SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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??–???
2004
[H.A.S.C. No. 108–15]
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM: OPERATIONS AND RECONSTRUCTION
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
OCTOBER 21, 2003
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Eighth Congress
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
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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
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JEB BRADLEY, New Hampshire
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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
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
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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 S. Rangel, Staff Director
James M. Lariviere, Professional Staff Member
Justin Bernier, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
HEARING:
Tuesday, October 21, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom: Outside Perspectives
APPENDIX:
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2003
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM: OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVES
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
Biddle, Dr. Stephen D., Associate Research Professor of National Security Studies, U.S. Army War College
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew Jr., Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert Jr., USA, Ret., Former Commandant, Army War College
APPENDIX
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PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The prepared statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Biddle, Dr. Stephen D.
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew Jr.
Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert Jr.
Skelton, Hon. Ike
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM: OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVES
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, October 21, 2003.
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The committee met, pursuant to call, at 8:01 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. I want to welcome our witnesses. This morning's hearing is on Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). We are fortunate to have with us some of today's most respected analysts on the future of warfare and its implications for U.S. security, and we are joined by Major General Robert Scales, United States Army, Retired, Former Commandant of the U.S. Army War College. Thank you, General, for being with us.
Dr. Andrew Krepinevich—and, Doctor, forgive me, I didn't see you when I came running down there to say hello to everybody—Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and Dr. Stephen D. Biddle, Associate Research Professor of National Security Studies, U.S. Army War College.
Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Even as major combat operations drew to a close in May, the lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom were beginning. A few weeks ago, this committee heard from the Commanding General of the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), Admiral Giambastiani, whose embedded combat observers and analysts are refining the joint operational lessons learned from OIF. The Joint Staff continues its work to distill the strategic lessons learned while the Services are cataloging their tactical lessons from this conflict.
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Today we are going to hear outside perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom and implications on U.S. warfare and national policy. As with any war waged by the U.S., it is critical we engage in an open and vigorous critique of our actions so that future military leaders can draw the correct lessons and apply them to the next conflict. One need only look to the erroneous lessons learned by the French military following World War I to see the value of a vigorous lessons-learned effort.
The aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom raises some serious questions on the future of warfare. Chief among these is whether the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom is the last war of some former era in warfare or the first war of a new era. Some believe that speed, precision, and superior knowledge were the reasons for success in Iraq and heralded a new type of warfare. If we invest in more high-tech systems that provide perfect knowledge of the battlefield and combine them with increasingly capable precision munitions, we can ensure victory in any future conflict.
To this, I would remind my friends that chess players always have perfect knowledge of the board, their pieces always strike with perfect precision, but this does not always ensure a successful game, and I think we saw in Operation Iraqi Freedom really some of the old and some of the new. I think folks were—there was a new validation of the value of heavy armor, for example, along with a renewed validation of the importance and value of precision munitions.
Others have suggested just the opposite, that the major conflict phase of OIF holds few lessons for future conflicts. They argue that future wars will look more like the current phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom with its current religious and ethnic factions, rivalries, foreign terrorists, shadowy non-state actors, guerrilla bombings and hidden weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Emerging nontraditional threats, not conventional land forces, will be the real threat. In this environment, more human intelligence, rapidly deploying and flexible forces and superior training hold the key to victory.
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The issues we will discuss here today are much more than a sterile academic class in the nature of future conflict. The lessons we draw from this and other recent military operations will inform the committee's decisions regarding how our forces will be sized and shaped in the years to come. They will also inform us as to the nature, quantity and type of hardware munitions we need to buy for our men and women in uniform so that they can meet the challenges of our future battlefield, and, gentlemen, I look forward to your testimony on this important subject.
Before we go to our witnesses, I would like to recognize the committee's ranking Democrat, Mr. Skelton, my partner and the gentleman from Missouri, for any comments he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you. I would like to offer my statement in total, if I may——
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.
Mr. SKELTON [continuing]. In light of the fact that we have other hearings going on, in the interest of time. But let me welcome General Scales, Dr. Krepinevich, and Dr. Biddle. It is very, very important that you do what you do, and the chairman correctly pointed out the values of lessons learned or lessons not learned when he made reference to the French between the wars, and consequently they hid behind the national line, much to their military demise.
