world?
Page 72 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General KEANE. That would be nice, but the fact of the matter is that the world is so interdependent, socially and culturally, that these values and ideas are exploding all around them, and they are penetrating their everyday lives, and they see it, and they want no part of it. And I believe the people are—who are purporting to defend against these ideas, you know, clearly have political objectives. They have an ideology. Most of them are thugs, to be sure, who carry out these kinds of acts and perpetuate them politically.
Mr. BARTLETT. But aren't we further from them than almost anybody else who shares our culture, and why should it be us, not anybody else, who is fighting this war, if indeed the war has to be fought? When I look at the map, Germany, France and other countries are a whole lot closer to them than we are.
General KEANE. Well, to be frank, I agree with that. I personally believe we have done a horrible job in explaining what this war is about and defining it properly to the American people in a comprehensive way, straight-talking with them, straight-talking with the Congress of the United States so it can be persuasive what this is about, and that we can— we can enlist the assistance of other countries in the world to help deal with this problem. And we—something happened after 9/11 when we were on top of this very well, in my judgment, to where we are today. We backed away from it, I think, because of political correctness. I think we backed away from it because of fear of uncertainty and the unknown, and we took a much more conservative, marginal approach to the problem as opposed to our comprehensive, straight-talking approach to it.
Mr. BARTLETT. General Scales.
Page 73 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General SCALES. Yes. If I could just give you a military perspective on that, sir, you know, we have soldiers deployed in 120 nations around the world, and very few of them are generals. They are training teams. They are young soldiers who are on exercises. Oftentimes they are young soldiers who are soldiers going to schools overseas. It could help a lot if we did a better job—back to my point to you earlier about culture—if we did a better job of turning our soldiers, training our soldiers, educating them to be as much ambassadors in these part of the world as they are, you know, armed men in a foreign country. A lot of it has to do with perceptions.
You know, the perception of the United States over the last year and a half has shifted enormously from this post–9/11, from the sense that we were a Nation that had been violated now to a sense that we are a Nation that violates, and one of the ways you can soften that impression, perhaps even over time turn it around, is to do more of this engagement.
To give you one quick example, there are 1,100 foreign area officers. These are officers—sort of a global scout that I told you in the U.S. Army. Of those, fewer than 100 are Arab speakers, 1 in 10. So how good are we in the Army with—permeating is a better word than infiltrating, but overlaying ourselves in some of the countries that are not militarily confronting us right now? How good of a job have we done over the last couple of years in turning these soldiers into ambassadors? I am not sure. I think the answer is, perhaps not as good as we should.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Page 74 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would concur that the cultural aspects of this war are enormously more important than the military aspects of the war, and we are committing enormous resources to the military aspects and little or nothing, I think, to the cultural aspects. Thank you very much for your testimony.
General SCALES. Thank you, sir.
Mr. HEFLEY. Dr. Snyder.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
One of the questions I have, or observations, when we talk about transformation, to me transformation means big change, and lessons learned means not quite so big changes. And we had an issues forum here a couple of days ago on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the lessons learned there that could be applied to Iraq.
Major General Darden and several of the others were very clear in their view that we did not take the lessons learned from Bosnia and apply it to the experience in Iraq. I found, Colonel Macgregor, what might have been done from the get-go when Baghdad fell really distressing.
I mean, we are having another memorial service today in Arkansas for the loss of a troop, and you hear a different approach in your view; the history and background was out there to advocate for an approach and perhaps a better way of doing things that might have saved lives. It is distressing.
Page 75 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So my question is, we are talking about these big changes we call transformation, but why—what can we do to see that we do a better job of getting lessons learned from the conflicts we have had in the more recent past? We had a Gulf War air power survey that everyone seemed to like. We have not done anything comparable to the current Iraq war?
General SCALES. Let me just start with that, Dr. Snyder, because most of what I have done over the last 14 years is lessons learned and trying to translate lessons from one conflict to the next conflict. You are right. We have done a poor job of that.
What is ironical is we have done a wonderful job of collecting the data. No one does that better than us. What I mean is sending out teams, absorbing the data, taking soldiers out of the line, asking them just what went on, convening seminars like you have just discussed to try real hard to apply those lessons and internalize them. We don't always do a good job of doing the second- and third-order assessment and analysis to translate those lessons, say, from Bosnia to Baghdad. It doesn't work very well. It is not a one-for-one, if/then, action/reaction type of thing. So it takes intellect. It takes reflection. It takes some time out of the line, so to speak, to try to make something of that and make those—make those sort of intellectual leaps in order for those lessons to be applied.
I will give you one quick even more dramatic example. The most successful urban takedown probably in the history of the United States was the U.S. Invasion of Panama. If you look at many of the lessons of things that went wrong in Baghdad went right in Panama. Of course, I realize it is a much different scale, but the things that General Thurman did and people like Bill Hartzog and others did to very quickly transition a strategic takedown into a change of civil authority and a restoration of order in Panama, I think, was done brilliantly. And I did a piece on that when I wrote a book about the lessons learned from the first Gulf War.
Page 76 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Very little of that actually permeated into the preparation of phase 4 of this war. If there ever was a one-to-one translation of lessons learned of actions to be taken, was the similarity of how we did phase 4 in Panama versus how we did it in Baghdad. Let us face it, in Panama we went to phase 4 in 3 days, and it was done very well.
So you are absolutely right.
What is the answer? The answer, I think, goes to our institutions, that we treat the reflective study of campaigns in an organized and systemic manner, and we build the mechanisms into our learning institutions to translate that very quickly into the future for us. Right now it is not—it is not as efficient, and it is so fraught with friction right now and service specific issues, that it is very, very difficult to do.
Dr. SNYDER. You know, Major General Darden, the first thing on his list was the first thing you have got to do is physical security and guard weapons caches so they don't get picked up by people and used against you.
General SCALES. That was the lesson in Bosnia.
Dr. SNYDER. By the way, it was the same lesson in Panama.
General SCALES. Was isolate the dignity battalions, disarm them, keep them in their camps, don't let them get out in the civil population, so the first person the people on streets of Panama City saw was an American soldier. Didn't happen this time.
Page 77 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. SNYDER. You brought up, General Scales, that your comment was about language skills, that I was thinking about over the last couple of days, actually before reading your discussion about language skills. I took myself back to my Marine Corps boot camp days, and if you spent 1 hour after dinner and evening with each platoon in a low-keyed environment—Platoon 29, which was mine at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) at San Diego—you have been designated as a Farsi platoon, you are going to spend 3 months at boot camp, and then your 2 months or whatever at Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), but for 5 days a week, for an hour a day, everyone in this platoon is going to learn Farsi. 2060, you are Arabic; 2061, you are French. And it seems like we talk about transforming the military, we have to think about transforming the soldier, too, under all of that equipment. I think what you are talking about with regard to culture——
General SCALES. Across the board, Dr. Snyder. I will give you one quick example. Congressman Israel and I went to a strategic war—a specific war game not too long ago, and the operational environment was in the Middle East, as I recall. And we asked the question, who do you have in this game who is from the region? I mean, in fact, I think the setting was in Iran, if I am not mistaken. Are there any Iranians here in your red team? Are there any Iranians that are helping you understand the nature of your game? Are they advising you? He said, no, no, no; we tried that a few years ago, but these guys just got too disruptive, so we don't do that anymore. Yes, but that is what war is, disruptive, and this type of war is the most disruptive of all.
So, you are right. The whole idea of immersion in foreign cultures is something we have to do from platoon through Army, and in all of our institutions. We are an isolated country. The language most of our students in college speak is Spanish. And we have trouble associating with these regions of the world that are very foreign to us. We have to go the extra mile in order to do it.
