SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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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
HEARINGS HELD
JULY 15, 21, 2004
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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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
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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
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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
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HEARING:
Wenesday, July 21, 2004, Army Transformation: Implications for the Future, Part II
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 2004
ARMY TRANSFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE PART II
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
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
Curran, Lt. Gen. John M., United States Army, Deputy Commanding General, Futures, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command
Griffin, Lt. Gen. Benjamin S., United States Army, Deputy Chief of Staff for Force Development, G–8
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Schoomaker, Gen. Peter J., United States Army, Chief of Staff
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Skelton, Hon. Ike
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Serving a Nation at War, A Campaign Quality Army with Joint and Expeditionary Capabilities
Charts (Soldier's Creed, Our Army at War—Relevant and Ready, Areas of Immediate Focus, Structuring the Force, Evolving Army Transformation, The Army Campaign Plan, Current FCS Program, Acceleration Strategy)
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
ARMY TRANSFORMATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE, PART II
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House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wenesday, July 21, 2004.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:08 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order.
This is the committee's second hearing on Army transformation. We began the series last week with a panel of distinguished outside witnesses, and, today, we are going to hear from the Army's senior uniformed leadership.
Our witnesses this morning are: General Peter J. Schoomaker, United States Army Chief of Staff, United States Army; Lieutenant General Benjamin S. Griffin, United States Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Force Development; and Lieutenant General John M. Curran, United States Army Deputy Commanding General, Futures, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. We look forward to your testimony.
At the beginning of the second World War, the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment, Custer's old unit, was armed with the 1903 Springfield rifle, the 1911 Colt .45 pistol and the 1918 Browning automatic rifle. By the end of the war, we had replaced the Springfields with M1 Garands, and the troopers were more familiar with Sherman tanks than with horses. The Army probably transformed itself more rapidly between 1941 and 1945 than at any time in its history.
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We believe it is self-evident that the Army must do so again. We must move from an Army designed to resist the Soviets to a force tailored to win the kinds of wars we have in Iraq and Afghanistan against enemies who ignore the international laws of warfare and amidst civilians who have a wide range of attitudes toward the United States.
The question, of course, is: What should that transformed Army look like? Some have seized on advanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, command and control capabilities as the ingredients of network-centric warfare. Others have focused on the need to deploy quickly across strategic distances and recommended a reconfiguration of our divisions into modular brigades. And still others have focused on the increased benefits of jointness to argue that the Army can shed certain capabilities in order to free up resources for what we would think of as non-traditional missions.
To its credit, the Army has developed a transformation plan to exploit every advantage in doctrine, organization and technology to build a new Army for the 21st century. Now, that said, I think we need to be cautious. Transformation is a good idea for the new capabilities it brings to the military, but it is equally important to pay attention to what we could lose in the process.
First, in the rush to embrace high technology and replace armor and firepower with speed and information, we may well lose the ability to engage in a traditional stand-up fight against either heavy or unconventional forces. I think our experience in Iraq when we saw some of the new and some of the old performing very well is a good illustration of that, where, while we validated the capabilities and the importance of things like precision munitions, we also revalidated the value of things like heavy armor.
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I am not the historian on the committee, but the ranking member from Missouri may recall the debates over battlecruisers in the Royal Navy at the turn of the last century. Advocates argued that their speed and maneuverability would make up for their lack of armor and firepower, but the Navy found out the hard way that its battlecruisers simply could not stand up in the slugfests that followed. Speed was not a substitute for armor when the enemies' salvos finally found their mark.
Second, we need to pay close attention to how the rush to embrace new technology affects our thinking about warfare. The intelligence problem we have in Iraq today is not solely the result of a lack of network sensors. As General Robert Scales pointed out last week, good intelligence on our enemy requires a solid understanding of what makes him tick, much of which you cannot learn through technology.
Because war is a human activity and not an engineering problem, there is no silver bullet guaranteed to make all our wars winnable and all our casualties low. We need to equip our troops with the best equipment we can, but, ultimately, their best defense lies in their ability to outsmart the enemy. I know our witnesses are on guard against falling into that trap, but it is a trap the entire national security community needs to keep in mind while we debate the pros and cons of transformation.
We look forward to hearing our witnesses as we move forward in this process.
So we are going to go to our witnesses, but, first, let me recognize my friend and ranking member, the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Skelton, for any remarks he would like to make.
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[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. Mr. Chairman, let me join you in welcoming General Schoomaker, General Griffin, General Curran for this very, very important hearing. We appreciate your calling it and appreciate the work that they do.
I was interested in your comments regarding my interest in history. As I have told you many times, I think everyone who wears a military uniform should be a historian as well, and so get ready for those questions when the question part comes.
Let me tell you I have been looking forward to this hearing. Some two weeks ago, we had a very interesting hearing with the Vice Chief of Staff, General Cody, and each time one of us asked him if the Army could handle the great demands that were being placed on it, he replied that the answer lay in the realization of the Army transformation.
Last week, we had a distinguished panel of outside witnesses who gave us their impression of Army transformation. They were a very thoughtful group of people. Now, as a result, we have so many questions about the Army's transformation plan that I hardly know where to begin.
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General Schoomaker, I commend you for recognizing the need to change, developing a vision, moving out smartly to achieve it. It is difficult, but thank you for doing that. This is the hallmark, I think, of great leadership.
Each of the witnesses we had last week expressed enthusiasm for a transformation that you have begun. Still, they had some cautious reservations, as you might imagine. For example, they were all concerned with the emphasis on the technology at the expense of the human component, whether it was the number of soldiers or the professional education or the internal cultural changes they believe the Army needs to achieve.
So, General, I applaud your initiative in setting this new course for the Army. I think it is past due, and I am not worried that the transformation is happening during wartime, as many, I think, would. As one of the witnesses noticed last week, it is during wars that militaries do transform to meet the new challenges, as the Chairman mentioned a few moments ago.
The First World War saw the tank break through the lines that had been stalemated for years. World War II saw the advent of the aircraft carrier emerge as the dominant power. But those sorts of wartime transformations took place at a time when the entire weight of a nation was behind the war effort. The whole of the country's economic might was then committed. The population was sacrificing daily.
Now that is not the case today. Today, the Army is fighting a war and simultaneously trying to transform within a set of domestic limitations and the constraints that they are on. So what you are trying to do is a bold move, and the Army is still going to come up billions of dollars short if we are not very, very careful.
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You are trying to make all this happen while staying below certain troop levels. Now we have had our discussion on this before, General. Constraints such as the limit on the Army's ability to experiment, to build new units, develop new operational concepts, to test them, all of them, in my opinion, create the need for additional troops. Quite simply, we just need those additional troops to help you do what you want to do.
That is why I worry about the Army today. Like I said last week, the Army is already stretched dangerously thin. It is interesting, Mr. Chairman, I heard yesterday from the National Guard back home in Missouri that their retention is, as a result of today's situation, sliding down here very, very fast, that some of the units in the Missouri National Guard are now down to only 80 percent when they were just a few months ago up to 100 percent.
The Army is thin, and not just the National Guard, but the Reserve and active duty. We need every pair of boots on the ground as well as every piece of equipment. There seems to be no elasticity, no capacity for that. So this is a pretty tall order, and we here in the committee want to help you, General, succeed in your efforts.
There is a difference between risk and gamble. Risk is one thing. If it goes wrong, you can recover. Gambling is something that is quite the contrary. So I hope we can work together on this. You can succeed in your transformation. We can win the guerrilla warfare, win the war against terrorism, which is the real war, and transform for tomorrow, a tall order, but, General, under your leadership, we can do it.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
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The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
And without objection, all your statements will be taken into the record.
So, General Schoomaker, thank you for being here with your team, and tell us what you have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF GEN. PETER J. SCHOOMAKER, UNITED STATES ARMY, CHIEF OF STAFF
General SCHOOMAKER. Great. Well, Chairman Hunter and Congressman Skelton, thank you very much, and distinguished members of the committee. I have submitted a statement for the record.
What I propose we do here, rather than each of us making an opening statement, I would like to take about 10 minutes and provide a briefing to the committee that will set the context for transformation, which I hope will help us frame where you would like to go in understanding what we are doing.
The CHAIRMAN. Absolutely.
General SCHOOMAKER. Thank you, sir.
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Of course, these charts, we can submit for the record as well.
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection. Absolutely.
[The information referred to can be viewed in the hard copy.]
General SCHOOMAKER. Thank you, sir.
First of all, let me say that we are in extraordinary times, and I have said it before this committee many times and in other places. I think we are in one of the most dangerous times of our history. We have an extraordinary opportunity here, in spite of the stress that the Army is under and that the Nation is under, for us to use the momentum and what we are learning in the current war on terror to help us transform and to provide some of the momentum and focus for our efforts.
But central to all of this and the reason I have the soldier's creed up as the first chart there—I know you all are familiar with this—is I just want to say that the great soldiers, the non-commissioned officers, officers and civilians, the sailors, Marines, airmen that we have currently engaged in the war on terror live this kind of a creed every day.
The center of this creed is the warrior ethos, and, in that warrior ethos, placing the mission first, never accepting defeat, never quitting and never leaving a fallen comrade is essential to what we are doing today and what I believe we will be doing for years to come.
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So, I am pleased to join you. I know you have been very outspoken on this and very proud of those that are serving our nation today in uniform and those that are out of uniform that are serving our nation as we go forward.
So, if you give me the first slide, a very simple cartoon, but starting at the lower left-hand corner of that graph, there is a straight line running to the cloud. That straight line represents, quite frankly, the path that we have been on since the end of World War II, when we had very clear focus on our principal potential foe in the Soviet Union.
That took the World War II experience that all of us are very familiar with in history, capitalized upon it and continued to refine our armed forces—across our armed forces, quite frankly—focused on an enemy that we knew a great deal about—or a potential enemy we knew a great deal about—and we optimized ourselves to be able to deal with that enemy.
That drove our doctrine, it drove the way we organized, it drove the way we trained, how we developed our leaders and, quite frankly, provided a singular focus to be able to deal with that. Most of the other kinds of things we dealt with as a nation, we tended to think of as lesser, including articles, you know, in the strategic context and felt we could deal with them if we could deal with the former Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, with the demise of this opponent, we continued on this track, and this cloud of ambiguity that you see there on that chart is upon us here. Inside of this, there is a great deal of uncertainty, there is a great deal of ambiguity, there is a great deal of asymmetry, and we find ourselves in our formations today somewhat disconnected and having to do things on the fringes and to disconnect and disassemble our formations to be able to deal with this threat.
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Along with that, an area in which I think is the greatest transformational challenge—is transforming how we train and educate, how we think, what paradigms we establish through our doctrine and training and education of our people, how our systems and processes work.
They have to be challenged, stood up on their edge and taken a very hard look at so that we can grow and develop the kind of leadership, the kind of soldiers, the kind of doctrine that is agile enough and flexible enough to deal with the wide myriad of challenges that we face. That is what that cloud of ambiguity there is.
But, throughout all of this, our Army has to be relevant to our nation's needs. It has to have the capacity to deal with what threats confront this nation, from the standpoint of the military, certainly, but also within the context of all elements of national power, the diplomatic information, the military and economic elements of power.
So what that arrow shows is this, an infinite process. The Army—and the other services, I would add—must be on a continual growth. I am not talking about necessarily in size, but I am talking about growth in terms of understanding and being able to adapt and respond to these threats.
The Army has two core competencies if you boil right down to it, and they are at the bottom of the chart. The first is to train and equip soldiers and to grow leaders, and growing leaders means growing leaders for the military as well as for this nation.
The second main piece there is that we must provide relevant and ready land combat power in the Army to the people that will fight these forces which are the combatant commanders and the joint team. The Army as an entity does not fight our forces. They are fought by the combatant commanders and the joint commanders that are out there.
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So give me the next slide, please.
That cloud of ambiguity is not going to go away. Quite frankly, I will tell you, in my own experience, this cloud of ambiguity started growing more than a quarter of a century ago, and I can talk about my own experience. You know, my view is it probably predates, but I think one seminal event was the 1972 Munich situation with Black September when the Olympic athletes were taken hostage and all that.
You can go up to 1976 with the Israelis at Entebbe and go to 1977 with the German situation in Mogadishu with the Lufthansa airliner and to our own hostages in Iran, Lebanon and all the rest of it, which I was intimately involved in, all the way up through the current.