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I hope you will be able to touch on the jointness, as much as possible. Goldwater-Nichols, I think, is coming into full bloom as a result of this conflict. I would appreciate that.
Otherwise, Mr. Chairman, I just want my statement in total put in the record.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman, and once again, thanks for being with us to our witnesses. The entirety of your statements will be entered into the record, without objection. General Scales, the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. ROBERT SCALES, JR., USA, RET., FORMER COMMANDANT, U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE
General SCALES. Thank you, Congressman Hunter and Congressman Skelton. I appreciate very much the opportunity to be here and testify today. I would like to keep my statement very short to allow most of the time for dialogue with you. As you know, Professor Williamson Murray and I just finished a study called, ''The Iraq War: A Military History'', and we wrote it for three reasons. One is a salute to our military men and women for the incredible job they did under very difficult circumstances.
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Second, we wrote it to provide context. The American people have been better informed about this war perhaps than any war in history, but they saw the war through a series of stop action kaleidoscopic images, and we sought to put historical context into that war to tell the American people a little bit more about——
The CHAIRMAN. General, could you get that microphone a little closer?
General SCALES. Is that better?
The CHAIRMAN. That is perfect.
General SCALES [continuing]. About how the war came about and what the consequences of the war were likely to be and finally, and I guess the reason I am here today, is we spent the last chapter talking about lessons learned. What did we learn from the war? As many of you know, I also wrote the history of the first Gulf War, ''Certain Victory'', back in 1992, and I would like to start my statement just by comparing the two.
You can argue that the first Gulf War epitomized the tactical excellence of American military forces, but it brought forth, I think, shortcomings at the operational level of war, just as Mr. Skelton inferred, the ability to combine the air and ground components into a single melded force. This war, I think, demonstrated again tactical excellence, but I think for the first time in American history it demonstrated the operational excellence of American forces. For the first time we put together, to use the Marine Corps term, an air-ground team of unparalleled sophistication and effectiveness.
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In the book we talk about nine different things that made a difference in this war in terms of its transformational impact on the future of warfare. The three, Mr. Chairman, you just mentioned—speed, precision, and knowledge. I will not go into those because previous speakers have testified to that. I would like to talk about four very quickly and then conclude with knowledge.
The first thing I think this war demonstrated is convergence. The one thing that struck us, and again the book is heavily weighted toward the Army and Marine Corps performance in this campaign, is how similar ground forces have become in the last decade, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and particularly since Goldwater-Nichols.
Obviously each ground component has its own culture, but what struck me is that the Army component forces that were employed in this campaign had become lighter, had become faster, had become more agile and adaptable. And Marine Corps forces applied the lessons of the operational level of war, so that if you look at the war from a strategic standpoint, what you see is a double envelopment, where the left prong was an Army division and the right prong was a Marine—the equivalent of a Marine Corps corps, and that is pretty remarkable.
I cannot imagine any time since the First World War where Marine and Army forces had operated together so seamlessly and performed the same function.
The second issue in the book is what we call ad hockery, and that is the ability of Army and Marine Corps forces in particular to play a pickup team. Very interesting that in the first Gulf War, we were extremely reluctant to put together fighting forces at the eleventh hour and commit them to combat. In this war, completely the opposite impulse prevailed. We were putting forces in the field, Task Force Tarawa comes to mind, that were literally a pickup team and they fought very effectively, and the reason for that is because the Army and Marine Corps training systems have allowed us to create a common cultural bias among units, regardless of where they are deployed, regardless of what their particular function is at any one particular time. So if you adhere to a common cultural concept and you follow similar training and you have commanders that are raised as a single generation with this common cultural view, when you put them together they tend to be able to fight well together, even though they may not be as tightly bonded as units in the past.
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Third is this idea of heterogeneity. I think this war clearly demonstrates, as you inferred, Mr. Chairman, that—foreground forces, in particular—in order to be effective in all regions of the world in all circumstances, you have to build forces that consist of many, many different components: heavy, light, special forces, conventional forces, firepower centered forces, and so forth; that the days that the concept that one-size-fits-all, particularly in land warfare, I think the performance of the Third Infantry Division in particular put that theory to rest.