Page 78 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Chairman, this whole issue of lessons learned, I think, is a huge, huge issue. A lot of us being— whining over the last couple of years about the lack of congressional oversight, but it seems to me in the area of lessons learned, it is something that Congress can play a big role in, in lining people up here, not only telling us how you have learned, but training, training for the future, and we do very, very little of that.
Thank for your indulgence.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HEFLEY. Yes.
Mr. SKELTON. Along that line, General, tell us why it didn't happen. Tell us why it didn't happen. The proper thing happened in Panama, Bosnia. Why didn't it happen this time?
Colonel MACGREGOR. I think it is an institutional problem, Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Well, it is more than that.
General SCALES. But I think—I think that once the war is over—two things. First of all, once the war is over, the first point that lessons focuses on is what new end items do we need to buy. Do we need a new tank? Do we need a new helicopter? Do we need a new fighter plane? What does that war tell us? Very little of lessons learned, to my mind, translate into what Dr. Snyder was talking about.
Page 79 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. Yes, but, my gosh, people were looting, tearing the place apart.
General SCALES. Yes, sir, and by the way, they tried to do that in Panama, they tried to do that in Bosnia, but we had the institutions in place to prevent it from happening.
Mr. SKELTON. Why didn't it happen? Why did——
General KEANE. Let me comment to that.
Mr. SKELTON. Jack. General.
General KEANE. Let me add to, because, you know, I participated in this process. And, you know, this represents the space to the intellectual capital that we expended to take the regime down. This represents the space for the intellectual capital to deal with it after.
I mean, that was the reality of it. When I look back on it myself, and having participated and contributed to it, one of the things that happened to us, and I will just speak for myself, I don't want to speak for others, is many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be.
Mr. SKELTON. We are all going to be treated as liberators, right?
Page 80 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General KEANE. That is correct.
So, therefore, the intellectual capital to prepare ourselves properly for an insurgency was not there. Nor was there—there were very few people who actually envisioned, honestly, before the war, what we are dealing with now after the regime went down.
Mr. SKELTON. I don't know that much about the Middle East.
General KEANE. Right, agreed. So the conventional wisdom was that we would have a stable operation that would be more akin to what we would do in Kosovo, but on a longer scale. And we would be very much involved in political and physical reconstruction and maintaining some law and order with the absence of competent police.
The looting and the lawlessness that ensued as a result of it went on for a shorter point of time that—I think, than what people advertised, but nonetheless, it did get away from you. And it got away from us for a number of days and for about a week, because there was fierce fighting for a short period of time in Baghdad, and the soldiers were dealing with the rules of engagement that did not change quickly enough to accommodate it. In other words, they were looking for people with weapons versus people with desks or people with artwork, and if the person at the desk wasn't threatening them, they weren't going to bother with them. And eventually the leaders changed, but unfortunately not fast enough to deal with it.
The more serious problem was being properly organized to deal with an insurgency, and we didn't recognize that until somewhere about midsummer that we had an insurgency on our hands. We had lawlessness. We toppled the regime in April. We had lawlessness and looting in May. We had targeted violence against us in June. It doubled in July, it doubled in August, and it increased again in September, and a steady state thereafter. And obviously we had our hands full, and we did not see it coming, and we were not properly prepared and organized to deal with it.
Page 81 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, the good news is that force there has given us the quality of leaders, is enormously adaptable, and they have reorganized themselves and, I think, acquitted themselves pretty well in dealing with this. But we could have done far better for them if we had properly prepared them for what the reality is we are dealing with.
Mr. SKELTON. I am not going to belabor the point, other than to say we have a lot of young folks that paid the price for that lack of foresight; am I correct?
General KEANE. Right. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. I am not going to belabor the point. I just interrupted. Go ahead.
Colonel MACGREGOR. Sir, may I make one quick comment? This lessons learned thing is a very important issue. A month after Iraqi Freedom, at least the initial phase was over, and we were in Baghdad, I received a phone call from the office of the Secretary of Defense, for whom I had done a lot of work in the previous 12 to 14 months, and this particular gentleman, who was very highly placed, asked me a question.
He said, we have gone back and we have looked at the casualties taken by the Marines and the casualties taken by the Army, and we don't see that there was much difference in the the number of casualties taken by either force. And since the Marines didn't have as nearly many tanks and armored fighting vehicles as the Army, we have concluded that we don't need that much armor anymore, and that we can do these operations in the future with light infantry.
Page 82 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. That is a problem.
Colonel MACGREGOR. And it was an example of where your preconceived notion of what happened takes over and ultimately obscures the reality. The reality was that wherever you had armor on ground advanced. Wherever you did not, things would come to a halt.
The 101st had an enormous problem until we sent a armored task force to it, after which it became quite effective. But until it received that armored task force, we didn't get much out of the 101st. Very simply, people with rifles that are not integrated with armored platforms with real firepower and protection get killed. The same thing was true in the Marine Corps. In fact, my friends in the Marines were furious in the Marine infantry regiments because they said they got tired of following around M1 tank battalions. They said, it is annoying; all we do is follow the tanks around.
Well, my point is that the lessons learned thing is a cultural problem. You are going to see what you want to see as opposed to what is reality. It is a dangerous thing. You, gentleman, have to be sensitive to that.
Quick point on Arabs. We have a bad habit of generalizing from the European experience especially to everything else. The Middle East is, as many of you have already pointed out, radically different. In 1991, after the war was over, my unit, the 2nd Squadron, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, had to go up and relieve a brigade of the 82nd. This brigade had pulled 10 kilometers south of the demarcation line that was established, and the reason they did that was that Talil airfield, which was mentioned earlier here, was still in the hands of the Iraqi Republican Guard.
Page 83 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
When I went up there, I asked them, the demarcation line places them south of that demarcation line. Toledo belongs to us. Well, they have got some tanks up there. There are several hundred people up there. We don't have any tanks. They didn't. They were digging in their 105s, and it was a light infantry outfit.
So when we went up to take over this area that borders on Nasiriyah. I sent one calvary troop up there, and I told the calvary troop commander, take Talil airfield, kill anybody that gets in your way, and clean the place out. Fifteen minutes later we had killed 50 people, taken 300 prisoners, and destroyed the wheeled French armor imports which were up there that the Iraqis were using.
Subsequently, as soon as we had done that, the population of Nasiriyah came out after this blitzkrieg in Talil yelling, George Bush, George Bush, we love George Bush. I am sure they did. They certainly didn't want to be in the path of that armored force that went into Talil, and I am sure they thought al-Nasiriyah was next on the menu.
Ultimately, we never had any problems with al-Nasiriyah, but my point is this is a strange place. It is not like the West. People there think differently. They react differently. They smell fear, and they respect strength, and power legitimates. It is not our way. It is not our way of life, not our values, but that is the way it is.
Mr. HEFLEY. We have a 15-minute vote and two 5-minute votes. How many of you plan to come back? Do you plan to come back? Okay. Good. And can the panel stay? Why don't we stand in recess.
Page 84 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Do you want to go ahead, Mrs. Davis? Do you want to go ahead beforehand?
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would love to do that if I may.
Mr. HEFLEY. We will let Mrs. Davis go ahead. We will wait until the next bell, and when we hear the next bell, we have to go.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. I really appreciate that, and if colleagues wanted to stay for a minute, I just really wanted to alert you and beg the indulgence of my guest today, who is one of the women who is here from Iraq, who has been sitting and listening to our democracy during the course of this hearing, and I just wanted to thank her very much, because I know it has probably not been nearly as fascinating and interesting to her without translation as it has been to me. I think this has been excellent, and I wanted to just acknowledge her. Her game is Golizar Mustafa Madhur.
Would you please stand?
Ms. MADHUR. Golizar Mustafa Madhur.
General SCALES. [Responded with Arabic greeting.]
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This really has been excellent, and I wonder—particularly General Scales, I wonder if you could, for a second, address the issue of a civil defense corps here. We have been talking about a whole host of issues, I know, among lessons learned, I guess the question I would ask is can they hear you now? Are people listening?