So this cloud started forming and developing long before this major threat dropped. But how are we going to connect that line inside that cloud of ambiguity?
Let there be no doubt: General Shinseki started major transformational efforts in the Army that we are building on today, and he deserves a great deal of credit for setting the stage for an awful lot of the kinds of things that we are doing.
But during our transition, I asked the transition team to fame for me some really salient issues that we should take on. I brought some of my own, they formed up some others, and you see there about 17 focus areas that we felt we must address in the immediate sense and be the primary efforts as we started this major transformational program to help us connect the dots in that cloud of ambiguity and to get us back into a situation where we had the capacity within our force structure, within our force to deal with what we were going to see.
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Central on that is the soldier, which I have already talked about, and then the leader growing a bench, having doubts on that bench, and training and educating leaders, not just training them for certainty, but educating them for the uncertainties that we must face so that we have this capacity at all levels within our organization to make decisions and act in ways that are relevant to what we are going to do, the joint and expeditionary mindset.
It is very clear that this nation needs this Army to be able to fight sustained major land combat, and we are not going to uncover that capability. But we also must be more like pentathletes and decathletes and be able to deal at a very high level with other situations that we will face, other challenges, and, therefore, we must have a much more adaptable flexible organization as we go through this.
Therefore, you see things like addressing the renewal of Army aviation; and we can talk about Comanche and that decision, how that enhanced it; modularity.
You know, for instance, last year, we had six heavy divisions in our force. None of those divisions were the same. They were all different. So you could find in one artillery battery a certain number of artillery tubes, another battery in a different division that is supposed to be identical, a different one.
There were different numbers of companies within battalions, different numbers of platoons within companies. Every way you looked at it, there were nuances across the force. If you took a look at the two light divisions, they were different. Of course, the 82nd and the 101st are different. There were seven different kinds of aviation brigades in the Army, different numbers of Apaches in aviation companies.
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So, because of years of incremental change that ended up leaving us with kind of a disconnected trail in the way we were put together—a lot had to do with downsizing and resourcing; some had to do with incremental kinds of modernization—we found ourselves in a way that is very, very difficult to have inside the organization the kind of adaptability and flexibility that is required.
On top of that, we had a personnel system that was moving. In an Army of 480,000 people, we were making almost 296,000 individual moves a year within that formation. Forty percent of our discretionary moves were being made just to support Korea on the individual replacement system.
So, fundamentally, we are disadvantaged from developing the kind of cohesive teams that we need to introduce into combat with stable leadership cadre and with trained and equipped crews, squads, platoons, companies, batteries, troops, et cetera.
So these focus areas that we had here became what we are looking at, and we have been working those, and I will show you how that has transpired over this last year in a major way to connect and to get ourselves on track in this different world that we are in today.
Give me the next slide, please.
Here you see a pyramid, and this pyramid reflects what the challenge is.
At the top of that pyramid on the left side, you see the Reserve Components (RC)—this is the Army National Guard—and their responsibility under Title 32 is to respond to the 54 states and territories, those governors and Tatical Assault Group (TAGs), and to other kinds of emergencies in homeland security, homeland defense.
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The requirement today for them to be able to respond is in a matter of hours now, not in a matter of weeks and months and years, but in hours to be able to respond in appropriate ways.
On the right side of the apex of the pyramid, you see active forces, and those active forces now have to be able to respond not in terms of months, but in a matter of days and hours to emergencies, and we have to be able to do it in a way that balances our requirements for the home game with the requirements for the away game on this.
So what we need below the apex of that pyramid is a certain amount of depth, and that depth should be modular and it should be agile and it should be able to plug and play based upon how we have to do this. Therefore, we have to skin this cat of having this great disparity between the kinds of organizations that we have.
What we had to do was tear down organizations to build the organizations we need to go to war, as opposed to being able to play out of the chutes, and so our modularity and the way that we are balancing and pulling the enablers inside these brigade-type modules gives us that kind of agility.
If you go down farther, you will see down in there the kinds of special capabilities that are required, many of which reside in the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, some in the active, that are speciality kinds of things that are particularly useful for the stability and support operations and for homeland security and for the kinds of responses that we have.
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At the base of the chart, you see the institutional Army. There is a direct relationship with maintaining, recruiting, training and deploying relevant forces with an institutional base. This is our schoolhouse, this is our training base, this is the recruiting base and all the rest of it that comes out of, you know, the operating strength of the Army.
When you grow the Army bigger, there is a direct relationship in how much you have to put into the training base to be able to do that, and these things do not happen over a weekend. They are serious investments in terms of how we do that.
So, I just show you there that to have an Army that is capable of responding in hours, days and weeks to both the away game and a home game, and to do it in a way that is capable of performing at the high level of combat in integrated joint warfare where you have to aggregate major formations to fight peer competitors and, at the same time, have the joint and expeditionary kinds of mindset and capabilities that you can deal in joint task forces and smaller kinds of expeditionary operations, requires, you know, the whole complex of doctrine, organization, training, leader development, the way we resource with our materiel, et cetera, to be able to do that, and that is what we are working on.
Give me the next slide, please.
This is the continuum era from the current to the future, and one of the decisions that I made, that made a lot of sense to me working with the folks was—you might remember in the past, on the left end of that arrow where it says ''current'' today, we used to call that legacy; and then in the middle, we called it interim; and on the right side, we called it objective. I thought the terms did not lend themselves to what we were going to do, and that is an organization that is a learning organization in motion to the right.
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Who here wants to go to war in a legacy formation, one that is not being modernized, is not being upgraded, is not, you know, being kept up to the standards? Now that is not exactly what the Army was doing, but that is what the words said, and, you know, it is a concept that is tough.
In the middle there, in the interim formations, Stryker used to be on there. I will tell you that Stryker today is part of the current force and proving itself in combat, and it has a role to play. It is not the ultimate formation, but it is an important tool in our toolbox. It is telling us things, informing us about the future in ways that is usually important.
Then the objective force to me said it was somewhere we were going to go and stop, which, in fact, does not send the right picture because this is a continuum that will go on through infinity as we continue to meet future kinds of things.
So the deal here is, look, we have what we have today and we have where we are trying to go tomorrow, but we must be in constant motion up that slope so that today we have so much of our current and a little bit of the future, tomorrow we should have a little more of our future in that force, and, the next day, a little more of that future and continue to go forward. That is the kind of concept that we are moving forward with.
To give you the next chart then, this will put some meat on that concept. If you look on this, this shows you all of the patches in the Army, and I have testified here several times before the committee and said, ''Look, this year, when we finish the year, we will have increased the active Army from 33 active brigades to 36.'' At the end of next year, we will be at 39, and, at the end of the third year, we will be at 43. We have an option to go to 48 beyond 2006, out there in 2007 and beyond.
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This is just the first step in moving ourselves forward. If you go down, for instance, on that top line there, you will see the 10 active division patches. Those are the 10 active division patches.
Below those patches where it says ''Active Component Brigade Combat Teams,'' you will see the formations that we are pulling in under there. In some cases, that is going to four units of action underneath the division patch. In some cases, it is going from two. For instance, the 10th Mountain Division will go to three.
If you go down then and take a look at the Army National Guard, you will see their division patches. There are eight of them there, and they start in 2005.
Below them, you will see the Army National Guard brigades. You know, last year, we had 15 enhanced brigades in the National Guard out of 36.
That means we were resourcing 15 to be relatively ready, and the rest of them we were not resourcing very well. Not only were we not resourcing them, they were fundamentally hollow because there was too much structure and not enough people to fill the structure in those formations.
So it took us a long time to aggregate and fill these formations to be able to be useful in the kinds of things that we are doing today.
Down at the bottom, you will see the Stryker brigades in the brigades coming on. You know, we already have Stryker 1 in combat, Stryker 2 is outloading as we speak, Stryker 3 is coming together up in Alaska, and we will continue to march right across the way there.
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So that is the beginning, and what we are doing is taking our current kinds of equipment, our current formations. As I have spoken before, we are growing the Army 30,000 people. We are growing the Army as fast as we can grow the Army. It is getting bigger, and I am not just talking about their stop loss, stop move. I mean, we have 5,600 soldiers a day that are affected by stop loss, stop move. That is not how we are growing the Army.
We are growing the Army by increased recruiting and retention, and we are growing the Army for our current fight by mobilizing Guard and Reserves, and so we have over 600,000 people today mobilized and on active duty that are engaged in the war on terror right now. Inside of that, we are growing on this slope 30,000 additional. We may find out that we need to continue to grow, but the important thing is we are growing.
I think the discussion and the dialogue we have been having has less to do with the fact that the Army needs to grow and more to do with how we are going to pay for that as we do it. What is the way in which we are going to resource it? You know, should we encumber ourselves within the top line we have now, in the out-years with increased permanent end strength? That is the real issue because, if we are encumbered, we end up trading off our flippage and our modernization and our transformational capability.
So, if you keep that chart in mind, which is priming the pump by starting this modularity process, now take a look at the Future Combat System program (FCS) because this is where it is going, brigade modularity, brigade combat teams, Units of Action (UAs) are the start of it.
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Put that big chart up.
There are two charts here. The one on top was the way the Future Combat System Program was structured, and I want to make some points here. The probability of us accomplishing that program and Future Combat System on the top chart there, as you look at it and it goes from 2004 on the left all the way out to fiscal year 2014 on the right, was somewhere down around 28 percent chance of success the way it was structured.
If you take a look at the way it is currently structured because we have now made a program adjustment, we have in excess of a 70 percent chance of closure on that program on the bottom chart. It is exactly the same program going the same place, but it is structured differently in the terms of the way we are going to bring it in. The difference is that we are going to spiral capability into these brigade combat team units of action that we are forming now. We are pulling FCS capability back into it.
Now I would like to make a couple of points.
The first one on the top chart is that when we got out there to fiscal year 2014, of the 18 systems plus the network that were planned in the Future Combat System, by fiscal year 2014 on the original plan, we would only be able to close 13 of those 18 systems. It was never going to come to closure.
If you take a look at the network, that feedhorn in the middle that is kind of going through the units, which is arguably the most important piece of the Future Combat System, it was not even going to start affecting the current force until out in fiscal year 2010, and it was only going to cover what you see in the footprint of that feedhorn as it goes out to 2014. It was never going to cover the whole deal.
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If you look at the way we have adjusted the program, we are going to spiral those capabilities back into this force now. For instance, the 3rd Infantry Division that captured Baghdad was the only division we had that had embedded in it the satellite-based blue force tracking, you know, the integration of the red picture in it, because we put blue force tracker and put a bunch of things inside of that, as an addition to the 3rd Infantry Division for the war.
Today, we want to do that across these forces as we do it, and that is why you see that network coming in. So what happens is—You see those green blocks there in 2004 on the left. Go on the bottom chart. All of those green blocks represent a brigade, and you will see that—at the end of 2004, we will not have 33 anymore. We will have 36. There is 36 green blocks there.
Inside of those green blocks, you will see some of them are coded yellow. There are 11 of those. At the end of this year, we will have modulized 11 of the 36 brigade combat teams into the new UA organization.
If you take a look as it goes across, by fiscal year 2008, we will have modulized all of the brigades that you see there.
There are five red blocks down at the bottom. Those are the five brigades that we have to make a decision on at the end of 2006 of whether or not we are going to go to 48 from 43. That is the additional ones that we have a chance of building.
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But what is important here is, as you will see that on that chart, that, by 2008, we will have moved everybody into the UA kind of configuration, and we will have pooled the network capabilities, the top-down stuff on top of a greater percentage of those UAs by 2008. By the time we get to 2010, we have covered more.
By the time we are out in spiral three by 2012, we will have put that kind of connectivity. We will have now freed our ground combat units from being reliant on terrestrial-based, point-to-point communications. We will have now brought them into the global information grid and be able to pull down Joint Fires, pull down national-level intelligence down into our lowest formations, pull down blue force situational awareness, pull down red force knowledge, and we will be operating within a much better network capability. As you go all the way out across, you will see that.
Now, starting in 2008, you will see a purple square starting to appear. That is the first FCS capability where we will have three of the 18 systems in that experimental organization. It will continue out, and, in fiscal year 2010, we will have more purple blocks—you will see eight of them there—that now have four of the 18 systems in it.