And finally, the issue of knowledge. I was in the Army War College two weeks ago, and I had a chance to interview one of the senior tactical commanders in the Third Infantry Division, and I said, what was your impression of the campaign, and he said something very interesting. He said, when I crossed the berm, I had near perfect situational awareness. He said, what I was lacking was cultural awareness. Very interesting. He said, I knew where virtually every tank in the 15th Mechanized Division of the Iraqi Army was around Talil, but that did me very little good because what I confronted when I crossed the berm was fanatical dismounted soldiers and people mounted in sport utility vehicles (SUV) and pickups attacking me with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and Kalashnikovs, and he said we went across the berms prepared to kill T–72s and BMP infantry combat vehicles and by the time I got to Baghdad I had plenty of antitank rounds left in my bustle rack, but I was black on 7.62 at .50 caliber because the enemy that my soldiers were faced with was different than that enemy that had been postulated.
And so, what this means to me, at least, and what is a central theme of this book, is that it is not enough to know your enemy's capabilities. We do that very well and with our overhead systems we are able to count tanks and motor pools with great fidelity. What we need to know in the future is intent and will and what is in the mind and ears of the enemy. Technological superiority is no longer enough. Computers, surveillance, bandwidth cannot make up for familiarity with the environment and the enemy. So what is needed in the future, we believe in our book, is intent-based knowledge, understanding the enemy and getting into his decision loop.
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Now, we avoided serious problems in this war for three reasons. Number one, we had great soldiers who were able to innovate and adapt to a different situation than expected. Second was the ineptitude of the enemy, and third was the presence of stable line forces, forces embedded in cities so that when the maneuver forces arrived they were able to add a subjective corrective to what they were able to encounter.
The CHAIRMAN. Explain that, General.
General SCALES. When——
The CHAIRMAN. One example.
General SCALES. When 37th Cav first approached some of the major cities, as they swung around the major cities they were expecting to do tank-on-tank engagements. Special Forces who were embedded in these cities and kind of new what the lay of the land was all about were able to come out of the cities and tell them those tanks were empty. There is nobody in the those BMPs. Your problem is going to be the Fedayeen, and these people are failed Baathist Party members and former police officers and security forces armed with small forces and RPGs. They have got mines waiting for you. They are going to try to ambush you in the city.
Of course, the forces waiting in the cities knew that, but it was the emphasis they put on it and the emphasis they placed on the minds of the commanders that allowed them to fight so well once they got into the cities. Had they not had that up-to-the-minute, fingertip style of intelligence, they probably would have had a tougher time. And it is unfortunate that we weren't better able to anticipate this change in the character of the enemy, because if you look at wars in the region, particularly those fought in the Middle East, indigenous armies, fighting against Western style armies, are 0 and 7, you could argue since 1948, but in nonconventional warfare, sort of irregular warfare, they are 5 and 0. So they have done well, indigenous armies have, in fighting in an unconventional manner, in everything from the incursion of Lebanon in 1982 through the ejection of the Soviet Union in 1989.
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So the lesson then is, technology will not triumph over the fog of war; technological monism will not work; technology doesn't tell intent, measure will and motivation.
It is interesting that our doctrine says that when a unit is 30 percent destroyed it becomes combat ineffective, and yet I can remember in Vietnam some North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units suffered 90 percent casualties and were effective, and you can argue that some of the regular Iraqi units in the North suffered zero percent casualties and were ineffective. And the Fedayeen, many of those units suffered near 100 percent casualties and fought not effectively but fanatically until they died.
So we are in a new era of cultural wars that has several characteristics. First is a focus on the tactical level. One of the interesting things that I found about this war was that the war was fought at the top level, at the brigade level, and most of the actions that were significant were essentially company level actions or company team level actions. The enemy thinks that our center of gravity is dead Americans, and part of Saddam Hussein's strategy, flawed though it was, was not to seek any strategic advantage or to maneuver against us in any way but to cause casualties. So his success was measured in his own mind and perhaps still is by the ability to string together tactical victories that result in American casualties.
So what this tells us then, as I have said before in other things that I have written and in this new book, is that this new battlefield we are facing is going to be different. It is going to be decentralized. It is going to be a battlefield where the enemy and our forces are dispersed. Battles will be fought in a distributed fashion, where the critical points will often be tactical instead of operational and strategic. We will be fighting enemies that are hidden in the clutter, urban clutter, the clutter of complex terrain, and we will be fighting enemies who rely on as their principal weapon, deception, obfuscation, and the ability to operate under—as one Chinese general I talked to one time said, we want to be able to operate under precision. Interesting concept, to be able to be free to operate under superior American firepower and still remain effective on the battlefield.