Page 85 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General SCALES. That is an excellent question. It is kind of frustrating to me, the message I am sending, and some of the others in the committee have picked up on, have been beating on this drum for about a year and a half. The answer is because there is no large-ticket item attached to culture and learning and cognitive transformation, there isn't a lot of interest.
Two services have paid some attention to what I am saying, the Navy and the Marine Corps in particular. But the answer to you is, the answer is no. It is just not. It is not there. There has been very, very little of a reaction. But I think everyone, in all the services, understands the problem, and everyone is well aware of the cultural issues in this campaign. The problem that we have is no one knows what institution we need to go to in order to fix it because it is so diffused, and it is not tied to major programs.
My recommendation to the major committee would be that either this committee or some organization like this convene some type of seminar, some type of study that would allow us to bring all the disparate parts of this culture issue together, education, training, culturalization, all the different aspects that I have talked about, under one roof and to discuss it. But to approach this problem piecemeal, service by service, individual by individual, particularly during a time of war, is just, frankly, not only for me personally frustrating, but it has become just too hard.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. I have—one of the others. Do you see a civil defense corps in this country? Do you see people, young people, volunteering more for that kind of service as opposed to military service? I know, General Scales, you spoke about the global scouts, and it seems like that would be part of the State Department, but it is not happening.
Page 86 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General SCALES. Oh, no, I think it is part of the military, ma'am. I do. I don't think this needs to be—in fact, one of the problems we have had with global scouts in the past is it has only been part of the State Department.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Yes.
General SCALES. That is too small a slice of our culture to be effective, I believe.
General KEANE. My own reaction with that, most of us spent our adult lives with this age group that is out there, 18 to 24. Sometimes it comes under sufficient criticism, particularly back in the 1990's when it was so self-centered. But the young people that are in our country today clearly have very high ideals and motivations in terms of wanting to make a contribution and wanting to grow and develop themselves, and to be able to make that contribution. So I think these suggestions fit hand in glove with the motivations of our young people that are out there.
General SCALES. I agree.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you and the Corps for working with you all on that issue. Thank you.
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you, Mrs. Davis, and thank the panel.
Page 87 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We will stand in recess until we get these three votes out of the way.
[Recess.]
Mr. SAXTON. [presiding.] Let me, while we are waiting for everybody to get back, let me just ask a question here that is kind of curious.
General Keane, as you know, Colonel Macgregor has spent a lot of time here on the Hill talking about transformation. And he makes three points that I think are worth—certainly worthy of discussion.
One is that the culture of the Army, as was mentioned earlier today, particularly as it relates to the officer promotion system, ought to be looked at to change inasmuch as, in many people's opinion, the system inhibits creativity.
The second point that Colonel Macgregor makes that I think is very interesting is that the strength of the new brigades will be inadequate, and he made that point here earlier today.
And third, that systems developed like the Stryker, which you and I have discussed before, where we propose to spend $12 billion to create the Stryker brigades and moving to the FCS systems where the Colonel believes that we would be better served in doing a spiral development, which he referred to today as prototyping.
In each of these areas, culture, strength of the new brigades and in terms of the third, prototyping or spiral development, I think it is a stretch to say that we are in the Army plan today seriously addressing those issues.
Page 88 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Would you give us your take on it?
General KEANE. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Congressman Saxton. It is good to see you again.
I agree with some of what Doug has said, but not all of it. First of all, on the culture, I share that view, and I have very strong feelings about it in terms of our officers and leaders living in an environment where their ideas are welcomed and respected and we are able to have a stake in the future of the Army.
When I was a young major here for my first assignment in Washington—and I have only had two, you know—we used to meet on Sundays, myself and a bunch of other majors, and we kind of thought the old fogies who were running the Army did not know what they were doing, and we were just dying to get our hands on it. And we eventually became that ourselves, obviously.
So I mention it because I am respectful of the youngsters that are out there and their own commitment to the institution, both intellectually and passionately, and their willingness to accommodate change. And we should be more than willing to accommodate their ideas.
And that takes leadership from the top to establish that and has to permeate through the ranks. And it also, you have to have a value in different career patterns as well. You have to be able to nest a group of so-called intellectuals in your Army that are visionary and can take the Army in a different direction.
Page 89 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Most of us get promoted because of our effectiveness as leaders in running things. But there are a few out there who have the capacity to take the organization in a different direction; and when you recognize that capacity, you have got to continue to nurture it and develop so that it has a future. In other words, you have to promote it. It has to get promoted.
And we do not do as good a job on that. And that is a second thing, along with the cultural change that I think has to take place.
As it pertains to the brigades, I believe the center formation, the formation that we should be reliant on is the brigade formation; and it should be multifunctional and it should be combined arms. We can argue over the size of it. I would argue that it probably has to be larger than what is currently envisioned, but I believe strongly that the brigade, combined arms, multifunctional, should have flexibility.
Before I left active duty, for example, we were dealing with the 82nd, which was going to go back to Fallujah. They had been in the war and were going back, and I was the acting chief at the time. And I got a hold of some of the leaders and I said, Look it, if we are going to solve this problem in Fallujah, we should organize the initial brigade in there differently than what it is. Why don't we give it a Special Forces battalion to do its HUMINT? Assign it to the brigade commander, and also give it a civil affairs battalion to deal with the people and the civil infrastructure—both with the thought in mind that the Iraqis were the solution to everything in Fallujah, and we had to have an organization that was working toward that solution.
Page 90 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So I say that because I believe in my own mind that these brigades should be multifunctional and have capacities to put things in it that you need, based on the fight that you are dealing with, obviously organized around a significant amount of combat power, but also being multifaceted to be able to deal with others.
The Stryker brigades, I have always believed in the Stryker brigade and believed in the vehicle. So that is where I disagree with Colonel Macgregor. And I think the Stryker brigades will bear that out as they operate effectively in Iraq. Everything that I have seen to date indicates that, and we will see how it goes.
I am going over there myself on Friday for about 9 days, so I am going to get some insight into what has obviously taken place.
And in Future Combat System (FCS), look it, everything has changed since 9/11. As I said in my remarks, we are in a war, and it is a long war. It is imperative to fix this current force at a pace that is dramatically different from the pre–9/11 decisions. Therefore, you have got to bring the technology forward that is mature.
And the technology that is not mature or the technology that is at risk, I agree that we should prototype it and experiment with it and make certain that that technology is going to deliver what we think it is going to deliver and that we are not going to wind up throwing a lot of money down a hole, but just as important, wasting valuable time.
Those are my views. Thank you.
Page 91 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SAXTON. General Scales and then we will go to Colonel Macgregor.
General SCALES. Yeah, a couple of points about FCS. Recall the whole premise behind FCS was to capitalize on knowledge, speed, and precision as a means of substituting for mass, firepower, self-protection and shock effect. That was the whole point of discussion back in the 1990's when we came up with these concepts with the underpinnings behind, first, Stryker and FCS.
But exactly as General Keane said, conditions have changed. One of the conditions that we have to ask about is cities. I mean, there is no question to my mind—and Doug may disagree with this—but I am convinced that FCS in combination with air-delivered killing power and the other services can dominate the open battle; and I think, obviously, working with Abrams and Bradleys can dominate the open battle. It is when you get into closed battle in the cities that something like that concept becomes more difficult to deal with, simply because when you get into closed terrain, as we have seen, the old equities of mass and self-protection and firepower suddenly trump knowledge, speed, and precision, and your ability to see the battlefield diminishes.
The red zone goes from 2,400 yards down to about, what, 50 yards for RPG. So I think it is important—exactly what General Keane says—as we begin to see how the nature and character of war is changing in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to ask two questions. One is, is this going to last into the future and if the answer is yes, how do we modify or spiral these—Doug's point—the technologies to make sure that this system is still suitable?