If you go on out there to fiscal year 2012, we will have seven of 18 systems now in almost three times the number of purple blocks. By the time we get out here to fiscal year 2014, we now have changed a preponderance of the force into those, and they will have 18 of the 18 systems in those purple blocks. We will have closed the 18 systems plus the network by fiscal year 2014.
We will have our first full FCS-capable unit with the new technology, the new platform by fiscal year 2014. The next year, fiscal year 2015, we will build another one, and then two each year thereafter.
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The reality is, going to the point that you talked about, having armor and being able to do all the things we want to do, the M1 tanks, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS), the big five that we know of right now, our heavy capability will still be in this force out to about 2030 and maybe beyond.
So we will not be divesting ourselves, but we will be investing in this heavy force we have with these capabilities all the way out through this process. Until we are convinced that the Future Combat System is able to give us the equal-to-or-better-than lethality, equal-to-or-better-than protection, survivability, and all of the other things that we want, we will continue to invest in those systems.
This gives us a very high probability of completing the totality of this program to the standards that we are talking about, puts it into reality in terms of the available technologies, into the programmatics, the fiscal realities that we have, and the time that is available as we go out there through it, and closes the program, which is hugely important.
So I hope this helps a little bit, setting the context, that this is not running along here and then having to pole vault 17 feet to get to the next level. What we want to do is we want take ourselves into the future in a way that we can control that future and that we do not uncover our ability to fight from the very top and all the way down through it and to develop the kinds of formations and capability populated by the right kind of soldiers, NCOs and leaders that allow us to do the things all of us want.
That is, you know, the renaissance formation, the renaissance soldier, the renaissance leader, well educated, well trained and equipped with the very best technologies that this nation can provide. So, you know, that is kind of the baseline that we have.
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I apologize. You know, I have tried to make this as simple as possible so that we can discuss the detail later, but that, quite frankly, shows you from now to fiscal year 2014 and gives you a peak beyond about how we are moving up that slope on the current and the future in a way that has a high probability of closure, that will allow us to leverage the very best technologies when they mature and will continue to keep us relevant and capable to perform the nation's needs as an Army.
So, with that, sir, you know, I will terminate, and I thank you for your attention, and I will be glad to answer your questions. We all will.
The CHAIRMAN. Well, thank you, General, and thanks for having your team here and giving us a real good opening view here.
Let me go to your basic building blocks, these new modular brigades, which are kind of the heart of this transition. We are going to go from 33 to 36 and, ultimately, in the third year, we will achieve the last 4 for an increase of 10.
If you were going to compare those brigades that we are creating as opposed to the brigades that we currently have residing in these divisions, is there a difference in firepower, is there a difference in the number of battalions that you have in those brigades, and is there any weakness that is manifest if you have reductions in unit levels in those brigades? Is there any weakness or problems that you see there that we are balancing off against benefits?
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General SCHOOMAKER. I will start to answer your question, and then I will pass it to General Curran from the Futures Center. He can talk about some of the specifics.
But, first of all, the typical brigade in a division today is about 2,000 soldiers, and that brigade does not have in it the enablers that they will go to war with. Those enablers reside in the division base. The signal battalion is up there. The DISCOM, the division support command, the division artillery is outside that formation. The reconnaissance is outside that formation.
All of those kinds of things that you would want to task organize inside that brigade before it goes to combat or outside the formation or up at the division base. So they do not live together, fight together, act together and all the rest of it.
Today's brigade typically has nine company maneuver elements in it. This UA that we are talking about here has 11 maneuver elements in it. Eight of them are fighting maneuver elements. Three of them are reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition elements that you would call cavalry in today's formation. They have fighting capability, but are hugely enhanced as you go out with things like unmanned aerial vechicle (UAV) and with enhanced optics and with all kinds of other capabilities that we would put in there to include the communications.
The CHAIRMAN. So you are not really subtracting any maneuver elements from the new brigades as compared to the old brigades. You are actually going to have a couple more.
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General SCHOOMAKER. We will have more companies, but they will be formed in a different way. We will have two battalions now of four companies, and we will have a reconnaissance squadron of three company-level organization troops.
We will have a brigade troops battalion that will have other enablers like human intelligence (HUMINT), counterintelligence, signal, engineers, and these kinds of things in it. Inside the brigade, you will now have a Joint Fires battalion. You will have a forward support battalion for sustainment inside that.
So the brigade, in fact, goes up to about 3,800 people. So the brigade combat team in a unit of action configuration has far more capability in it and is a larger formation that is capable now of acting on, let's say, a joint task force in a much more independent, self-sustained role than what your current brigade does.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay. If you took that, if you take the new versus the old, and you put it in what you might call a classic conventional situation, let's say, go back to Korea, handling some heavy North Korean units coming down into the Pusan perimeter, and you are having to take them on with heavy stuff, how would the new brigade stack up against the old brigades in handling that conventional attack?
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, in a general sense—and then I will turn it over to Mark Curran here—what you would do in that kind of a conventional setting is you would aggregate more of these brigades together and place a division headquarters, which we are calling UAX, over the top of it that has enhanced command and control capability. It ends up with far more command and control nodes and a lot more enabling from the sky and from over the horizon.
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What it allows you to do is optimize your precision. It allows you to optimize your maneuver. It gives you greater insights in terms of what you are looking at. So if you are in the Pusan perimeter or—I hate to use Korea as an example. You know, take that kind of a war, you have the ability here not only to fight nose to nose with people, but you have hugely increased opportunity to fight to your advantage by gaining asymmetry with the traditionally organized foe and fighting from the rear and the flanks as well as the front in a far more mobile, maneuverable, knowledgeable, lethal, precise way than what we would have done 50 years ago in the situation you are talking about.
The CHAIRMAN. So really your commander there of that particular fight would have vested in his brigades a lot more capabilities.
General SCHOOMAKER. It is huge.
The CHAIRMAN. They could run a lot more missions for him and handle a lot of different enemy attacks, formations, operations than he could in the past.
General SCHOOMAKER. It is hugely different, not only in the intermediate configuration I showed there in the green going to yellow. By the time you get to purple, it is astronomical. I will let General Curran—because they ran models on this and fought some fights—describe some of that.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay. I think it is important. Now you folks know that one of our concerns is that, as we go into the new configuration, we are not losing something in one of the scenarios that we think we may still have to fight in the future, which is head-to-head conventional stuff, heavy stuff, heavy armor and having the ability to kill that armor and to handle the infantry that is associated with it and all the other aspects of that type of an attack.
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I think, to some degree, as you know, when we talk about transformation, there is always that latent fear that somehow we are giving up something and we may find ourselves in a conventional role a couple of years down the line and we find out that we have lightened or we have changed in such a way that we are not as effective, but the message I am getting from you, General Schoomaker, is, actually, you think that the new brigades will be more effective even against a conventional heavy-armored enemy than the old brigades. Is that a fair statement?
General SCHOOMAKER. I mean, in a physical sense, in my personal opinion, it is an unequivocal yes. We are advancing ourselves significantly.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay.
General SCHOOMAKER. When you talk outside the physical sense and talk about the synergies that are achieved, it is astronomical, the improvement. I mean, what we are doing is forming stabilized units of enormous capability that will stay together, train together and fight together in ways that allow it to operate in a professional sense at a very high order.
So, you know, you have to talk about stabilization. You have to talk about the way we train. You have to talk about the leader development. You have to talk about all of that because that is all a factor in what you are doing.
But, in terms of the equipment itself, we have the same equipment we had. We are using it differently, we are combining it in a different sense, and we are enabling it with far better networking capability than we had in the past, which gives you tremendous combat power.
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General SCHOOMAKER. Okay. Now General Curran.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. JOHN M. CURRAN, UNITED STATES ARMY, DEPUTY COMMANDING GENERAL, FUTURES, U.S. ARMY TRAINING AND DOCTRINE COMMAND
General CURRAN. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As we have done the analysis that has backed up this design of the modular brigade,—really it started back in 1998, even some earlier than that, as we worked the Strike concept, we worked Army After Next, we worked Army Force 21, many of these leading to our Future Combat System analysis of alternatives—all that analytics has been underpinning these designs.
The Chief has charged us as we bring this capability on that however you design it and however Ben resources it, it has to be as capable or more capable than the current brigade it is replacing because, without that being the case, going to 43 or 48 brigades does not give you the combat power increase that we seek.
We have taken this organization through the analytics and built the construct, we then ran it back through the analytics through Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Censor System (JLENS) models and simulation, and we found some interesting things.
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First, we found that this thing does fight better than the conventional brigade today. Why is that? It has to do with reconnaissance. It has to do with the fact that we have always had enough killing systems in our brigade. It has been finding the right target. It has been finding the enemy, whether it be dismounts or whether it be a mounted platform system. It has been finding the enemy so that we can kill the right target.
What this brigade brings and what the analysis shows what the added capability was is the reconnaissance. It was moving anywhere from a current brigade, which has about a troop or a platoon of reconnaissance at the brigade level, to a full squadron.
I have included the fact that this organization has a significant increase in human intelligence collection capabilities. It has a much more robust military intelligence staff to do the military intelligence analysis that is required so we can find the right enemy and we can kill them with our killing systems.
So all of our analysis to date and the guidance that we have from the Chief all indicate that this, as designed, is more capable than the current brigade, and, as we resource it, it will not be less capable than the current brigade. That is our charge, and that is what we are finding in our analysis.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, if I could add two things just to build on that, number one, everyone of these UAs that we are building has more infantry in it than the old one. It all has more infantry. Our heavy brigades in the past have been infantry poor. They have been very much committed to a platform.
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So, if you were to go out and you were to watch a heavy brigade and the infantry tumble out the back of Bradleys, what you would find coming out of the back of Bradleys was about two-and-a-half squads, not a full platoon, because that is the way it was organized. It was organized to fight against a totally mechanized foe where most of the of the time, the infantry would be encased inside that Bradley and moving, and, when it got out, there is not that much.
The second thing is the MI, the military intelligence. This is an example. You are talking about pulling national systems and other theater systems down into this level of organization and having the analytic capability at that level that normally you would have had to go to division to get the analysis of that product to act upon, and so you get latency, you know, in kind of what you know to what you can do about it.
With the increased lethality of precision weapons, by reducing that latency, that sensor-to-shooter time, you now are extremely more lethal, and you can call on joint fighters from other services—the Navy, Marine platforms, Air Force platforms—in a precise way against the kind of foe that you have, as well as deal with them in the direct fight context with the weapons systems that you have within this brigade. So it is really almost apples and oranges in terms of how you would compare it.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay. Thank you very much.
Mr. Skelton.
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Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have been sitting here, General, listening, hoping somewhere in your discussion, your well-thought-out—and I compliment you on it—proposal for transformation of the Army, for the words that would form the basis—and you did use the phrase ''leader development'' at one point—for professional military education. It ought to be the basis of everything you do.
When I heard not that long ago the discussion of the Army cutting Command & General Staff College back from the required 10 months, I could not believe it. I think that crisis has passed. But I think this is a great opportunity for the United States Army to revisit the importance of professional military education.
I do not understate this requirement. You never send a bright, young soul into a courthouse with a bunch of law books and say, ''Try this death penalty case,'' without first having sent that young soul to law school, and what you do is so much more important than walking into a courtroom.
The reason we did so well intellectually in the Second World War was because we did not have enough billets to fill for the officers. So you sent them to college. You sent them to War Colleges. They instructed. They were students. Troy Middleton, the Corps commander of the Battle of the Bulge, spent 10 years of his military life in colleges either as an instructor or as a student.
I would urge you, General, to take another look at what you are doing. Try to increase the military education through military art, the study of cultures, the study of languages. Whether it be on the tactical or the operational or on the strategic level, that is the glue that brings victory.
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You have to outsmart the enemy, and you do this by old-fashioned study in the War Colleges, Command & General Staff Colleges, on your own. It has to be done.
Let me share with you testimony of General Scales just last week. He said, ''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 or Patreus, 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 would be.''
Well, I do not want to belabor the point, General, but I would hope you would go back and relook at this whole issue to see if you cannot put more study into this all-important subject of war ethos. That is part of it.