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So what to do, and I will end it with just a couple of points: Number one, we need to maintain an emphasis on situational emphasis, to be sure, but we also have to shift our emphasis to the human side of warfare, cultural awareness. We have a hard transformation under way. Perhaps what we need to consider is what we call in the book a soft transformation.
I asked one division commander by e-mail, what do you need? What is the one thing that you're short of in this war, and he replied to me, I thought, rather prophetically, I need translators. The long pole in my tent is my ability to connect with the people in these cities. He said if I know where the enemy is in the cities, I can kill it. My problem is I cannot connect with the local population.
So, again, with deference to the gentleman on your left, I think that part of this soft transformation is a continuation of the PME, professional military educational, reforms that Congressman Ike Skelton, of course, pioneered for so many years, and I would offer the following. In order to conduct this soft transformation, the first thing I would argue is we need to begin earlier the process of educating our officers. We need to include non-commissioned officers (NCO).
It is very interesting in this process of soft transformation that the center of gravity in many of these battles were E–7's, where in the Civil War they were lieutenant generals. So this whole level of indirect leadership is being pushed further and further down the operational chain. We need to improve our cognitive situational abilities for complex and ambiguous circumstances. We need to be able to train our officers, our younger officers, to see through the fog of war, to better understand the enemy. We need to create a sort of cultural court sense, if you will, to build into our young leaders the ability to understand cultures and to quickly adapt in changing situations they encounter, not so much in weapons the enemy is armed with, but in his will and his attitude and in his tenacity, and so forth.
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We need to be able to immerse our military forces culturally, and we need to reward those who have it, and a part of that is to improve the language capability of our young men and women in uniform, not necessarily to make every rifleman fluent, but at least to make them cognizant of where they are fighting, and to understand a little bit better about the culture that they are dealing with. And we need to focus on the critical regions of the world, America's strategic perimeter, those regions of the world where we are most likely to fight.
And I will end my remarks with a brief war story or historical analogy to talk about why this is important and why it is very difficult today to implement it.
At the end of the 19th century, the British Army basically became an army that was too busy, scattered across the globe in small garrisons, a thin red line that stretched from India to Africa. It was an army that was too busy to learn. It didn't think much of education and training. It thought that you learned about wars by fighting wars rather than studying the art of war, and because they were too busy to learn and too busy to create this common cultural bias, by 1914 they had prepared for one style of war and were very good at it, and suddenly they found themselves at Monzin Lake Hatu fighting an army that did study the art of war and understood what modern war was about and for the first two or three years they were outclassed and tens of thousands of British soldiers died needlessly.
We face, at least metaphorically speaking, a similar condition today, where on the one hand we have a military that is very, very busy, it is scattered around the world and finds itself meeting back to back deployments, and yet to understand the art of war and to understand sort of the culture of combat takes education, it takes reflection, and it takes time to study and so we have two poles pulling apart here, and I think it is very important if we are to be prepared to fight in this new era of cultural wars we need to carve out time and resources to allow our young men and women to understand their profession and to study the art of war.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak.
[The prepared statement of General Scales can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. General, thank you and with that last commercial for the educational institutions, we will move on, but good work and great statements.
Dr. Krepinevich.
STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW KREPINEVICH, JR., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to be here this morning and to share my views with you on the lessons of Iraqi Freedom and the implications of our military in the future.
To begin, I think it is important to recognize that the recent war was one conflict, won by that point. I think Admiral Clark summed it up best when he said, ''This war ain't like the last war and it ain't like the next war. This war is like this war.''
So I think there is always a danger in trying to overextrapolate lessons from a particular conflict and paste them onto the future. So that is one point, and what I have done in my analysis is to try and look at trends, and, unfortunately, we have a number of recent datapoints; not only Desert Storm, but also Allied Force and Operation Enduring Freedom to draw upon.
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Second, while Joint Forces Command is certainly hard at work on defining the lessons of the war, in a sense we put the American military in the difficult, but not necessarily unwelcome, position of grading their own homework; and one thing I think that is lacking and will make it difficult to define lessons is the absence of an independent lessons learned effort on this war, something analogous to the Gulf War airpower survey that was commissioned after Desert Storm.