Page 92 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But the three equities that need to be protected are, number one, the ability of the Army to maneuver to operational distances by air; number two, to fight its brigades; and number three, to do this joint interdependence that General Keane is talking about.
As to size, I have written a couple of times in books in the past—it is something that Doug and I have talked about. It is called ''the magic of 5,000.'' a foreign officer, a Chinese officer said to me, one thing about you Americans is, we do not listen to what you say; we watch what you do. And every time you deploy anything in the Army, it is in about the size of 5,000. Anything smaller than that is very difficult to sustain. Anything larger than that is very difficult to project. If you look at it that way, this organization seems to be a little light at 2,800 to 3,000.
The other criticism I would have, frankly, is a lack of aviation. One thing we have learned in this war and in other wars we have fought time and time and time again is that the Army is trying to push warfare up into the third dimension. Aviation increasingly has to become more and more organic and part of the organization. And to take helicopters and large UAVs out of that organization and put them somewhere else reduces the flexibility, the agility, and the bonding that is necessary to fight combined arms.
We say that it is a combined arms formation. It is, except it is absent one critical element of the combined arm which is aviation.
Mr. SAXTON. Colonel.
Page 93 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Colonel MACGREGOR. Just a couple of things. Let me talk about the culture last of all.
I think it is very important for the members to understand that I am not opposed to the introduction of some number of wheeled armored chassis into our inventory, provided they are deployed intelligently. I certainly would not permanently equip with them. They are not warfighting platforms.
The Army very wisely has deployed the Stryker brigade in an area where it is very unlikely to encounter the kind of lethality that if would if it were sent to Fallujah. I think people realize the limitations of the organization. The question is, do we want to spend $12 billion of the taxpayers' money and the Army's money on that particular initiative? And the initiative has some problems.
First of all, it is significantly over the contract stipulated weight of 38,000 pounds, despite a key performance parameter that was stated would be roll-on-roll-off C–130 deployable without waiver. Frankly, the notion that we would pile anything onto C–130's and fly them around the world is absurd in any case and unworthy of serious discussion, but that was the original stipulation.
It has to have a waiver and it is not roll-on-roll-off; and it is experiencing high operating costs documented by the G8 as much as $50 per mile in tests, could be hundreds of dollars per mile in Iraq.
Given the costs of contractors that we have in Iraq, parts in the $110 million reset bill that has already been identified by the Tango Automotive Command, I think we have a very expensive proposition here. I think you ought to look into it; I don't think it makes a lot of sense. Again, run 4- or 500 of these and use them and find out what they will or won't do. But let's not spend billions and billions and billions on this.
Page 94 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We already know we have serious problems with the mobile gun system. There are more promising chassis and technologies out there that ought to be explored. I would not advocate under any circumstances right now spending $12 billion on any one initiative that is platform-related. Things are just moving too fast right now.
The second part is this business of the size, and this goes back to my earlier comment. The Chief of Staff of the Army is in a tough position. He is caught between the Secretary of Defense, who is demanding more pieces, more brigades in order to execute a specific mission. He is also caught within the framework of some resource constraints which are understandable. We have to understand that.
But we are at a point now where we can no longer tinker on the margins of the old structure. We need to take out that sheet of paper, we need to figure out what it is that we need and then we need to build it.
Now, I am very pleased today to hear everybody say the brigade, it should be the level. The problem is, our brigades are still under full colonels; they have inadequate staffs. As we build complexity into these formations, they can't do the job. It is not because they are bad people. It is simply because when you want to integrate aviation, along with all the various arms of combat and psychological operations and military intelligence, and at the same time plug directly into a joint expeditionary force, you need a more experienced staff structure.
I was in the British Ministry of Defense in November. I was invited there because my work is extremely popular with the British, as it is with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and the British explained to me that they had looked at staff and command and control structure that I outlined in my new book, which essentially gives you a brigadier general in command, two full colonels, one is the chief of staff, one is the deputy commander, and then a staff of lieutenant colonels in principal positions.
Page 95 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
They said, you know, we only have one unit in the whole British army like that, and that is the Royal Marine Commando Brigade. It is only 2,200 men. But the reason we have that is that it must plug directly into joint and combined operations and conduct complex operations on the scale that you have outlined. But we have decided, based on our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, that we will now organize all of our brigade battle groups that range between 5- and 6,000 in the British army in exactly the same way with the same robust command and control structure.
We have career patterns that are bound up with the old World War II structure. With the structure, the career patterns, comes culture. It is inconceivable to many, many men who have served in the Army over many years and retired that you could have an army in which a full colonel did not command a brigade, in which a brigadier general commanded something larger, that the full colonel level of command vanished in favor of something else. The same thing is true when you go to the two- and the three-star levels.
One of the most important things that Secretary Rumsfeld has done, for which I doubt seriously that he will ever get a contract in the long run, but I think it is very important, in the transformation guidance of April 2003 he talks about a standing joint force headquarters. It is very important. It is a three star headquarters. It is not single service; it is not Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine. And it is designed to take over command and control expeditionary operations. We have been talking about it incidentally for several years now and little has been done about it.
It needs to be stood up. It needs to be established. The services will never step up to do that because it threatens large numbers of single-service headquarters. The only way it will happen frankly is if you gentlemen, along with your colleagues in the Senate, stand up and say, Damn it, establish it; and then report back to us in 6 months what you have got and whether or not it works, and an independent assessment is done.
Page 96 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The whole idea behind the things that I have advocated is to plug into that to drive the jointness down lower in the Army. But the only way to do that is by having that robust command and control and authority at a lower level than is the case today. So that is my concern about the brigade organization.
And, again, let's figure out how many of these we want, what the content ought to be, and then we will turn it over to you; and then you tell us how many of these you really want. How many are we prepared to pay for? I think that is a reasonable approach. I think we ought to do it.
The culture issue is a big one. Any institution with the history of the United States Army which really goes back into the early days of the Second World War, more than anything else, develops over time certain attitudes. These attitudes are passed from generation to generation to generation to the point where each generation is like its predecessor. It adopts the ideas. It adopts the attitudes.
This is a big problem. And the only way that will change is if, ultimately, different kinds of people to some extent, along the lines that General Keane mentioned earlier, are introduced into the process. Normally that only happens from the outside.
Mr. SAXTON. Or after you lose a war?
Colonel MACGREGOR. Or after you lose a war or sustain a significant defeat.
Page 97 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Israel.
Mr. ISRAEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, I have found this to be one of the most enlightening hearings that we have had. I appreciate you gentlemen hanging in with us. I want to pursue our discussion of cultural versus situational awareness as has been stated. I have been attempting to climb a rather steep learning curve on this issue and have spoken to many in our military.
One 3rd ID commander told me when we were in Iraq—when I asked him how he spends most of his time in the day, he said well, probably do a lot of what you do as a Congressman. I go to ribbon cuttings. I am giving out small business grants, trying to develop infrastructure and build sewers and referee legal disputes between rival factions.
I said, General, I have enough trouble figuring out the politics of the Second Congressional District of New York. How do you figure out the politics of the Sunni Triangle? He said, That is the problem. I have been trained a warfighter, not a nation builder.
General Altschuler from Army Civil Affairs reiterated to me in a meeting that we train soldiers to kill and not to keep the peace. And General Garner said during one of our meetings that our National Training Centers—thanks to our National Training Centers, we have built the greatest generation of warriors in the world and now the next segment is nation building and stability operations. And as recently as last week at a breakfast the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, said to a group of us involved in national security issues, ''We spend millions of dollars on an F–22 so that we can have peerless air power dominance, and we put an 19-year old in a Humvee in an urban environment, which is far more complicated.''