So, with that, I will refrain from asking you a question, and I will certainly hope that, in the days ahead, we could receive information for this committee to see about how you can continuously upgrade the studying professional military education of the United States Army.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, if I could just respond just very briefly to you. First of all, there is no daylight between us. I agree with you, and I think that we never made a decision to reduce the War College or the Command & General Staff College. If you look on those 17 focus areas we have, you will see that leader training and education, leader development, is one of the focus areas that we have. But what I did ask them to do is to turn everything on edge and make sure that what we are doing is the best we can do, and so they explored a bunch of different kinds of ways.
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I might also remind you—and I know you know this—at the beginning of World War II, one of the first things General Marshall did is shut down the War College and Command & General Staff College and take a look at it and created it in a way that he wanted. He also removed several hundred officers out of the officer corps. I mean, he came in with a pretty heavy hand and did some pretty important things that had to be done because even then, the system was not perfect.
So I asked people to take a hard look at this, and General Wallace and General Burns in the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) are taking a very hard look at it, and, as I have told you, you know, we are going to continue the 10-month program.
But we have improved it. We have increased the number of officers we are putting into the school for the advanced military studies. We have looked seriously at the integration of joint warfighting and to all of our aspects.
On the civilian education side, I agree with you. There is a big difference in what we were doing decades ago and what we are doing today in terms of the military education, and, in many respects, it is directly related to both the fiscal realities we have and the availability of officers to do that within the level of operations we have.
But it is a desirable ideal, and it is one that we are looking at very hard because I believe that these soldiers we have can do anything that we can lead them to do, and our ability to lead, our ability to use and to maneuver soldiers and to deal with the complex environment we have is directly related to education.
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We train for certainty, and we educate for uncertainty, and the world we are going into is far more uncertain than the world we have passed through, and so I, you know, agree with you on that.
Thank you.
Mr. HEFLEY [presiding]. Thank you very much.
It is my turn now. I have assumed the Chair, but it is my turn.
I think one of the transformations I would like to see the Army make in this process is to get rid of the PowerPoints. Your pretty charts made almost no sense at all to me, so I appreciate very much the comments that you have made in response to the Chairman and Mr. Skelton's question, which I think clarifies it considerably.
I go to a military base somewhere, anywhere in the country or the world, because I want to see what the military base is like and what it is doing, and the first thing they do is put me in a room and give me a PowerPoint. Sometimes I spend all my time in the room doing the PowerPoint—or almost all of it. So that is just an aside. It does not have anything to do with what we are trying to talk about here.
I have a couple or three questions. One is that we keep hearing testimony that the Army is becoming much more an expeditionary force, lighter, faster, more lethal. I know this is never going to change, but it raises the question: Why do we need a Marine Corps and an Army that are both expeditionary forces that are faster, more lethal and so forth? Why do we need them both doing that kind of a job? If we have two light infantry units in our military, why do we need two?
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Second, in your pyramid thing that you had there, you had the Reserve Component and the Active Component (AC)—I do not know if it meant anything the way it was drawn—equally divided, and, in Iraq, we are told that about 40 percent of our people that are in Iraq are Reserve or Guard components and the other half are active duty. Is it your plan to keep those about evenly balanced, 60–40 or whatever, pretty close to evenly balanced?
Also, I am very disturbed that we have so many of your specialties not completely, but almost completely in the Reserve Component. Military police (MP) is a good example. When we deploy and activate the way we do, I think there is no wonder that Mr. Skelton goes home and finds out that the retention rate in the Guard and Reserve is not very good.
It is not going to be very good. It is going to go down continually if we keep doing this. This is not what they signed up for. They are willing to go and do it for a short period of time, or they are willing to go and do it in a crashing emergency, but, mostly, they want to be citizen soldiers and not do this.
Then, finally, if you touch on what has already been touched on a little bit—Mr. Skelton touched on it about military education—in the kind of wars we are talking about in Iraq and Afghanistan, although we have the best-trained soldiers in the history of the world in many respects, it seems to me we have a deficit in the civil affairs area, in the language area, in the military police area.
Obviously, we had people in Iraq not trained to do some of the guarding and military police activities here. Are we doing anything to help us as we go to these kind of wars to understand the culture and the language better and to be able to communicate better and to be able to win the hearts and minds as well as shoot?
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I will stop there, General. That is enough.
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, Congressman, thanks. I mean, there are a lot of questions embedded in all that. Let me run it down.
I suggest, when you go someplace and somebody hits you up with a lot of PowerPoint, to get up and leave and tell them you want to go see what you want to see.
Mr. HEFLEY. I am going to quote you.
General SCHOOMAKER. You should.
Mr. HEFLEY. I have permission.
General SCHOOMAKER. You do. I have done that.
I have tried to put up charts up here that were simple, black and white and very basic so that we could at least have a visual picture of what we are going to do.
But, that aside, let me address, first of all, the business of the Active, Guard and Reserve Components of our Army. If the active Army today is 482,400 soldiers in terms of our permanent end strength—and, of course, we have grown that now to over 490,000; 493,000, I believe—the Army National Guard statutory end strength is 250,000 soldiers, and the Army Reserve is 205,000 soldiers.
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The Army National Guard very much replicates, in terms of its formations and the way it is constructed, the active force. The Army Reserve is very heavy in the combat support and combat service support because that is the depth in those.
Part of our transformation, we are rebalancing the Active, Guard and Reserve. Now the end strengths will stay the same, but the kinds of specialities that run across that, we are rebalancing over 100,000 specialities. We are taking down, for instance, artillery air defense and some armor formations that are hollow and creating transportation engineers, MPs, these kinds of formations.
In the program that started in 2004, we are transferring 9,600 spaces into the civil affairs and Special Operations, aviation, psychological operations and that kind. So there is a huge rebalancing that is taking place across the force as we go.
To your question on retention—and I will give you the retention figures—this year, on the active reenlistment, which is our retention, we have raised the target from 51,000 last year to 56,100. We have raised our retention target 5,100 soldiers, and we are at 100 percent of retention on the active side.
If you go to the Army Reserve, we have raised that target by almost 2,000, and they are at 99 percent. If you go to the National Guard, their retention target is 40,000 soldiers, and we are at 101 percent of retention. That is this year.
Now are we going to have a bigger challenge in 2005? I think we will, and I think we will have a bigger challenge in 2006, and the faster we can spread and increase the base of available units for deployment that are balanced and cohesive, the better the circumstances will be that will cause soldiers to want to stay with their unit and have their lull time in between these deployments.
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I have to remind you, when we started this current war that we are on, when we got into it, we were hugely overstructured in the Guard and Reserve. The Guard and Reserve in aggregate had 70,000 or 80,000 more spaces in units than they had authorized end strength to fill.
The first thing that happened was that we got volunteers to start guarding air bases and airports and all that, and they started their mobilization clock. They came out of those same hollow units. Then we started deploying these units, and we had to aggregate them so that we could make full units to go to war.
So it started from a position of unreadiness in terms of the balance between the people and spaces, and it aggregated, and so what we are trying to do now—and we are being rather successful at it—is to get this in balance. Therefore, we have had to use things like the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). We called up 5,600 soldiers out of the IRR to fill 4,000 spaces in basically National Guard and Reserve units.
You know, in Desert Storm, when we went to Desert Storm in, what, 1990, we called up over 20,000 IRR in 1990. We called up four times the number of IRR for Desert Storm, Desert Shield than we called up now. So this is not new.
That is the way we have it. We have National Guard and Reserve forces in the IRR to meet these emergencies, and that is what they are for, is to immediately make the Army bigger to be able to deal with the increased threat now.
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To continue to do this, we are working very, very hard and trying to be very prudent about how we ask, you know, people to sacrifice for what we are doing, but, quite frankly, you know, I do not see any other reasonable alternative to this. Even if we wanted to make the Army 100,000 bigger, it would take us a decade to do it.
I mean, we are basically living and fighting with what we have paid for and grown, you know, over history, and, you know, we have what we have. We are trying to make it bigger, and we are trying to make it more effective.
So I will rest. I hope I have answered all the questions that you had within your statement.
Mr. HEFLEY. I think you did a good job. I would not be complacent, however, about those retention rates as you keep them longer——
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, believe me, we are not.
Mr. HEFLEY. As you call them up more often, I think you are going to see a change in that.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir. you know, we are very concerned, and we are working it very hard.
I might add one other thing. I think you have seen this program called Blue to Green. You know, the Navy and the Air Force are both cutting the number of people in those services, and these are great people. The Blue to Green program where we want to bring airmen and sailors and certain specialties into the Army are not people that have left the Navy and the Air Force. They are people that are on active duty in the Navy and the Air Force that they are cutting that we want and they would like to serve. We are getting some pretty good response.
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So aircraft mechanics, security policemen, transporters and people that we can bring over is a great opportunity for us to more rapidly grow the Army with people that are already fundamentally trained, and all we have to do is do a little inculturation into the Army and pick up and go.
So we are looking at all these techniques, you know, to help ourselves.
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you very much.
Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. I want to thank all of you gentlemen for being here.
General, last week, Major General Scales appeared before the committee, and I am going to quote one of his statements.
''If you look at the era of limited warfare since World War II, in this continuum of American involvement in limited-liability wars from Korea to Iraqi freedom, you will notice that 81 percent or four out of five servicemen or women who died in combat at the hands of the enemy have been infantry, 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.''
I notice that neither General Keane who was present or Colonel Macgregor doubted that, and I have not heard anyone come back and say that was not the case. I am curious as we as a nation spend about $15 billion a year on Star Wars and missile defense. Again, we have not lost an American to a missile.
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In Army transformation, what are we doing or what can we do to try to tilt the odds a little better toward our infantrymen? I realize that death is a cost of war, but is there anything we can do to moderate the number of casualties that are being taken by such a small percentage of the force?
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, first of all, it is a great statement. You know, I take you back to the Civil War, and, you know, in 1 day at Antietam, we lost over 20,000 people in one battle. In 3 days at Gettysburg, we lost almost as many people in 3 days as we lost in the entire Vietnam War over a decade. In World War I, if you take a look, the horrendous casualties there were huge. World War II was huge.
But I guess what I am telling you is it is all about the nature of the fight, how you fight, et cetera. We do not want to be in that position. Besides equipment, which I will have General Griffin talk about here, about all of what we are doing for our soldiers to get them the best equipment and all the rest of it, the most important think you have to do is do your very best never to have a soldier enter a fight that is an even fight or to his disadvantage.
What you want to do is always have the opportunity to put him in a fight where it is an unfair fight to your advantage, and that means it is usually important that you pick the time and place and meet the enemy in a way and do it in such a way that, you know, digging them out with bayonets and hand grenades is a last resort. But you have to be able to do that.
So we are equipping people to do that, and I think you will see that the nature of what we are doing right now. There is a tremendous draw on infantry to be able to do the kind of things that we are doing.
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So, first of all, it is the nature of the war, the nature of the fight that is important to look at. Second, it is how you approach, you know, how you close with and engage in that fight and, of course, how you are informed about that.
Then you have to equip people and train them in such a way that makes it unfair to your advantage when you do do it, and I think that is clearly the case today. I think we are improving that case as we go forward in the future, and I think General Griffin can tell you that we place—he can give you some specifics here—a lot of money into equipment on our soldiers.
I will remind you that prior to 9/11, the United States Army was only, you know, buying 1,200 sets of body armor a month. It was going to take us almost five decades, 48 years, to equip the entire United States Army with body armor. We are not producing that at 25,000 sets a month. We have equipped every single soul that is in harm's way, and we are moving toward equipping 800,000 soldiers with advance body armor, as an example, communications so the soldiers knows, you know, what the hell is going on, the quality of the optics and the weapons, the Rapid Field Initiative (RFI) program.
I will let General Griffin pick up and talk about just in recent times how much we have invested in that.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. BENJAMIN S. GRIFFIN, UNITED STATES ARMY, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, G–8
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General GRIFFIN. Sir, on the Rapid Field Initiative, which is the element to the boots, the goal is 840,000 operational forces will be fielded with that new equipment within the next 3 years.
On the individual body armor, the goal is 840,000 sets within 2 years. The Chief mentioned everybody in the theater today has the improved body armor. That is Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
Then, today, the Continental United States (CONUS) base units are being fielded as they prepare to deploy and train up with the Rapid Fielding Initiative as well as the body armor.