Having said that, let me offer five brief observations for your consideration and a few possible implications for the defense program and for force structure. The first observation, again looking at trends, is we find ourselves having gotten into the regime change business. Since the end of the Cold War, we have on average overturned the leadership of a government about once every three years. Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq—that is 5 in less than 15 years.
With that comes certain moral, political, and security consequences. During the 1990's, we said we could take it or leave it. We left Haiti after a period, we had exit strategies for places like Haiti and Somalia.
Now, following 9/11 we find there are certain threats, certain parts of the world that make it very difficult to depart, whether we want to or not, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq.
What this means, I think, is that there is a clear lesson in terms of the trends that we have gotten into, the stability operations business, and we had better get good at it in a hurry.
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My second point is that it seems as though precision warfare, which was a novelty back in 1991, has really come of age, and in fact I would argue that if you look at the last three conflicts, in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and particularly in Iraq, you see that precision warfare is almost indispensable to the kinds of military operations we want to conduct.
In Afghanistan, in the Balkans, and in Iraq we did not wage war against a country. We waged war against a despot and his colleagues, if you will—against Milosevic, against the Taliban, against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist leaders. We did not wage war against the infrastructure of the country, we did not wage war against the people of that country, and precision enabled that. Precision enabled us to be very discriminating, along with a different sense of how ground forces would operate—very fast moving, nonlinear operations, very dispersed, taking risks, in order to move very quickly and achieve their objectives very quickly.
Again, I think this combination of precision and a different approach to land warfare, instead of the linear approach, the shift in the war to nonlinear operations, the willingness to use Special Operations Forces (SOF) really does signal a shift in the different direction and a couple of dimensions of how wars are fought.
Among the key factors, air and information superiority, persistent surveillance, suppressing the engagement cycle and as Admiral Giambastiani would say, one of the critical problems we have in this area is battle damage assessment, keeping up with the increasing tempo of military operations, the aggressive use of Special Operations Forces and nonlinear ground operations, truly joint air/land operations, and what is remarkable here, I think, is that combination. And here I would differ from Joint Forces Command and say, to me it is remarkable how few friendly fire casualties we suffered, considering the way we operated in that war. I would be glad to elaborate on that. And finally, the familiar wheel of precision weapons that is developed over time, the full force of what we did not even see in this conflict.
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The problem, and I think this is something that you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, and also Bob Scales, is that the competition continues. The enemy is seeking offsets or counters. Targets are becoming mobile, they are going deep underground, they are seeking sanctuary.
The first hundred or so schools that we investigated in Iraq turned out to be armories, for example, after this war, using mosques, schools, hospitals as sanctuaries. The discrimination problem—as Bob says, once they stop becoming regular forces and move to irregular warfare, no matter how many sensors you have, it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe, camouflage, cover, and concealment, and of course, over time adversaries get the ability to do what we do, even in a small way, which is to hit large, soft fixed targets at a distance. We are going to have to change the way we project power, because iron mountains and moving through large airports and bases is going to become increasingly difficult.
The third point I would mention, and this is in a different sense to what General Scales mentioned, is that I see continued divergence, not convergence, in terms of U.S. military capability and those of other armed forces.
What this means is that waging symmetrical warfare against the American military tank on tank, plane on plane is suicide, and I think we saw that once again as the Iraqis tried to do it in this most recent conflict.
The other thing is that the old metrics of warfare, the way we measure impact power, the way you have to evaluate the defense budgets and the defense program—those metrics are changing, and what I thought was really interesting was a comment by Major General Blount, the Commander of the Third Infantry Division (ID), and as he said, ''Our equipment was superior, our training was superior, our soldiers were superior. The Iraqis had the larger numbers, but our technology was vastly superior with our situational awareness, our ability to communicate and our command and control.''
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He didn't talk about numbers. He didn't talk about firepower. He talked about training, he talked about soldiers, he talked about information, he talked about communication. Those were the things that he signaled out as really being the difference-makers in this conflict.
Consequently, since the gap between us and everyone else is growing, our adversaries are moving to the far ends of the conflict spectrum—get nuclear weapons, or go terrorist or go irregular warfare. That is where the competition is heading. So if we think of the competition in how we would fight it next time, we are missing the point because that is not how the competition is going. So I think that is how you have to view the lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Fourth, as remarkable as our military's performance was, we always have to remember that we need to gauge it in terms of who are we competing against, who is our enemy, and of course going up against the Iraqis, General Schwarzkopf had a comment about how poor General Saddam Hussein was. I think we could say the same thing around this time, as well.