Page 98 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Everyone across the board on both sides of the aisle at this hearing and outside of this hearing agrees that we have to effectuate a cognitive military transformation,that software is just as important as hardware is. But I haven't heard anybody tell us specifically how to get to that point. I have heard some of those impediments, and I would like to share some of them with you and ask how we get around them.
I have heard that there are career impediments. If you want to be in civil affairs, it is not the most glamorous and promotable position you can find in the military. If you want to be an FAO, there is not exactly a lot of reward and stability in being a foreign area officer.
I have also heard that the impediments are educational, that military education is just stuck in the Cold War and it just has not caught up with the changing nature of threat and conflict.
So my question to each of you is, do you agree that those are the structural impediments? Is it curricula and career? Are those the impediments? And what do we have to do to get around those impediments in order to effectuate this vitally necessary transformation of our military?
General KEANE. Well, I think those are some of them that you listed. I think they are accurate. Certainly, we have always had a bias in the military, not just in the Army, for line officers and for line sergeants, those who are more directly involved in the essence of warfighting, using the instruments of war to defeat an enemy and the skill sets to do it. And we shouldn't diminish the complicated nature of warfighting.
Page 99 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And while we are emphasizing the challenges that we are faced with nation building, warfighting is still very complex and requires a tremendous amount of education and cultural institutional support to be able to achieve the level of preeminence that the United States military has achieved in the last 20, 25 years.
The educational impediments are clearly there. We have not adjusted to the—as Bob talks about them, as to limited liability wars that we have been involved in in the post-World War II, Korean War construct. That is the reality of it. We are still faced with old mind-sets in dealing with that. We still have to have the capacity, as I said, to defeat another army on the battlefield. And by having that capacity and being able to take a regime down, that will always be a deterrence.
And it has to be realistic and our adversaries have to see it as realistic. It is not magic. It is something that is tangible. They can see the fire power and they can see the technology. They understand the effects of mass, and it should be intimidating to them to be able to take that on.
The reality is that we are fighting different kinds of wars, as well, and if we are going to continue to have the kind of global influence that America wants to have in the world in propagating democracy and protecting open market societies, then we will have to do this other business as well. And we are not doing that nearly as well.
Why? Because we do have the impediments. We do not have an educational and a doctrinal system that comes from the education to support it. There is very little introspective thinking that is going on in our institutions—not just the Army, in the United States military—to deal with this kind of warfare. So we have to educate and train a generation of officers and noncommissioned officers, and that is not something you do overnight.
Page 100 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
When you commit to education you are committing to time. That is such an important ingredient in that, but you have to start someplace. And we have to get started; that is the reality of it.
The cultural impediments are out there and we discussed a lot about culture today and the pejorative way we look at things. I grew up in an army and was a general in an army that always looked at central to the Army was fighting and winning our Nation's war. That was our battle streamer. And then we looked at everything else as a lesser case. So Bosnia, Kosovo, all of those other small little things—stability, peacekeeping—were always lesser cases, and small contingencies are lesser cases because they are not the big war.
One of the things that intellectually killed us in our army was Just Cause, 1989. We truly integrated jointness for the first time. We were very rapid in our delivery of combat power and we understood the dimensions of dealing with a population. We had a lot of things going for us. But in less than 4 hours with 27 attacks at night we took a regime down.
And it was the portent for the future. Nine months later Saddam came across the border and guess what? The United States Army got to ruck up and do the war it was trained to do for 50 years. And we got out and did it. And we got to do it on the most favorable terrain that exists on the face of the planet against some of the most favorable conditions we have ever had, Third World power, and it intellectually robbed us of our future because it fulfilled all the things that as an institution we wanted to do.
And we couldn't intellectually move after that. We were in a straightjacket. There were a number of people who saw the straightjacket, understood and saw the future and knew we had to get there. But we were in an intellectual morass there for a number of years as a result of this thing. We are out of it. We are coming out of all of that. It has been like fighting out of a bag, and we are coming out of that thing.
Page 101 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We are not there by any means. I think General Schoomaker, who is running the Army, clearly understands this. He instinctively understands it because of his background and also because of his capacity to see the future. And I think they are listening, the leaders of the Army, better to enlighten people that can help them shape the future.
So I have some hope here about this, and I think Pete Schoomaker is starting us down the right road here.
I share with you your concerns. Those impediments are there. And I think the leaders recognize them.
General SCALES. You said, what should we do, Congressman. Let me just give you a couple of bullets.
I do think we need to restructure to some degree. I do think that—that on the margins there are some units that need to be brought into the regular force—civil affairs, civic action, things of that sort. I do believe that Special Operating Forces need to be expanded. I believe there ought to be more soldier diplomats out there, and therefore, the tip of the spear needs to be made larger in relationship to the tail of the spear if we are going to build this cadre of global scouts that I mentioned to you, so some structuring to some degree. Do not turn the Army upside down but do the necessary structuring to fit the need.
Second, find a way within the institution to reward those who fit the model rather than punish them. I think that is probably the bottom line. Find ways, either through your action in Congress or through your influence in—within the DOD, to find ways to celebrate those who have the skills and the intellect to operate in this new environment, and highlight them in such that they are not left in the shadows to suddenly bubble up at the eleventh hour to try to pull our bacon out of the fire.
Page 102 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The next thing we have to do along the same line is tolerate malcontents. One of the things that always amazes me as a historian about the German army, both before World War I and World War II, is that was the most Prussian, the most ossified, the most reactionary military force on the planet. And yet they had an amazing ability to create islands of excellence. The Guderians and the Mansteins and they had an amazing, expansive ability to steal ideas from other countries and to inculcate those ideas. They had a very tight decision loop. But it wasn't done in the main army. It was done by the small cadre of—I use ''malcontents'' but small cadre of trusted agents in the general staff who were charged with change and were allowed to make mistakes and were given time for reflective study.
Here is the other thing: People who were listened to—listened to. One of the interesting things I find—take a look at this when you are out in the Army next time. Who are the people in the 1980's and 1990's who created air-land battle, now the current doctrine, that is beginning to do transformation? They were the majors and lieutenant colonels, guys like Wass de Czege and Holder and people myself and Doug and others who as captains and majors were heavily engaged in this process of transformation in the 1980's.
Who is leading the charge in that transformation effort now? It is Wass de Czege and Holder and Scales and Macgregor. Have we reached a point where our obsession with being too busy that we have failed to grow our seed corn? I mean have we built an army, as General Keane says, that is so focused on just operations? Do we reward the can-do, go-to guy, the guy that gets the job done, the quintessential S3; and at the same time we push aside the guy who is thinking in the future? Is the practical present trumping the intellectual future? I think the answer is yes.
Page 103 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So how do we fix that problem? Number one, we have to push the educational level down. One of the great things that Ike Skelton did in the 1980's was, he forced us to be joint. Now what we have to do is take that same energy and force us to be individual thinkers and to get beyond jointness at a much lower level. You cannot wait until your 18th year of service to teach an officer the nature and character of war, or for that matter, a sergeant.
So the learning system must begin at a much earlier age, at lieutenants, perhaps precommissioning, for sergeants at the grade of E6 and below. One of the things that I found interesting as an educator for many, many years is that we always underestimate the intellect of our officers. We always tend to think that they are not as bright as they are. Why? Because we never give them time and resources to study. So that is what I would do.
I think we have to study war seriously. I think it was Dr. Snyder back there who talked about lessons learned. That is just the tip of the iceberg because we are so busy running from operation to operation, from war to war, that we treat our study of war superficially.
In other words, the lesson learned from the first Gulf War is, the M1 tank needs a new auxiliary power unit; that is one of the major conclusions that came out of the war. No, no, no. What it means is, the nature and character of war are changing fundamentally, but we are too busy running back to the acquisition people to build a new APU and not thinking about about how the total force is being run.