The improvised explosive device (IED) task force is a training mechanism as well as a rapid fielding mechanism to react and try to both prepare people and react to explosives, demolitions. That is a very aggressive program. Robotics, aviation survivability equipment, all rotary wing aircraft in theater have a survivability equipment today.
When I was here last time, the Marine Corps, along with the Army, demonstrated some body armor. We were having a significant number of casualties with the arms and underneath the arm. We have designed and are fielding today a deltoid protector for the soldiers. We are producing, ramping up to 450 up-armored Humvees, the combination of up-armored and more powerful Humvees that we can bolt armor protection on to.
We are working with respect to modifying and testing vehicles in country, gun trucks. I talked last night to the commander of the 13th Corps Support Command (COSCOM), and he is testing a new concept from Lawrence Livermore. He is also testing some Stryker boxes that we insert in the back of a five-ton vehicle, and these are gun trucks.
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We are fielding armor to security vehicles today, producing, ramping up to eight per month, I believe, starting in September. That combined with the up-armored Humvee is providing the additional protection.
We are testing at Aberdeen as we speak a device that protects the gunner. We call it a Q4, which allows the soldier, when he exposes himself in the ring amount of the vehicle as with his machine gun, to provide necessary protection. As soon as we get the final test on that, which should occur this week, then we will go into production to field that to soldiers in the field.
We are working hand-held radios. They are in great demand for soldiers in theater, and we just approved a concept and are starting to field an improved hand-held radio that we can get to the soldiers in the field.
There were a tremendous amount of lessons learned from trips over and feedback from commanders and soldiers in the field, great ideas that are being applied, and then we can apply those to the rest of the force.
Unmanned aerial vehicles: We are fielding UAVs to the theater as well as Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) and other systems to provide better intel capability.
Those are just some of the examples.
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In what we call the bridging supplement, we expect to the get in the neighborhood of about $16 billion that will help us between now and through the beginning of the 2005 period to apply those resources to the war effort.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you very much, sir.
General GRIFFIN. One additional point is that we are equipping more combat service support vehicles with machine guns. We have gone back into the depot and assessed where we are with respect, for example, to .50 caliber machine guns and how we can speed up the process, repair process to get those additional weapons. It is other machine guns as well, but .50 cal is certainly a weapon of choice.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, sir.
Mr. HAYES. I thank you gentlemen for being here. I have three questions. I will get them out quickly and then let you all comment on them.
First, how do we get from training as it exists today so that the training which we will need for transformation—and I like the plan that you have—will be applicable to the new arena?
Second question: As we work to put more folks available for active duty, move to the 43, possibly 48 active brigades, what are the measures that we are using to make sure that we do not lose our recruiters, ROTC folks, base instructors, these type of folks, making sure we have the ability to fill the billet where we need them in headquarters, for example?
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The last question: As we transform, as we look to speed, technology, intelligence, all these things, is there a potential danger in relying too much on intelligence, technology, losing our heavy weapons capability?
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, I will start from the tail end first.
As I laid down the transformational plan up here on the charts, the point of all that was we did not want to ever lose something, to step into something that we are uncertain of what we might gain, and so, as I explained, the M1 tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle and a lot of other of those kinds of systems that we have today will be with us out through about 2030.
What we are going to do is, by pulling future technologies on to those platforms, increase their utility to us, while maintaining the kind of firepower and protection that we have today out of those systems, and, as the Future Combat System comes on board, the program that we have now will allow us to ensure that before we tradeoff capability we have today for future capability, that future capability is, in fact, better than what we have.
Second, to your other question, I think one of the biggest myths in the world is the fact that, you know, we want to trade firepower and survivability just for knowledge. You know, just for digits and information. I mean, it is very clear to us that you can enhance what we have through better knowledge and through better intelligence and through decreasing the latency between the time you know something and the time you can act on it. That is very, very clear.
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But,you know, nobody up here and nobody that I know of believes that technology and information alone is going to replace homogeneous steel and bullets, you know, in terms of what we can do.
Now we do know that it is going to enable the effectiveness of it, and we do know that the technologies of the future are going to make the power of information much more powerful. I mean, there is no question about it.
But we are not going to step off into some abyss that we do not know, you know, where the bottom of it is, and so, you know, I would just kind of like to dispel it. I probably have not explained it very well, but we are moving into this in a deliberate, controlled fashion that we will know what we have, I mean, kind of like doing what Congressman Skelton would understand, you know, kind of like ''Show me,'' you know, kind of the Missouri approach to things, that we want to see this, and we want to be comfortable with it before we make the transition, and that is why we have, you know, restructured our programs the way we have.
I am not quite sure I heard all of your first question there, but, you know, if you had another one, I would be glad to address it.
Mr. HAYES. Just the issue of how training will change to adapt to the plan, and it is a good plan.
General SCHOOMAKER. Yes, training is changing dramatically. I just came from West Point earlier this week where I was looking at the way we are training the cadets up there through their summer experience. Believe me, the lessons learned from the current fight by the soldiers and the NCOs and officers from the 101st Air Assault Division who are up there training those cadets, who have just returned from the fight, are the things that they are learning up there. I mean, they have media in their situations. They have insurgents. They have, you know, armed and uniformed enemies. They have a very complex training situation that these cadets are getting up there.
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I was out in Fort Lewis at the Reserve Officer Training course, Warrior Forge, which is the summer training for cadets between their junior and senior year, and it is amazing. The 82nd Airborne is out there with them, just recently returned from Iraq, and the lane training and scenarios that they are going through there are far more complex than they have ever been and far more effective.
What we are doing in basic training and in advanced individual training and in open-source intelligence (OSINT) are hugely different in terms of the focus on the warrior ethos and, I mean, you know, the kind of things that we are asking and training our folks to do. What we are doing in our education institutions is wrapped all around the kind of future, the 21st century environment, all the way from the top-level, high-level warfare, all the way down through insurgency and stability and support operations.
So I think we have a real renaissance going on. Are we where we want to be? No. But I think we are moving in a direction, especially as we grow this bench and these platoon leaders and these company commanders and battalion commanders, these platoon sergeants, first sergeants and command sergeants, majors that are growing up through what we are doing right now. As they enter and become the trainers and the educators of the future, I think we are on a great path to the future there.
Mr. HAYES [presiding]. Thank you, sir. You forgot to mention Pineland.
Dr. Snyder.
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General SCHOOMAKER. That is a secret. We can do that in closed testimony.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General, thank you for your service, and you have one of the more unusual retirements that I have seen. So we appreciate you so much.
I have two quick specific questions and then as many as I can get in in other areas.
First of all, today's L.A. Times has a story with the headline ''Troops Could Stay Beyond Limit,'' subheadline ''Pentagon Is Considering Extending the Tours of National Guard Troops in Iraq Who Are Nearing the 24-Month Active Duty Maximum.'' This story is about Arkansas. This story is about the 39th Brigade.
It is my understanding from folks I talked to several days ago that you all have made a decision. Have you made a decision? If so, can you share that with us today?
General SCHOOMAKER. There are about 400 soldiers in the 39th Brigade. First of all, the law——
Dr. SNYDER. I understand. I do not have much time, General. Excuse me for interrupting. But have you made a decision, and, if so, what is the decision?
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General SCHOOMAKER. The decision is in progress. As far as I know, a decision has not been made. It is the decision of the secretary of defense. We put up indication we are looking at it, and I am not aware that is a decision has been made.
Dr. SNYDER. Great. Thank you.
General SCHOOMAKER. But I will let you know.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. Thank you so much.
The second specific question is General Cody and I had a discussion a week or two ago about the 5,674 people that have been on the list of possible IRR, and there were 15 band members on there. Some folks from the Army came by there to go to my office, and it is my understanding in the process of going through this that the 15 band members are no longer going to be on the list of involuntary activation. Is that an accurate statement?
General SCHOOMAKER. I do not know that it is accurate, but I will tell you that the 5,600 people that we called up were to fill 4,000 positions. So there is 1,600 of them, you know, that will not be used. I do not know about the band members.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you.
The first question I want to ask about the transformation issues is you are talking about huge changes here. When we had our hearing last week with several folks no longer in the military, but with military background, there was pretty much unanimous agreement that the military—and, I guess, we in the Congress also—do not do a good job of applying lessons learned from previous conflicts.
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We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago including Major General Darden who was talking about lessons learned from Bosnia-Hercegovina that could be applied to Iraq, and the conclusion there was also we have not taken the lessons from Bosnia-Hercegovina and applied them to Iraq. I think it was General Scales who talked about not applying the lessons from Panama and applying them to Iraq.
What confidence should the American people and the Congress have that in this big change that you are talking about, the transformation change, that we should have confidence that you have applied the lessons learned from Kosovo, from the first Gulf War, from Bosnia-Hercegovina, from Panama, from Iraq, that the changes we are making are based on lessons learned? What is your safety valve to be sure?
I think it was General Curran talked about the analysts. Analysts are just human beings that are fallible like everyone else is. They can come out with a nice-looking report that may be just incredibly wrong. What confidence do you have that the conclusions you have reached to make the kind of changes on the PowerPoint are, indeed, incorporating all the lessons learned and are going to take us in the right direction?
General SCHOOMAKER. First of all, I fundamentally disagree with anybody that says that we are not wrapping lessons learned into what we are doing because we have huge efforts all the way from Joint Forces Command all the way down through the Army's Center for Lessons Learned. It is just happening constantly, not only through the formal kinds of networks, but through the informal networks and things like companycommander.com and all kinds of Internet interfaces, the products that we are putting out of the schoolhouses and the operational units that are returning. So I just fundamentally disagree that the lessons learned are not being used.
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What level of confidence do I have that we are doing it? I have a very high level of confidence, but I will remind you that warfare is a human endeavor, and we will never insure ourselves against the human failings and the misunderstandings and all of the kind of things that, say, an analyst may go through and all the rest of it. It has always been the nature of warfare, and my view is we will never eliminate that as a factor of warfare. Warfare is a human endeavor where huge events will turn on some minute thing sometimes.
So my level of confidence is very high that the direction we are going is far better than the Army that I grew up in for 35 years, I will tell you that. You know, there is no comparison in the Army of today and the Army that I joined in the early 1970's, and I am very confident that our future direction is the correct one.
Dr. SNYDER. I mean, this is the discussion that occupied a lot of the hearing last week, about lessons learned, but that probably is a discussion that perhaps you will be wanting to have with some of your folks, and we ought to perhaps continue that discussion because there was some pretty strong feeling by people in and out of the military, in and out of the Army, that while we are good at gathering data, that does not at all necessarily translate into changed behavior.
You know, I am a family doctor. That has always been a challenge. Doctors can sit through lectures. They learn a whole lot of new stuff. Six months later, 3 months later, we are doing it the old way. So I think that is a really important issue because there were some very strong statements made that we do not in the military do a good job of incorporating lessons learned.
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I thank you for your comments. I think it ought to be an ongoing discussion because it is very, very important.
General SCHOOMAKER. I would agree with you. I also agree with you that we could do it better, and I will agree with you that no matter how well we do it, there is always going to be somebody that is going to want to do it better, and that is good tension to have, to continue to push it.
I think there is a huge effort to wrap lessons learned in. I mean, if you go out to the national training center today and take a look at what we put on the battlefield—300, 400, 500, 600 civilians, many of them Iraqis—and the trainers and the people that are out there that have firsthand experience in what we are experiencing right now in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is night and day different than it was a year ago. Night and day different than 18 months ago.
So I think we are making a superb effort to move in the right direction. Is it perfectly executed? Probably not. Can we make some real improvements? Yes. But we are on the right glide slope there.
Dr. SNYDER. So what you are saying is over the last 12 to 18 months, we have made dramatic improvement in how we incorporate lessons learned. Maybe we are saying the same thing, if you are saying over the last year, we have reached the conclusion we have done a lousy job for the previous 10 years, and we are making a dramatic improvement over the last year.
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General SCHOOMAKER. As I tried to describe on the chart, over the last 50 years, we have had a single focus, and it has been very doctrinally based. You know, it has a lot to do with how to do. You know, it is what to think as opposed to how to think kind of things. We are trying to transform ourselves into a better balance of the how to think, the cognitive skills, you know, when your instincts come to play, your experiential learning comes to play and where we have the kind of doctrine that is a more flexible base from which to start.