The Iraqis didn't do the things we worried about most. They didn't use weapons of mass destruction. They didn't seriously try to destroy the economic infrastructure. They didn't go after the Kurds or the Shi'ites. They didn't fight principally in urban areas.
Once again, it was a poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly led force that we encountered, and, quite frankly, they were fighting a very poor version of the old military regime. If the Germans introduced blitzkrieg back in 1940 with planes, tanks and radios and how you combine them together, the Iraqis had no planes, no radios, and old tanks, and I dare say that if you could somehow magically transport the German army of 1940 to 2003 and put them up against the Iraqis, the Germans would have won handily.
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So again, remarkable performance by us, yes, but you have to consider the adversary, as well, and what I would say is, what we need to do is look at the essence of Operation Iraqi Freedom in terms of what they tell us about Korea and the budding anti-access area denial problem that we see there. How would we fight against an enemy that would use large numbers of missiles, chemical weapons to hit ports, to hit our bases, to frustrate our ability to operate?
Pakistan. How would we deal with the situation if Pakistan became a country that was coming apart at the seams? Certainly something we worried about after 9/11.
What does Operation Iraqi Freedom tell us about the need to secure the weapons of a failed state? Because what we are seeing is more Third World unstable regimes getting access to nuclear weapons.
What does it say about stability operations in a transnational insurgency, because that is what we are faced with in parts of the Islamic world, in parts of Afghanistan and like Iraq. Urban control operations, something we saw only a smidgen of, and, of course, homeland defense.
The final point, the fifth point I would like to make is that the anti-access threat is real and growing, particularly in one aspect, which is the access to forward bases that we need to project power. As we saw in this conflict, access is becoming problematic for political reasons, and as I mentioned with respect to countries like North Korea, it is also becoming increasingly problematic because of the diffusion of missile technologies and weapons of mass destruction. And so, our global basic restructuring as we conduct that review must take this into account, as must our Services own transformation plans, and I must say in this regard, there are some disturbing disconnects.
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Finally, a few observations for the defense program and our force structure. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld once said low density, high demand capabilities were those things we didn't buy enough of, and I think in some cases we will be looking to buy more of certain things.
If, as has been fairly unanimous, the support for persistent surveillance as a key enabler of the kind of war we like to fight is important, then I think more of the same is not necessarily going to be an answer. I think we are going to need longer-range surveillance capabilities. If you think you are going to come up with an enemy that has integrated air defenses, there are going to have to be stealthy surveillance platforms and capabilities, and these quite frankly are things that are not in the pipeline as of the present.
One of the lessons of the JFCOM study is that while we had about 80 percent of our aerial surveillance assets in theater, if we had put all of them in, you would not have gotten a significant increase in our surveillance capability; in other words, we hit the flat of the curve. More of the same, at least on the scale of an Iraq problem, is not going to give you a commensurate increase in persistent surveillance.
Second, distributed network ground forces. The payoff achieved by using Special Operations Forces—for example, the Army is already moving in this direction. The Army's future, it says, is going to be in nonlinear warfare, which it practiced in the Gulf, and its emphasis on see first, understand first, and act first and finish decisively—essentially emphasizing extended range engagements based upon an information advantage. One of the key bottlenecks here is going to be bandwidth, and it is going to be interesting to see how we solve that problem.
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Bombers. The Air Force doesn't have a bomber program until sometime in the 2030's. Yet, in Allied Force bombers flew 1 percent of the sorties and dropped 11 percent of the precision guided munitions (PGM). In Afghanistan they flew 20 percent of the sorties and dropped 70 percent of the PGMs. In the recent war, they flew 3 percent of the sorties and dropped 28 percent of the PGMs. Bombers count.
Tankers. One of the interesting facts I think that comes out of the U.S. Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) study is that if you use the Gulf War as a baseline, a tank of sorties would double the ratio they were in the first Gulf War and Allied Force. They were two-and-a-half times the ratio in the war in Afghanistan. They were again double the ratio in Iraq. Why? In part because we are buying short-range systems and in part because it is getting more difficult to get access to forward bases.
And finally, Stability Operations Forces. This is a business that we got out of after Vietnam that we are going to have to get back into.