The other thing we have to do is force reflection and we have to make time. I don't know how to do this. Mr. Skelton mentioned, in the 1930's there was time for officers to reflect and officers were rewarded for the quality of their learning.
Page 104 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The only way I know how to do that, Congressman, is for—frankly and sadly, is for it to be done from the outside. I am sorry. I cannot see—I can't see the academy, the military version of the academy being a self-corrective instrument. It is not just the Army.
I was intrigued by some of the stuff that is being put out by the Joint Staff recently about future concepts and doctrine. It is almost Talmudic in nature. It is the Sadducees and Pharisees scribbling away hour after hour, day after day, in a thoughtless, mindless effort to create an amorphous document that will make everyone happy. That is not the way to win wars, particularly when you face an enemy who is in many ways intellectually gifted in the sense that he has the ability to learn, to internalize, and to find ways to take us down.
I guess I have said too much.
Finally, maybe we need a learning czar. Maybe we need—without creating additional staffs, maybe we need someone who can herd the cats inside this institution, or some institution. Maybe we need a gathering of the clan, so to speak, across all of the different people who are involved in this cognitive and cultural transformation business just to sit down, if nothing else, to recognize the problem, identify those who are participating in it, and then tag those and give them a mission to accomplish so that we can see some results in the short term.
We do not have a lot of time. It is time to start turning this battleship.
Page 105 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Colonel MACGREGOR. Having learned on the Army staff that there is no horse too dead to beat, let me now put a bullet to the brain of this one. And I want to bring up the hated ''A word.'' accountability. You can do whatever you want with education. You can develop whatever courses you want to develop. You can pour money into anything. But let me give you an example of the problem.
General Shelton, I think it was, 4 years ago came to the National Defense University where I had recently arrived. He stood up in front of the graduating class at the National Defense University and he said, Two hundred eighty-nine matriculated and 289 are graduating. And he chuckled and he said, How about that? That is the problem.
What did it take to get there? I am sorry, it did not take anything except to be accepted by your superiors for some reason. It is very hard to put your finger on, to be perfectly blunt. And what did it take to graduate? Show up and breathe.
This is not going to get us anywhere. You have to have a system where people are examined. That is a legacy of the citizen-soldier war mobilization Army of George Marshall where we were putting out millions of people quickly and we had to give everybody enough so that they could get through. That was it.
We are way beyond that now. Every discussion here this morning has talked about the requirement for sophistication and understanding. So you have got to have accountability.
Accountability also extends to performance, performance whether it is in training and performance on the battlefield. If someone sends a convoy of Humvees and trucks down a road repeatedly and each time the convoy goes down it is attacked and someone is killed, the third or fourth time you have to ask the question, Who the hell is in charge of this outfit that keeps sending people down this road? And by the way, why haven't we gained control of it and what measures do we need to get control of it? And if we can't get control of it, maybe we should build a road somewhere else. And, oh, by the way maybe we should use different trucks from the ones we have got. Maybe we should go to the Union of South Africa and pick up trucks that are designed to deal with improvised explosives and mines because they had 20 years of experience with it. Maybe we need to look at different kinds of armored platforms to go along. Maybe we need the skies flooded with cheap UAVs that our soldiers can use. Maybe we should buy 50 or 60 Pioneers from the Israelis at 100,000 a pop, put them in the hands of captains and majors and lieutenant colonels so they this can see what is happening up and down these roads all the time. We have got to have some accountability.
Page 106 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me finish with this particular anecdote.
In 1942, Sir Winston Churchill flew down to North Africa to see a field marshal named Auchinleck. He was one of the most highly respected men in the British army. He was a wonderful man and had a wonderful war record and had been in the First World War. The problem was, he had been in command for 12 months and in the preceding 12 months, everything had failed. Every single time he met the Germans, this miserable little 35,000-man German army with 75,000 Italians, with his 250,000 British troops he failed.
Auchinleck looked at him and Churchill said, ''What are you going to do next?'' He said, ''I am prepared to defend the Suez Canal''. And Churchill said, ''You are fired''. And they put this man Montgomery in. And 4 months later—and everybody loves to pour buckets of abuse all over our friend Montgomery. He is not a popular fellow, thanks to Hollywood. But 4 months later everything changed. We did not hear any more about the 35,000-man German army.
My point is this. You have to hold commanders in the field responsible for what they do or do not do. It is not personal. It has nothing to do with that. You have got to break up a system that is built around aide-de-camps, special assistants, executive officers and speech writers who are repeatedly advanced to high rank on the basis of relationships they cultivate with senior officers.
Go back and look at Marshall during the Second World War. Anybody he thought was any good, who had talent, was shipped to the field, placed in operational command, and he either made it or failed on the basis of his performance out there. Marshall was one of the most ruthless people the United States Army has ever seen. No one in this room would like George Marshall. He was almost humorless. But he got the job done. And there was a lot of blood spilled, but we won.
Page 107 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And in the final analysis, what we are about is winning. And sometimes it is not a function of necessarily what somebody did or did not do. It may be a bad fit. You can actually pull someone out of one area, put them in a different area, and it turns out they are more suited to something else. We also did that. We had a man named Ernest Harmon, who was relieved of division command and placed back into division command. The British did some of the same things. It depends on where you are in the circumstances.
But it is not personal. As they say in ''The Godfather,'' it is business. We have got to get down to business. This is serious stuff; 8,000 casualties is serious stuff.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you.
Mr. Hayes.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, gentlemen. This has been fascinating, and I appreciate your candor. The only thing that really concerns me is how this is going to be reported in the press tomorrow. I hope they listen carefully to everything and get it right, because I think the discussion today is vitally important.
Getting down to the nuts and bolts for just a minute General Keane, are you very familiar with the 18th Airborne Corps of the 82nd? Talk about the firepower that can go with them and can be dropped out of airplanes. Can we do better? I am not trying to pick a fight.
Mr. SAXTON. Before General Keane answers, we have to be out of here in about a half-hour and that last set of answers took a collective 20 minutes. So we have Mr. Cooper and Mr. Taylor after Mr. Hayes.
Page 108 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General KEANE. Briefly, the 82nd had a battalion of light tanks that it used to have in its inventory; and those tanks began to outlive their usefulness, and what we failed to do was replace them with a comparable modern system.
The 82nd has always needed, as most parachute organizations do, some kind of armored capability to help it establish an air head, not to fight tank warfare because if it is going to get in a fight against a significant armored force, you are putting a division in the wrong place. But you want it to have an overmatch of people with guns, machine guns, RPGs that can establish roadblocks, fire from buildings. You want to have a punch-through capability, a penetration capability for your infantry.
So it makes sense that they have something like that. And in my view, it was a mistake to take it away from them and hopefully it is going to be fixed.
The 82nd also needs some kind of tactical mobility and survivability once they are on the battlefield in some vehicles that make sense, not necessarily for the whole division, but certainly for certain segments of their fighting force. And they can probably go to a pooling capability to do that.
Those are the two concerns I have about the division.
Mr. HAYES. We do not have an Armored Gun System (AGS). Does Mobile Gun System (MGS) get us to the finish line as it is presently constituted?
Page 109 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General KEANE. I am not sure. I think you have to take a real hard look at it. My answer would have been, you know, the AGS system I looked very hard at it, and I thought it was a first-class system frankly. But the MGS needs to be looked at very hard in terms of its capacity to do that parachute mission.
It has been assigned that mission, so there will be some prototype and experimenting being done with it to make sure it is going to be able to do it. Of course, the issue I think is whether it is going to fit to be able to do it.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, sir. In your capacity as resident malcontent, Doug?
Colonel MACGREGOR. I thought you were talking about those guys behind he.
Mr. HAYES. AGS? MGS? Can you drop MGS?
Colonel MACGREGOR. First of all, let me tell you what the soldiers coming back from Iraq tell me. I am talking about captains and lieutenants that talk to me, as well as some majors, lieutenant colonels, and believe it or not, even an occasional general does.