You know, I like to say, you know, the strength of a football team is not the play that is called in the huddle and how well everybody knows the playbook. The strength of the team is when you get to the line of scrimmage and the ball gets snapped, what happens when everything changes? That is the difference, and that is the kind of Army we need. We have to have a common basic starting point, but, boy, once the ball has snapped, you know, we have to have people that understand the intent, understand what the end state is supposed to be and understand how they can contribute.
It is not the first block you throw. It is the second and third block that is important. It is the fact that the guy that you were going to block may not be there, but somebody else is and you have a whole new play come out of it. I would go back to the Super Bowl. I mean, you might remember that the guy that caught the winning touchdown pass there happened to be a linebacker that they put in at tight end.
I mean, that is the kind of force that you need where you have this kind of agility organizationally and you have this kind of intellectual agility that allows us to deal and anticipate and to create situations that we have, and that is the direction that we are trying to go.
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Mr. HAYES. I thank the gentleman.
We need to tighten up our questions and our answers a little bit.
Congressman Simmons, we do have a vote about 12, and we would like to complete and let you all get back to work.
Mr. SIMMONS. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, General, again, for being here. Thank you for coming back on active duty at a very difficult, but a very challenging time.
The focus today has been transformation of the Army, and I think that I have been very impressed by the testimony, I am very impressed by this booklet that you have put out, ''Serving a Nation at War.'' I had the opportunity this morning to read through it, and I think it is headed in the right direction.
[The information referred to can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Mr. SIMMONS. My question goes to the issue of two points that are mentioned in the booklet and have been touched on by your testimony; one, a quote from Von Clausewitz which says, ''It is essential to understand the kind of war on which we are embarking.''
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As a former military intelligence officer, I cannot agree with that more. If we do not understand the war, we are not going to win the war. It is just that simple, and there is so many examples that history will provide.
On page five, you refer to incomplete information, and you said the ''requirement is to fight for information rather than to fight with information.'' I would guess that the requirement is to both fight for the information and then to fight with the information.
But I want to focus on information and I want to focus on intelligence. I believe that the U.S. intelligence community in general, I believe that military intelligence specifically must also transform from the Cold War model, which is what we have been talking about this morning, changing the structure of our Army to reflect the new realities.
Well, we also have to change the structure of how we collect information so that we can inform the new and the transformed Army in a manner that meets the needs of the battlefield, this new battlefield, this different battlefield, and, in that regard, I have a concern, and I have sent you a letter on the subject. I suspect it is over in an in-box somewhere.
But ''FM 2–0'' on intelligence, the new military intelligence manual of the Department of the Army says, on page 130, I guess it is, ''Open sources of intelligence, or OSINT, is more appropriately defined as a category of information.'' ''A category of information.''
Now I reject that, and I think that the people who feel that are living in the Cold War era. You know, yes, we have Electromagnetic Intelligence (EMINT), and, yes, we have Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), yes, we have Technical Intelligence (TECHINT) and HUMINT, but we also need OSINT in this new war, in this new battle. We cannot simply ignore 80 percent of the information that is available to us because it does not have to be classified.
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You know, the magic of classification no longer works. If you are going to be interoperable and interdependent, you may have to depend on some foreign militaries, as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) does, where you cannot give them the secret no foreign stuff, but you can sure give them the OSINT stuff, the open stuff. You can share it around because it is not bound by classification.
The Special-Operations Forces OSINT handbook, which is in draft form now, which was given to the John F. Kennedy (JFK) School at Fort Bragg—I was honored to write the forward for this—is circulating in the community.
You yourself have been a great supporter of open source at the Special Operations Forces Joint Intelligence Center (SOFJIC), and you have promoted it.
What are we doing, short of my amendment to the intelligence authorization bill, to require the Director of Centrall Intelligence (DCI) to come up with a report on OSINT? What are we doing in the Army today to transform our intelligence thinking, to expand out beyond the Cold War model and to get into some of these and dynamic areas?
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, I thank you for bringing up the thing because this has been one of the pets for a couple of decades, growing up through the Special-Operations community. I mean, I think this has been resisted for years, you know, by the discipline, and I think that, in the information age that we are in today, it is becoming astronomically more important.
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The way we categorize and think through this thing today is, you know, you collect data, you accumulate it in the information, you transform it into knowledge, but what we have to now do is take it to a level of understanding. This is Ph.D. level, and you cannot do that outside the context of what you find in open source and the circumstances which you have.
And so what are we doing? Obviously, you know, we need to take a look at 2.0, you know, in terms of what you have there in your hand, and we will because, you know, obviously, I do not read all those manuals and do not know everything that is in them, but it is clear to me that we are operating in a world now that to ignore open source information is fundamentally flawed. I mean, you just cannot do it and expect to survive and be effective in the world that we are in today. So we will take a look at it.
You know, you asked me what influence do we have in terms of the broader intelligence community. That is a question I will have to go back and find out. I do not know.
Mr. SIMMONS. Mr. Chairman, if I could just pursue it for one more second, I realize we are in the red. Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the intelligence center and school, has done open source training for a decade. Ben Venevitas is one of the lead trainers out there. They have produced the military's first open source handbook. It was produced by the Army. So we have a decade of background and experience.
General SCHOOMAKER. Right.
Mr. SIMMONS. But the point I am trying to make is that a transforming Army is going to save lives and be more successful.
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General SCHOOMAKER. I agree.
Mr. SIMMONS. It has been a battle with Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), the Community Open Source Program Office headed up by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It has been a battle out there. They do not like it. They do not want it. We know that.
But I think you are uniquely positioned to bring about this transformation of thinking in the military because of your background and because of your experience and because you know the stakes are so high for your soldiers, the men and women wearing your uniform.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, thank you.
Mr. SIMMONS. I thank you, General.
I thank the Chair.
Mr. HAYES. Congressman Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, gentlemen, thanks again for being here and being candid about the challenges that the military faces.
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I apologize for having left, but I had to go speak on the floor because we have an issue where there is an attempt to take away military housing, and we were speaking on that.
But Dr. Snyder advised me that you had mentioned, General Schoomaker, that you have visited West Point to get an idea, an appreciation of how they will fit in to this restructuring and reformation. Since jointness is a huge part of how we fight today and how we will fight in the future, have you visited also the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy, or are you intending to do that to make sure that you underscore that this is a joint fighting effort in today's military?
General SCHOOMAKER. I had not planned to visit them, but we do have people that are working. I just met with some members and some folks that took a look at the Air Force, Navy and Military Academy, and they gave me a back briefing on what they saw there.
But I will go back and tell you that I do not see these service academies as the principal place in which we are teaching warfighting. I see it as a place at which we are providing the fundamental education, and I will tell you—and I told the cadets at West Point—they are attending the finest school that this country has to offer.
It is the finest school that we have. The academic rigor is high. The physical rigor is high. The whole person, the character aspect of it is hugely important. So that is what I look at when I think about the service academies.
The Military Academy at West Point has got to be the United States Army's academy and the seedcorn of thought and the foundation of character and all of the kings of things that the military academy has given over the years. So, you know, when you go up there and you take a look at advanced warfighting and stuff, that is not the place that I would put my finger and say that is the genesis of that.
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Mr. REYES. But they are going to be in the leadership when they graduate from the academy.
General SCHOOMAKER. Of course.
Mr. REYES. I would think that it would be important to reinforce that in that leadership they have to have this mantra of jointness.
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, absolutely, and the mantra of jointness is no issue. You know, we exchange midshipman and Air Force Academy.
Mr. REYES. Right. I was aware of that.
General SCHOOMAKER. We have them in the schools, and, of course, the famous prisoner exchange during the service academy games is a big deal.
Mr. REYES. Right.
General SCHOOMAKER. As a matter of fact, one of the primary instructors out there on the tactical training lanes at the Military Academy when I was up there earlier this week was a Marine major. He had been up there. He is on his third year now on the faculty, and he is involved in the tactical thing. We have similar kinds of exchanges with the other academies and that.
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But the foundation of joint warfighting is here to stay and it is growing, and, to really be able to capture that, we have to invest in the fundamental development of the gray matter up there that fertilizes that so that as we then transition in to the kinds of training and education experiences that these cadets will get once they are on active duty, you know, it gives them the potential to grow, you know, to the great captains of the future.
So all I am saying is I agree with everything you said, except that I would tell you our principal function at the Military Academy is not to create squad leaders and platoon leaders at the academy. It is to provide the broad education base that is going to allow them to grow and to be the great captains of the future and the leaders.
Mr. REYES. On that point, we have had testimony here, in fact, last week about the importance of it. I noticed when we started off the briefing you had the warrior creed up there. You know, I have visited Iraq five times and Afghanistan and other parts. The warrior creed has never been an issue.
But, last week, one of the areas that was recommended to us is a cultural component. That is to say a better understanding, an appreciation for different cultures that were going to be involved with or in combat in languages, appreciation of local customs, and those kinds of issues to be able to have—I guess for lack of a better way to describe it—a well-rounded soldier that knows and understands and can communicate and appreciate the environment that they are fighting in.
General SCHOOMAKER. I think the idea would be every officer in the United States Army should be able to speak a second language. I think there ought to be a broader cultural awareness. That is a real ideal that I could subscribe to.
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But I will tell you, having spent a long time in my career in organizations where that was our purpose, was to teach and learn and operate in foreign languages, it is an enormous undertaking, and it is very, very difficult, and we are never as good as we need to be at it. I mean, if you go to Army Special Forces and take a look at the energy going into maintaining 60 languages, it is incredible. To maintain once you get even to a basic proficiency level is huge.
So I would tell you it is a lofty goal, it is something we ought to shoot for, but, in my view, it is probably hugely impractical that we would ever be able to achieve that level. I wish it were not so.
Mr. REYES. But it is part of your priority.
General SCHOOMAKER. Absolutely, and I think it is a tremendous resource. By the way, you know, we have almost 40,000 soldiers in our Army today that are not U.S. citizens that come with another language as their primary language and are learning English as their second language, come from a variety of cultures, and I think one of the things we need to do is make better use of that resource, as we grow. The diversity that we need, all of that, I think, is a huge challenge and one that, if we could do it well, would help us a tremendous amount.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HAYES. Congressman Schrock.
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And we do have a little bit earlier vote. If you all have questions, it would be my preference, but I will go with your wishes. We have a long series of votes. I hate to hold these gentlemen up. So, if you kind of come tell me while Congressman Schrock is asking questions, we will see how we are going to deal with that.
Mr. SCHROCK. So, while you are taking a tally, I will start.
Let me make one comment before I ask my question. I want to follow up on something Dr. Snyder said. He talked about lessons learned, and that is something we have heard a lot about recently, and I would suggest maybe it is not lessons learned but just lessons. If we had learned them, we probably would not be having the same pay problems with the Reserve and Guard folks now that we had in Gulf I. That is just a comment.
I am probably going to address this to General Curran mainly, but how do you balance education, getting the guys back into the field or in the case of the Navy back into the fleet? Do you believe that the career paths of today's Army officer allows enough time to fit in a meaningful graduate education? Is there value to increased time for the study of warfare and cultures of other countries, like Congressman Reyes said?
You know, does somebody want to have a whole career field in civil affairs or cultures or language? I know, during my career in the Navy, a lot of officers looked down on a lot of education, as did the detailers who pretty much discouraged you from doing that, because the career path you were on did not support it if you want to get promoted—too many wickets, as we used to call it, ticket punching.
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I am just wondering if you would be willing to comment on that. Where is the balance? Where is the balance so we make sure people are not so overeducated they are going to keep them in the education realm for their whole careers?
General CURRAN. Thank you very much.
The way we tend to approach this in the Training and Doctrine Command, but also throughout the Army, is to look at it from really three ways that we learn and we train. We train first in units, we train in the institution, and then we have self-learning. We professionals will spend some time studying our profession, not in the institution, nor necessarily the unit.
When you look at the pace of operations that we have going on right now, we are training and learning an awful lot, and we are learning most of it on operations. You know, some people call it a laboratory of unbelievable dimensions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, essentially, when you look at how our forces are maturing and learning, the majority of it is occurring on operations.
Where we are leveraging that in the institution is by bringing those officers and those non-commissioned officers back into their education process, into the institution, and they are exchanging that information with their fellow officers and NCOs. So, even in the institution, we are embedding, we are bringing in the lessons, if you will, from the combat veterans and instilling it into our instruction.