Finally, some high-density, low-demand capabilities. What are systems and capabilities that we may be buying too much of? Not that you can have enough of anything, but if you have to make tough choices, where might you make the cuts?
There are two particular areas where I think we are victims of our own success. In Gulf War I, we used roughly 1,600 tactical aircraft to conduct those military operations. In Gulf War II, we used 640 strike tactical aircraft, about 40 percent that number, and the reason is that in Gulf War I only 20 percent of our strike aircraft could handle PGMs. In Gulf War II, nearly all of them could.
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Heavy ground formations. We plan to use—the war plans, anyway, called for several, at least, heavy Army divisions for major theater operation, and we used one heavy Army division in Iraqi Freedom, again being a victim of our own success.
Again, I think we have to ask ourselves, who is going to challenge us to big tank battles in the future? We may need a different mix of armor. Armor is still going to be relevant, but five to six heavy divisions may not be what it needs and the Army agrees. The Army is moving in that direction.
Finally, nonprecision fires. In the first Gulf War, air forces dropped 210,000 dumb bombs. In the recent conflict they dropped 5,000. Again, I think this speaks volumes about the way we are fighting now and also, quite frankly, about where the money needs to go, in terms of do you buy platforms to drop lots of dumb bombs or fewer numbers of platforms because we are using more and more precision weapons. And I would say it is going to be interesting to see where this goes in terms of ground forces as the Army begins to field the Excalibur system for its artillery, which is the smart artillery round.
I will conclude my remarks with a couple of observations. I would say, one, beware of people like me. Beware of people who are offering you hard and fast lessons, because even Admiral Giambastiani would say his work is not done. We are talking about one datapoint. We are talking enemies who have enormous incentives to present us with different kinds of problems in the future. So the best we can hope for is a qualified discussion of trends.
I think this discussion should be informed about where we think the competition is going, and finally I would say in my own little infomercial, Mr. Chairman, that the opportunity to really conduct an independent survey of what happened in this conflict, as well as the last two, in Afghanistan and in the Balkans, is really being passed by, and I think to our great disadvantage.
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Mr. Chairman, this concludes my remarks and I would be happy to respond to any questions you have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, thank you very much. Excellent statement.
Doctor Biddle.
STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN D. BIDDLE, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES, U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE
Dr. BIDDLE. Chairman Hunter, Mr. Skelton, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning and talk about OIF.
My remarks today are based on the preliminary findings of the War College study on why the campaign to topple Saddam came out the way it did and what implications we should draw from that for the future of American defense planning. The study isn't yet complete. It is undergoing peer review and as a result it is subject to change, but on the basis of the work completed to date I think it is possible to sketch the outlines of what the main answers are likely to be, subject to the proviso that that review process could still alter the final conclusions if the data or emphasis so indicate. And I should emphasize the views I am expressing this morning are my own. They do not necessarily represent the positions of the Army, the War College, or the Department of Defense.
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Now, the key question is why the war came out to be a low cost victory. Lots of people were afraid that OIF would see an urban street fight with heavy coalition casualties, the protracted siege of Baghdad, the scorched earth campaign with extensive Iraqi economic and environmental damages or Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, none of these things actually happened. Instead, Saddam was overthrown in 21 days of fighting, without scorched earth or WMD use and without prolonged street fighting in Iraqi cities.
The coalition loss rate of fewer than one in 2,300 troops killed in action was among the lowest for modern mechanized campaigns and it compares favorably with those of other recent American wars that have led lots of people to think that we are in the midst of an ongoing revolution in military affairs.
How did the coalition avert the perils that so many people feared beforehand?
Well, I think part of the answer lies in what the Iraqis didn't do and I think the other part lies in the interaction between their failures and our strength. The prevention of scorched earth, for example, I think was mostly a story of what the Iraqis didn't do rather than the speed of what we did do. This is because they systematically failed to make the preparations necessary in order to destroy their oil fields or other economic infrastructure, and they do not appear to have been in the process of doing so as the war began.
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The survival of Iraq's economic structure is thus attributable chiefly to their failure to prepare it for prompt demolition, not the speed of our advance. In fact, the evidence suggests that even a much slower advance probably would not have changed the outcome much, whereas proper preparations for demolition would have made it possible for us to preempt them even with the tremendous speed of the advance that we realized in 2003.