If your enemy uses a toothpick, you had better use a baseball bat. And I think that was General Keane's point on overmatch. The AGS is type-classified. It now has a hydroelectric engine. It can now mount a 120-millimeter smooth-bored cannon. It has now additional armor. It has got band track. It is an excellent piece of equipment. We should not buy 2,000 of them, because we can build better ones down the line, but we need some number of them. Yes, absolutely we do. And we need them right now and the soldiers would like to have them. There is no question about it.
Page 110 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
There is also something to be said for something psychologically that looks like a tank. Tanks have a big psychological impact. If it does not look like a tank, it does not get the same response from your adversaries. If you look at all of these limited wars that General Scales referred to, one of the things that you see repeatedly from prisoners of war is that, When we ran into the armor, we surrendered. When tanks showed up, it was over.
I don't think we should lose sight of that. And I don't think that we should necessarily decide that tanks are any different from bombers or aircraft carriers. They are not the answer to everything in the future. They have long-term utility if they are used intelligently and integrated properly within the force.
We should not dismiss what we have because it is old or it isn't brand-new. But the M8, in particular, is very attractive. The MGS has been in development over 4 years and it has—in my estimation, it has serious problems.
Mr. HAYES. Can you drop it?
Colonel MACGREGOR. At the moment, you can't.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. General, I want to thank all of you, saying I think you started at 9 o'clock this morning. To the committee's credit, I don't think they have ever given a panel an hour and a half to talk without interrupting. And I think that is a tribute to just how interesting you all were earlier this morning and all of this morning. Thank you for being here.
Page 111 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I really appreciate all three of you, and Colonel, you in particular. I think people who say what they think, we need more of them in this country and in this town and not fewer of them.
I definitely appreciate the generals being here. I find you guys much more free to talk once you take the stars off your shoulders. And we need to hear what we are doing wrong as well as what we are doing right.
One of the observations I have, and I will let you tell me how wrong I am, going back to the colonel's remarks that people who do not say what the administration, or whoever, want to hear don't get anywhere.
I distinctly remember General Shinseki saying he needed 200- to 300,000 troops to maintain the peace after the war. My observation, going to his retirement, was, the President wasn't there, the Vice President wasn't there. Secretary of Defense wasn't there. I did not see any under secretaries of defense there. Now, as an outsider, my observation was, A, he got retired early; B, the administration sent a message.
But going to the colonel's point, if you do not say the company line, your career around here isn't going anywhere or, in that instance, it may be over. How wrong am I in that observation?
Because I do think—as all of you have pointed out, I think the war was fought brilliantly. I think it is the failure after the war that has caused so many casualties and continues to cause casualties.
Page 112 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And in this book by Stephen Ambrose called ''The Rise of Globalism,'' he makes the observation that the first time we made this mistake about having overwhelming force, but not realizing it can't guarantee peace, was with the atomic bomb and the rapid demobilization after World War II. Because even some in Congress were saying, We do not need an army anymore. We have the bomb. All we need is an Air Force to drop it. And we learned quickly in Korea, and ultimately in Vietnam we learned that the bomb is not everything.
Going to that point that, A, people are afraid to say what they really think because of what happened to General Shinseki. Any validity to it?
General KEANE. I worked with Eric Shinseki for 4 years, and I considered him an outstanding officer and he retired on time.
Mr. TAYLOR. Couldn't he have been extended a year?
General KEANE. It would be very unusual, but there is a provision to do that. He would have to go to the President of the United States and get permission from the Congress to do it. There were a lot of challenges taking place at the time and there were certainly disagreements between the Chief and the civilian leaders in the Department of Defense. He chose to not invite them to his retirement, and that was his decision.
Quite frankly, I have always found in the institution there is room for people who speak up. Now, does the institution tolerate all of it? No. But is there room for that? Yes.
Page 113 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We wouldn't be where we are today with as quality a force as we have and people committed to this force, with the kind of talent that is in it, who have many, many options other than being in the military in terms of achieving a modicum of success in their lives. The quality of our NCOs and officers these last 15, 20 years is at an all-time high in the history of the institution. And I find it insulting to think that every one of them is a passive, go-along person afraid to buck the chain of command. Quite the contrary. I find them to be serious people, people of personal and moral courage and, obviously, physical courage, which is on display on a regular basis.
Are there institutional norms that shape our institution and pressure as a result of that? Yes, as there are in any large organization. But when you look at the quality of the people and their opportunity to influence that organization, I believe it is there.
My frustration with it has been with the intellectual side of it and not nurturing those who have large capacities to create innovative change in the institution; and because of those capacities, and maybe they do not run a particular organization as well as somebody else, we have a tendency to cast them aside, and we lose the benefit of that intellectual capital. We have to do better at that.
I also reject this sort of nostalgic notion about the interwar years and the great leaders that are produced. The fact of the matter is, back in the 1930's we started the duty day at 9, we finished at 4:30. We took an hour and a half for lunch. We actually rode horses sometimes during the lunch hour. There was not much quality training going on in an army that was less than 300,000. There was a lot of social interaction with each other.
Page 114 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This thing that we have out there today has been on an operational treadmill since 1989. We are a very, very experienced, high-quality, hard-working, intellectually engaged force. There has never been anything like it in our history.
The other thing is that what has given me such joy and satisfaction throughout my life associated with it is how hard we try to make it better. And we argue among ourselves about it, and we are willing to submit to some pretty decent scrutiny about what we are doing with it.
So my answer to you is, I do believe that this institution produces very healthy officers and noncommissioned officers who have the capacity to create change—maybe not as rapidly as people want it to be—and have the guts to say what is on their minds.
Are there some out there who kowtow to pressure? Yes.
One of the things that is resident in this town is that the numbers of people in Iraq is wrong. That somehow throwing more people at Iraq will solve the problem. I have always had the view that we could take the regime down with about the force we did. And so I was not for a much larger force to take the regime down, because I knew that if we integrated the force, using joint capacities and truly integrated, we did not need as many, as many of my friends in the Army would have liked to have had. That is number one.
Number two, what size of force do we need to conduct the operation that we have been doing for the last year? Well, Franks took a hard look at it before he left when he knew there was an insurgency. Abizaid, who is as intelligent an officer as we have ever produced in the Army, I talked to him on multiple occasions about that, and he came to the conclusion that he did not need any more people.
Page 115 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
You could make a case where you could do it with less, and what he needed was better intelligence. So we stayed at numbers we were at.
But then the other thought that is resident here in this building and in Washington is that Secretary Rumsfeld really is holding down the numbers. He does not want a larger force. Therefore, the generals, Abizaid and others, are kowtowing to that.
I find that so insulting to the integrity of those general officers, to John Abizaid, to Rick Sanchez, and now to George Casey. These men have put their minds on this, and they have used the collective wisdom of others to help them come to that conclusion. And I know—it does not—I do not doubt—I have had multiple conversations with John about this when I was acting chief—if he wanted more forces, all he had to do was say so, and they would be delivered.
A theater commander has enormous leverage during war for additional resources. He can get them. The fact of the matter is, he is held accountable to what he does with them, as he should be, as General Westmoreland and others were held accountable for additional resources that they required in the Vietnam war.
So these men out there are people of value. I do believe they have the personal and moral integrity to deal with these positions. Not all of them are as good as each other. There are obviously different capacity levels that are operating as there are in any institution. But basically, I think we are pretty healthy.
Page 116 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you. I would like to remind everyone that we must vacate this room at 1:15. There is a markup here at 2 o'clock, and we have to reset the room.
Mr. Cooper, you are the final man.
Mr. TAYLOR. Would that be the unanimous opinion of the table?