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We are making changes to some of our tactics, techniques, and procedures that are being applied in our institutions based upon the lessons we are picking up from the force. It is not just our combat veterans, but it is also the lessons that we are picking up from those combat units that are not coming into the schoolhouse, but we are reading their lessons learned and from the Joint Forces Command and the work we do with them to collect joint lessons learned.
So we are plowing that all back into the institutional base, but you have to realize we have a force right now that is learning exponentially in experience.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sir, if I could just add to that, there are differences in each service in terms of what their philosophy is on education. In the United States Army, the non-commissioned officer education system and the officer education system are mandatory programs. To proceed through the non-commissioned officer ranks or to proceed up the officer ranks, we have mandatory education requirements that we do. So all the way up through the intermediate level of schooling for officers, a hundred percent of the officers are required to accomplish that goal.
Then, of course, it becomes more selective to the War College, et cetera, but I will tell you, from the basic course through the advanced courses through the intermediate-level schools, those are mandatory courses and they will not advance without it, and it is part of the program.
Mr. SCHROCK. I thank you all very much.
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I am privileged to have TRADOC in the district I represent. If I had my way, it will be there for a long, long, long time.
Thank you very much.
Mr. HAYES. I thank the gentleman.
Ms. Sanchez.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen, for being before us today again.
I am glad that Mr. Reyes brought up the issue of joint training because, obviously, the Army is and always will be part of the Joint Force, but there are certain aspects of the transformation which still seem to lag behind the improvements in joint operations.
For example, OIF dramatically demonstrated our advances in recon strike and close air support to ground combat forces during the past decade. These improved air capabilities allowed our ground forces to go into Iraq with less artillery support than the Army doctrine would require.
As the Army looks at the future for structure, do not these improved air capabilities suggest that maybe we can reduce organic cannon and rocket artillery forces, especially at the core level? Do the transformation plans achieve those reductions? Why? not? What do you have as far as that?
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General SCHOOMAKER. We are reducing in the artillery about, I think, 49 battalions of artillery that are creating the MPs and the civil affairs in the transformation. That is part of the base that we are using to transform.
Joint Fires is an integral part of the brigade combat team unit of action. That is why we put the Joint Fires battalion in there, and we are working with General Jumper, my counterpart in the Air Force, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, with battlefield airmen, they call them, increasing the numbers of enlisted tactical air controllers within our formation so that we can get them down to company level and connect the Joint Fires.
We are training our what we call FISTers, our fire support teams, in a broader array of Joint Fires possibilities, especially with our precision fires, and so that is one of the most powerful elements of the unit of action formation, is to be able to do that.
Of course, the network I described is the means by which you can integrate that. See, without that network, you do not have access at that level. You have to rely on division to integrate those things for you and provide them where now what we are doing is pulling them down into the lower tactical formation.
So these formations that we are putting together right now give us huge potential in the integration of joint capability.
Ms. SANCHEZ. You said that reduction was of 49 battalions and you are moving them more into military police, civil affairs, et cetera, to reflect the types of situations we will find ourselves in? I would just like to know if there is a document or where we would find that information so that I can read through it and ask more detailed questions.
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General SCHOOMAKER. I can be more specific on that, I think, but I do not have the numbers on here.
But what we are decreasing are field artillery battalions, air defense battalions, engineer battalions, armor battalions, and ordnance battalions. What we are increasing is military police, transportation, water distribution, civil affairs, psychological operations (PSYOPS), and bids companies, you know, in that transformation. You know, it is over 100,000 structural changes that we are making to do that.
Now that still leaves us 107 battalions of artillery. I mean, that is how rich we were in that in the Cold War period, and, of course, that artillery, what we are talking about now, we are much more precise with that artillery so we can reduce the logistics that feeds the cannon and the rocket and the rest of it.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Great.
My last question to do with, well, one of the guiding principles of the Army transformation strategy to enhance the strategic and operational agility of the Army mechanized forces. One of the results, I think, in reading through things, was a design requirement on Future Combat System of a 16-to 18-ton weight limit, which would allow airlift by C–130 aircraft or a future heavy-lift rotary wing or tilt wing aircraft.
This so-called air mechanization concept would give the Army a mechanized vertical capability. However, experience from Vietnam, Kosovo, clearly Afghanistan and Iraq recently, demonstrates how difficult it is to suppress even an unsophisticated low-altitude air-defense threat to a slow-moving tactical aircraft. Both the Navy and the Air Force have concluded that air strike and ground support operations should be conducted above 10,000 feet.
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So is the concept of air mechanization really feasible in light in particular of what we saw in Iraq in the earlier part of this year with low-altitude ground-to-air threats? Can you give me some scenarios where the employment of the capability would be undertaken with acceptable risks?
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, I can give you a perfect example.
Mr. HAYES. If the gentleman would yield just a moment, we are down to 5 minutes. So Congressman Skelton——
Ms. SANCHEZ. If he could just answer that, that is my last question. Then I will run over.
General SCHOOMAKER. I can give a 60-second answer to it or even less.
Mr. HAYES. Okay. Please. But we have to go.
General SCHOOMAKER. A good example in northern Iraq: We parachuted the 173rd Airborne Brigade into northern Iraq, and then we had to heavy lift tanks and Brads in there. Had we had Stryker available or the Future Combat System available to us at the time that we did that, we would have been able to rapidly reinforce them and seriously change the dynamics up there. Fundamentally, what we ended up with was dismounted infantry with no mobility on the ground. So there is a good example that was totally doable.
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Ms. SANCHEZ. So that is an acceptable risk with respect to low——
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, we landed C–17s with tanks in them up there and did not lose any of them.
Ms. SANCHEZ. That was before they figured out maybe that is the way they could get it.
Mr. HAYES. We are going to have to recess, and Congressman Skelton has asked that you please come back. We will get here as quickly as we can, grab a quick bite of lunch, and we will go from there.
General SCHOOMAKER. What time do you want us back, sir?
The CHAIRMAN. Twenty-five minutes, 20 minutes.
General SCHOOMAKER. Half past the hour.
[Recess.]
Mr. HAYES. Okay. Well begin as soon as everyone is prepared. Then barring unexpected entry, Mr. Marshall, we will look to you to go first.
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Mr. Marshall is recognized.
Mr. MARSHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will give the witnesses an opportunity to sit down here.
Chief, pleasure to be with you again, sir, and I really appreciate the job that all of you do on behalf of our country.
Ho Chi Minh was asked—of course, I was not the questioner. It is only as a result of history and historians that I found this out—how in the world he was going to whip the United States of America, and his response was, ''They will kill a lot of us. We will kill a few of them. They will tire of it.''
Lieutenant General Scales, a former commandant, I guess, of the War College, in his written testimony last week—I do not know that he mentioned this in his oral testimony—he said this, ''Since the Israeli war of independence, Islamic armies are 0 and 7 when fighting Western style.''
Parenthetically, I describe that as, you know, Desert Storm and the first part of this war. Then he said this, ''And they are 5 and 0,'' and then, parenthetically, he says, ''Well, 5, 0, and 1 if this war is included.''
I really think he made a mistake there. I think what he is saying is this one is still up in the air, but 5 and 0 when fighting unconventionally against Israel, the United States and the Soviet Union.
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I do not know whether this is just a question of national character. When I talk about this, I often talk about our character as a nation and whether or not we have the staying power to deal with what some refer to as the follow-on, some refer to as the low-intensity, some refer to as the insurgency. There are a lot of different ways of describing the problem that we have in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I do not know whether it is a question of national character, but I certainly agree, General Schoomaker, with an awful lot, just about everything you have said, and certainly agree very much with your response to Gene Taylor when he asked about how are we going to protect our troops, and you said, ''Well, one of the most important things is you do not ever put your soldiers, if you can avoid it, into a battle where you do not have the upper hand, where it is not unfair.''
You had this quote; it is hugely important that you pick the time and place, referring to us, that we pick the time and place. When we get into these unconventional conflicts, the way we are structured right now as a military, it is not us who is picking the time and place. It is others. We go out on patrol, and we get shot at. We worry about how we are going to add armament to different vehicles because we are being defensive. Now we know we are going to get shot at. We are going to get blown up.
So, with the reorganization that you all are describing—and I do not come close to being able to understand the PowerPoint presentation. I mean, I am probably closer than most here, but I do not think anybody could have followed that. With that reorganization, you know, I know doggone well we can decapitate any government that is out there. We can knock off any conventional force that is out there.
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What worries me—and I know the response could be, ''Well, that is not really in the Army's lane,'' and, if it is not in the Army's lane, I do not know whose lane it is in—is that we are not well organized as a country, whether it is character or something else, to deal with the low-intensity stuff, and if we cannot deal with the low-intensity stuff, we have a huge problem for Iraq and Afghanistan and where this whole terrorism, Islamic threat is concerned.
You know, I was talking with somebody not too long ago who said, ''Well, you know, really what we need is we need a Peace Corps, you know. We need to flood that place with Peace Corps.'' Well, that is not going to work. My God, they are not going to go. You know, the typical Peace Corps person is not going to go out there and get killed, which is what is going to happen.
Civil affairs was mentioned earlier, sort of the dregs of the Army, and yet terribly important when it comes to this kind of engagement. Language, military police: You know, why we would think that we could put military police over there and somehow they are going to solve the security is beyond me. They are targets just like our armored troops are targets and our infantry troops out on patrol are targets.
The idea here is that they will just bleed us, moneywise, limbs, lives. They will just bleed us over a long period of time and let the news media carry the bad news over a long period of time, and we will give up. We will tire of it, as Ho Chi Minh said. Then we do not accomplish our objectives, the terrorists feel like they have won, they are emboldened, all of a sudden, they are ascendant, and we have more hard-liners rather than less in control. You know, if that happens to Pakistan, they have nukes already.
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So I guess my question is just terribly broad. I hear all of this about reorganization, I do not question that this is exactly what we ought to be doing where conventional fights are concerned, but I do not know that it helps us a whole heck of a lot where the sort of follow-on conflict that we are in right now is concerned, and I would like to hear some about that. I mean, how are we going to do this as a country?
I do not say that it is the Army's responsibility, but I do not know who else is going to do it because you cannot get the State Department folks to go over there because they are afraid of getting killed and they have to volunteer anyway. How do you explain that to your wife, your family? ''Oh, I am going to go over to Iraq and be gone for a year.'' And the Peace Corps, you know, I mean, I guess a few idealistic souls would go over there and get killed, and then that would stop.
I think that maybe we need not the school of the Americas, it is the school of the world here. I mean, clearly, we need not to have better relations with militaries throughout the world that can come in here and do it more effectively than we can because they look like these folks, they speak the language, they can drink the water, et cetera.
But I do not know what it is. I mean, I would love to hear how we are going to get to a point where we are not going to have General Scales saying, ''Well, bottom line here is it is 0 and 6 against Islamic insurgencies,'' and the 6 is Afghanistan, Iraq.
Mr. HAYES. The gentleman has time to answer the question, but both of you have been very patient.
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Ms. Davis, you want to go ahead and get your question out there while they think about how they may want to address that very broad question?
Is that agreeable, or you would like to go ahead, Jim? I am just trying to get moving along here.
Okay. Go ahead and answer his question, but, again, Ms. Davis has been waiting a long time as well.
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, Congressman Marshall, thanks a lot. That is very broad. I do not disagree with Bob Scales. I think we ought to be careful, you know, that this does not become just a dialogue of bumper stickers kind of on the thing.
I know Bob Scales and respect him a great deal, and I know there is an awful lot behind what he is saying there. I think it is a concern, and I respect—and I have said this many times—unconventional warfare, insurgency. The thing that we are in right now is a very, very, very powerful form of warfare, and it is underappreciated, and it has been for a long time.
Much of what you say, in my view, is true. I think this is a test of wills, but I also know that in this form of warfare, you know, there are more ingredients in the recipe than just the military, and it does require a huge interagency effort. It does require other elements of national power. It is hugely dependent upon the informational aspects.
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You rightly pointed out that, you know, the way things are often portrayed, the way the media is focused and the rest of it, in my view, is not particularly helpful, you know, in balance on what is different than what, quite frankly, our soldiers believe is going on and seeing and what they are committed to. So I think you are right. It is going to be a test of wills.
It is protracted. That is one of the real dimensions of, you know, part of the geometry of this kind of warfare. But, again, I think some of the principles still apply. You still do not want to place yourself into a fight that you cannot win. You know, some of it is counterintuitive.
Sometimes the best way is to be less present and to be focused in your presence and successful in what you do and that exposing more and more of your formation to this kind of warfare may not be the smartest thing to do, and, when we are looking and working very hard to do that, you know, through the commanders over there.
So, again, I guess I agree that this is a powerful form of warfare, time is a real factor, many more elements of power involved in it beyond the military, but this transformation we are talking about—it is not reorganization. This is a big difference in the way that we are talking across all of the aspects of this—gives us much more capability to deal at this level, at that level of warfare than our co-warful nations did, and it gives us access to a much more complete toolkit at the tactical level to be able to deal with the multifaceted aspects of this kind of warfare.
Most importantly, I think it gives us better capability to use information to our advantage so that we can enter the fight when we want, and it gives us the kind of precision that is required because precision is an important aspect when you are engaged in this because of the collateral damage aspects and the civilians on the battlefield and all the rest of it.
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So I think we are developing a much better toolkit, but it cannot be used and employed, absent all of the other aspects of the national power and resources that are required. So I guess I will just stop there on that.
The CHAIRMAN [presiding]. I thank the gentleman for his answer.
Congresswoman Davis.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, General Schoomaker for your remarkable service and for hanging in with us this afternoon as well.
I think my question actually follows up in many ways with my colleague, Mr. Marshall, and I am wondering on the charts that you showed us, in many ways, you were talking about hypotheticals and the kind of Army that we would need in the future or that we certainly need today, and I wondered if you could even expand on that on where you would like to be on that chart, where we perhaps should have been or might have had a potential of being today.
What would you change, how would you shift some of those resources ideally, and, if you could speak to the civil affairs piece in that as well, that would be helpful.
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, first of all, I mean, I used to command all the civil affairs. I commanded SOCOM, and we viewed them as a very, very important aspect of the world that we are in today, and I will tell you that much of the disciplines within civil affairs—and, if my memory serves me correct, there are about 22 of them—you largely cannot develop and maintain purely in an active-duty force.
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Many of the skills that are there, the people that, you know, know governance and, you know, civil authorities, the legal aspect and all that, many of those have grown out of our society at very high levels of skill. So on one hand where you have a little civil affairs teams that are helping at the tactical level, that is not the full aspect of civil affairs.
There is a much broader operational aspect of it that has to do with all of the aspects of civil society and how you integrate that, and it is a very, very valuable resource. As I said, we have made a major move in terms of providing the spaces to U.S. Southern Command (SOCOM) for them to grow more civil affairs to help them be able to you know, meet the need that is out there. Right now, civil affairs is stretched, so that is one aspect of it.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. On your chart, yes.
General SCHOOMAKER. There is not much hypothetical on that chart. What I have laid out there is the program, and the way we have structured our budget requests and the way we have laid out our program over the time is behind what you see there. I mean, we have laid it out.
We think it is achievable within the technologies, as we see them. We think it is achievable within the programmatics that we see, the fiscal programmatics. We think it is realistic in terms of what we are doing, and I do not think there is much hypothetical there.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. General, I am sorry. Perhaps I did not phrase that right, but is there a point on there that you would have liked to have been when we finished the occupation, taking Iraq, as an example?
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General SCHOOMAKER. Well, the kinds of organizations that you see on there are configured with mature technologies, mature training, you know, with the cadres and all that institutionalized in a way that right now we are doing on an ad hoc basis. We are having to break our formations and put them together to meet the requirement today, which leaves pieces, bits and pieces.
I use my old hundred-dollar bill analogy, you know. When you pay yourself with hundred-dollar bills, that means that is what you have to use every time you go pay a bill. If you are going to buy something that cost $7 at the corner store, you have to break a hundred-dollar bill. That leaves you $93. You go to the grocery store, and you have a hundred-and-one-dollar bill, that means your change does not cover it, so you have to break another one.
That is exactly what we have been in. So we want to change the coin of the realm here. We want to go to $20 bill. And is $20 perfect? No, but it allows you to do a lot with $20. If you need to aggregate to pay a $50 bill, you take three $20 and you get less change back, and it gives us the ability through modularity to be much more capable to meet the full range of requirements that we have in the force.
I am telling you I can remember back when we first started into Bosnia and Kosovo how we saw ourselves strained in the combat support, combat service support. We were breaking the DISCOMs across the Army to meet the sustainment requirements for that, and that was over 10 years ago, and, you know, I am telling you I am very serious. I think we missed lots of opportunity to start transformation.
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There are lots of reasons, not because it was not good leadership. It is not because, you know, the people's hearts were not in the right place, but, you know, the focus, the programmatics and, you know, the fiscal resources were not there to do it. Today, this war has given us the focus, it is given us the momentum, and through the supplemental funding and stuff, it is given us the resources to be able to reset ourselves for the future as opposed to resetting ourselves for the past.
You know, when we came back from Desert Shield, Desert Storm, we reset ourselves the way we went. We are not resetting ourselves the way we went to this one. We are resetting ourselves for the future with the same amount of money. So it is an opportunity to do that.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General GRIFFIN. When the Chief talked about spiraling into the current force, it allows us to reinvest billions of dollars into the current force as we go down this road to get at those objectives much sooner.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. It is kind of forced that, hasn't it?
General GRIFFIN. Yes, ma'am.
General SCHOOMAKER. By the way, if I could just say one more, it is really important because of the protracted nature of the kinds of things that we are doing that we increase the number of entities that we have to play, and that by going from 33 to 43, it is a dramatic change in our ability to sustain over the long term unit rotations with adequate lull time between, and it is just like—I keep using sports analogies—you can go to a football game.
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I happened to play in the Sugar Bowl in 1968, okay, and we showed up down there against LSU, and LSU must have fallen out half of Baton Rouge, Okay. I mean, they had a hundred players out there dressed up, and we showed up from Wyoming with about 50 of us, and, believe me, depth makes a difference because we were winning at halftime and we lost by the end of the game.
So what you can have is the best players in the world, but if you are going to go play a long game, you better have the ability to keep doing it, and that is part of what we have to build into our Army is a capacity to meet the commitments that we are going to have in the 21st century in a way that will sustain us, in a way that we can maintain a volunteer force and maintain the force of excellence that we need, and not run out of gas in the third quarter because somebody can hold us to it that long.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the lady and the gentleman.
My distinguished friend and colleague, Mr. Skelton?
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me go back, General, to professional military education. I think it is more than your seedcorn. It is your guiding light. In these days, you have two major challenges, one to continue to educate as well as train, let's talk about educate, but how you fight force on force. That is historically what the American Army has done so well.
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But, in addition to that, you have the asymmetrical challenge, which includes, of course, the fighting, the cultural understandings, as well as the language requirements, and all of that. So you really have to educate for two types of warfare, and slighting either one could cause us serious problems in the days ahead.
By the way, I do not go around advocating movies, but one, ''The Battle of Algiers,'' which I saw just recently, is excellent. I think every American military officer should see it. You can win so much and still lose the war and be chased out of town.
Let's look at your education system for just a minute. The Army War College, for instance. You send people to the Army War College, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Am I correct, which is a senior school?
General SCHOOMAKER. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. A few moments ago, you said that the infantry is, if I quote you correctly, core to all that you are doing today. Is that correct?
General SCHOOMAKER. I missed that part. I am sorry.
Mr. SKELTON. The infantry is very important to you.
General SCHOOMAKER. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. Is it true that you are shortchanging some of the infantry officers because they are needed on the front line today in Iraq or Afghanistan and not sending them to the War Colleges?
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General SCHOOMAKER. We have not reduced our War College attendance.
Mr. SKELTON. No, no. That is not my question.
General SCHOOMAKER. Okay.
Mr. SKELTON. Are the numbers of infantry officers being cut back because of the operations tempo (OPTEMPO)?
General SCHOOMAKER. Not to my knowledge.
Mr. SKELTON. Would you check on that for me?
General SCHOOMAKER. I will. I sure will. I would be very surprised. In fact, on top of the War College, we also have fellowships at institutes of higher learning.
Mr. SKELTON. I understand that, but I want to make sure that the infantry as well as the necessary specialties are being accepted and sent to Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine War College, particularly the Army War College. Would you check on that and get back and make it for the record, please?
General SCHOOMAKER. Yes, I sure will.
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Mr. SKELTON. An interesting book came out—I forget the name of it—by a Major Negal from the Army, Command & General Staff College.
General SCHOOMAKER. I believe I sent you a copy of that book.
Mr. SKELTON. You did.
General SCHOOMAKER. Yes.
Mr. SKELTON. I am reflecting on it. It appears from that book that you were kind enough to send me that the British did much better in asymmetrical type of warfare than the Americans basically because the British in Malaysia as opposed to the Americans in Vietnam had a culture through the decades and the centuries of fighting this type of warfare, and they did a good job there in Malaysia in 1946, 1947, that era, and, of course, you know the story of America never losing a battle but losing the war. You know that far better than I.
How do you make up for that today? How do you put America in the same position that the British were in so that they understand and can fight these asymmetrical types of warfare tomorrow, the day after tomorrow?
General SCHOOMAKER. Well, we certainly cannot take 200 years so that we get it through experience. You know, the title of that book was a comparison, for those that have not read it, between the British experience in Malaysia and our experience in Vietnam, and the title of it, taken off T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia's statement that this kind of warfare is like eating soup with knife, it is slow, and it is messy, and that is the nature of this war.
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But the real thread that ran through the book and the reason that I wanted to send it to you was because what they talked about was the effect of culture on learning organizations, and the real study in that book is not about counterinsurgency, but it is about the difference in the British culture and our culture at those times and place and the difference in our learning organizations, our Armies as learning organizations, and the effect that culture had on them.
My charts that I showed up here and that straight line and our focus on the Cold War and the inculturation of that doctrine and that focus that we had against that mitigated against our success in that kind of warfare, and what we are trying to do is to educate, to roll lessons learned in, to train and to broaden and to become truly a learning culture in our Army so that we are adaptable and flexible..
Mr. SKELTON. I do not think you have any choice. You have to do it.
General SCHOOMAKER. We do not. No.
Mr. SKELTON. You have to play catch-up football, as you say, for centuries or else we will repeat the same.
General SCHOOMAKER. But, you know, breaking culture and breaking the emotional commitment, which is well earned and well deserved by a lot of people that have served very faithfully, it takes time and leadership and patience to bring people along, not only intellectually, but emotionally, to buy into the culture shifts that you have to make and to broaden on this.
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Mr. SKELTON. General, could I ask you in the next several days to give some thought to your professional military education from second lieutenant all the way up to someone who spends 25, 30 years? I am not talking about the Schoomakers in this world. I am talking about the person who does a good job, second lieutenant, colonel, and yet does yeoman's work in the field. I am not talking about training, but how you will educate that person to do well in all situations, whether it be asymmetrical or whether it be force on force.
Could you and your staff set forth a plan for that potential officer so that, you know, we will know? You know the work this committee did a number of years ago on professional military education. Let's play catch-up football and see where we are, if we have not made some strides on additional types of education for that officer.
General SCHOOMAKER. Sure.
Mr. SKELTON. I am not asking you to go back between the wars because you are a busy Army today as opposed to then, it was not a busy Army, and they had time to go to school. But you have to capture some of that some way. Would you put together a plan for me at your earliest convenience? I would sure appreciate that.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. HAYES. I thank the gentleman for his question.
Chairman Hunter, do you have——
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The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate you on the way you have run this hearing. I think we are about ready to wrap up, but I certainly appreciate it, and I appreciate the great testimony by General Schoomaker and his team.
General SCHOOMAKER. Thank you very much.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, gentleman. I could apologize for the train breaking down and the skirmishes on the floor and all that, but we do appreciate your patience.
In closing, a lot of books have been quoted, I have no doubt about the patience, the will, and the ability of our Army and our military, and there is another book that may have come from West Point, ''Carnage and Culture,'' the Eastern culture, many led by a few, our culture, few led by many. We will win. Thank you.
General SCHOOMAKER. Thank you, sir.
[Whereupon, at 1:18 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]