General SCALES. Two seconds. I agree with everything my old boss said. The only thing I would say is that I just wish that—oftentimes this team chatter occurs almost in spite of itself. I wish we had more flexible, more open means of communication at the lower levels, at the captain, lieutenant, major level. I wish we had—the two most popular Web sites in the Army are companycommander.com and platoonleader.com. We have lieutenants and captains all over the world chatting each other up and rich dialogue going on.
I just wish our institutions frankly and our units were more—''open'' is not the right word. More—more ''accommodating'' maybe, if that is the right word, to that degree of team chatter. Because it is team chatter; it is not people falling on their sword over programs, but it is the richness that comes from sharing ideas and so forth at the captain, lieutenant, major level. I never had an idea after I was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Everything I know, I learned when I was a young officer, when we all had the capacity to learn. I just wish we were a better institution at that.
Mr. TAYLOR. General Keane, just one quick follow-up. And I certainly respect you professionally and everything that you said.
Page 117 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But my follow-up question is, when we met with David Kay last September and he is telling us about these enormous ammunition caches that they have discovered that he knew the Iraqi insurgents were sneaking in at night and stealing weapons out of that went on to become IEDs, his direct words were, I am being told for lack of manpower, we cannot guard these caches.
Was that a poor utilization of the troops that were there? Or lack of manpower? Or a low priority given to guarding these caches?
General KEANE. If we are losing weapons and ammunition out of those caches, we should guard them. My initial response, I would have tried to guard those with Iraqi security forces because the guarding of a cache does not require the complexity and combat skills that you would need to defeat these forces that are out there. And until the Iraqis were better trained, I would have used those as a pool of labor to help do that sort of thing; that would have been my solution to it.
I don't dispute the fact that they needed to be guarded. I did not look at them. I have been there, and I only overflew them. And I did not intellectually deal with the issue. But I will take them at face value, and if that is the issue, then they should be guarded.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Colonel MACGREGOR. Briefly, let me tell you that General Keane's assessment of the interwar period is absolutely correct. There is a lot of romanticism that is on the street that I think is very misleading.
Page 118 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The other point I absolutely, totally disagree with is his characterization of his senior leadership and the how they get there, and anybody who reads my work knows that.
In the United States Army it has been my experience that your most difficult subordinate commander is your best commander. He is the fellow who raises all the questions. He always has a better idea and is always trying to figure out how to do it better. He is the first person we get rid of because he is not a team player.
That incidentally is a critical difference between the German army culture that was mentioned earlier by General Scales and our culture. We value the team player. We value compliance. We value conformity. We want to believe that the fellow working for us is our friend and will support us and be loyal to us.
It is a cultural problem that is not going to be solved unless there is an interruption in the system. We have been through these interruptions before. We will go through them again.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you.
Mr. Cooper.
Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I agree with the earlier comments. This is one of the best hearings we have had in the 2 years I have been on the committee, and I would like to propose three action steps as a result:
Page 119 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Number one, that the transcript be supplied to all members of the committee so that the many who are not with us could benefit.
And, number two, that we have the additional hearing on the Stryker and perhaps other vehicles. I know that the Chairman has had strong interest in that. Now that it has been battle-tested in Iraq, let's see what the genuine results are.
Number three, I would like to propose a stop loss order on the Pentagon, so that all the services of these gentlemen could be retained by the current military. Because, to me, if you ask why this is such a good hearing, there are several interesting factors.
Number one, there is no civilian from the SECDEF's office on the panel, so we are not getting a lot of spin.
Number two, you are all retired.
Number three, you are extremely knowledgeable people.
But I think one of the reasons for the wisdom is, we have a colonel present. For almost 2 years I have been agitating that we have witnesses who are colonels, majors, captains. And I asked Secretary Wolfowitz this one time and he said: Sir, they would just be harming their careers if they testified before this committee.
Mr. TOWELL. I am surprised he was that frank.
Page 120 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. COOPER. And I said, do you mean that the Pentagon would punish them for telling the U.S. Congress the truth?
General KEANE. Mr. Cooper, I did not realize that. I did testimony here 19 times. If I could have sent a colonel in my place, I would have gladly done it.
Mr. COOPER. I think another reason the hearing has been excellent is, very few interruptions. We appreciate the Chair's indulgence and patience and very few editorial comments.
To me, we are going to have to function as a committee. CSIS has issued a very damning report on the quality of our operations. If we are going to have a chance of standing up joint commands and taking the reform steps that are necessary each one of you has agreed will not come from separate branches of the military, this Congress, this committee, has to do its constitutional duty, which I am deeply worried that we are failing to do because we are like the services. We have a culture of ''yes.''
If you raise questions, you are not a team player. Some people here will even question your patriotism. And that is a culture that will lead to our demise as the greatest country in the history of the world. So I am proud of your work.
And my real question has to do with what General Keane described earlier as the intellectual planning to take down Baghdad and the intellectual planning postwar.
Page 121 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Why was there a thimbleful of planning for the postwar period? Were we deluded by the neocons? Were we seduced, as the earlier answers implied, that we were going to be greeted as liberators?
To me, the duty of a professional military man is to know the lessons of history, to plan for the future, and unless you are given a direct order to the contrary, to at least have a plan B if not a plan C.
We have gone so far from the Powell Doctrine with a clear exit strategy. Now we have apparently almost zero postwar planning. How could this possibly be in the greatest military in the world?
General KEANE. Well, that is a legitimate question, and as I said at the outset in response to another question, that mostly occurred because we accepted the belief that it wasn't going to be necessary.
Were there options? Yes. General Franks' people could talk more comprehensively to the numbers of options that they had in contingency. Certainly they were all there.
But what I was talking about is the genuine intellectual capital that went into it. The way the war was constructed to take the regime down, and now we look on very fondly because it went so rapidly. But we actually changed the way we fight to do that war. And there was a lot of criticism before we did it and, actually, while we were doing it in terms of not having enough troops to do it and so on.
Page 122 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So there was some rather dramatic change taking place in how we were prosecuting that war, and it unfortunately has been overshadowed by what has taken place. So that was one of them.
I think the other thing that happened to us—also, I was always curious about—is, as we were dealing with the stability operations, we brought on another command structure, so to speak, to deal with it. Initially it was General Garner and then it was Ambassador Bremer. I think while some of that may have had its place in time, I think when you are transitioning from a regime takedown to the beginnings of physical and political reconstruction and the stability of the people, you should leave the military commander completely in charge, so he can make that transition, and let him have the tools of the interagency to help him do that. That model we have been successful at in previous major wars in the 20th century. We separated ourselves from that and we stood Garner up and then Jerry Bremer to take his place.
One of the challenges I think we had—I remember when I was talking to General Garner in my office and he was laying out what his plans were and I said, Who are you working for? And he said, I work for Secretary Rumsfeld. And I said, You should be working for General Franks. You should be working for the theater commander who has control of that theater so that security, physical reconstruction, and political reconstruction are all connected to one another with one person in charge.
And so I think we went down a separate path and we learned another valuable lesson about unity of command. And it does not make much difference what the task is; we have all learned throughout our military careers that whenever you have challenges and you have significant tasks in front of you, you have got to have unity of command to apply to solutions to that task.
Page 123 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I think that was a second mistake that we had made that cost us.
Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know time is short, but I do think this is accurate. I don't believe that we have heard in this committee from one prior CENTCOM commander, which is an embarrassing lack of information if we are going to have continuity and understanding of this troubled part of the Arab world. Not only have we failed to hear from rank-and-file soldiers, airmen and Marines, but to not even have heard from one prior CENTCOM commander is an amazing lapse of oversight by this committee.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SAXTON. My recollection is that General Franks was here at one point while he was CENTCOM commander. So maybe it was after he retired.
Okay. Listen, thank you very much for being with us today. This has been most informative, and the give-and-take was great. The differences of opinion were noted and appreciated. And so we look forward to seeing you again in the future. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 1:12, the committee was adjourned.]