Now, of the 250 oil wells, for example, in the key sections of the Rumailah oil field in the South, only 22 had actually been prepared for demolition when the Marines secured the field on March 21. Of those 22, only nine were actually detonated, causing seven fires.
No gas oil separation plants, no pumping stations and no pipelines were wired for destruction, nor was there any evidence of ongoing efforts of preparing additional wells or additional oil fields for destruction in the days before the invasion or in the early stages of the invasion itself.
Even with a very fast moving, very impressive offensive, there was still more than 48 hours available to the Iraqis between the beginning of the hostilities and the time the field is actually secured. If Rumailah had been prepared for demolition, the Iraqis could have had time to complete the job before we stopped them, but had considerable but unused time for setting additional charges, for preparing additional facilities for destruction even after the war began.
In fact, the Kirkuk oil field in the North remained in Iraqi hands for more than three weeks after the invasion began, yet at no point in that interval were any oil wells destroyed or any facilities demolished or any fires set. No evidence of preparation for demolition was discovered when American troops finally took possession of the field after April 7. In fact, dirt had been piled around a number of the wells to protect them against accidental destruction in the fighting.
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Even if one were to argue that one would have demolished Rumailah if only we had given them more time, at Kirkuk they had the time, by any standard, and yet they did less demolition. So I do not think our speed was logically necessary for the preservation of these assets. Either Saddam never meant to carry out this threat or his people refused to follow his orders or his organization proved unable to implement the plan, but the failure of scorched earth was less our doing than theirs.
Even a slower or less capable coalition offensive might still have averted scorched earth, given the Iraqis' apparent unwillingness or capability to carry out the threat, and even a very capable coalition would probably have failed to avert scorched earth if the Iraqis had been able and willing to follow through.
Now, that having been said, much of the explanation for OIF's relative ease on the other hand lies in the interaction between our strength and their particular weaknesses; that is, I would argue that the skilled use of modern coalition technology interacted synergistically with Iraqi errors to produce unprecedented lethality and a radically one-sided military confrontation.
Now, in this, no one technology and no one family of technologies, such as precision strike or information technology, was really necessary. Practically any of the major advantages of American forces, ranging from the survivability of American armor, the lethality of American firepower from both the ground and the air, would have been sufficient given the skill differential between ourselves and the Iraqis and synergistic nature of the interaction between skill and technology.
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With the diverse panoply of sophisticated technologies, there were lots of possible ways in which a highly skilled military could exploit hostile mistakes with radical severity, and skill imbalance, although it is necessary, isn't sufficient either. Comparable imbalances between skill and motivation prior to 1991 had never produced outcomes as lopsided as either 1991 or 2003. Only together can a skill imbalance and modern technology explain our ability to topple Saddam without heavy cost to lives or environmental damage.
Now, given the synergy, our skill and technology would probably produce similar results against other enemies as unskilled as the Iraqis and with friendly forces no larger than 2003. But because both technology and the major skill imbalance are required, even the same coalition skills and technology would probably not produce comparable results against the more skilled opponent, and, in particular, the troop level necessary to destroy a skilled force the size of Saddam's might well have exceeded that available in 2003, and even so, the losses required to do it could have been higher. And this is because skilled militaries can survive stand off precision engagement and compel close combat on terms unfavorable to us, as al-Qaeda has already demonstrated to us in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan, and with close combat, even with modern technology, it is inherently dangerous and labor intensive.
To survive our standoff precision, however, and compel that kind of close combat requires very high tactical proficiency and ability to use complex terrain for cover and concealment.
The Iraqis in 2003 were many things, but they were not highly proficient tactically. Their poor training and leadership produced a combination of mistakes, poor marksmanship, flawed dispositions, that left them fatally exposed to coalition technology, and this in turn enabled a small coalition force to prevail on a short, relatively low-cost campaign, but it would be a mistake to assume similar outcomes against better prepared opponents.
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Now, this explanation implies some very different directions for American defense planning than the views most common today in the debate over the war. If the Iraqis' errors were necessary preconditions for the 2003 outcome, then it would be risky to assume similar outcomes against future opponents who may prove better skilled or motivated, even if our technology improves.
Hence, it would be dangerous to accelerate modernization at the expense of either mass or training. In skilled hands, today's technology is already tremendously lethal to unskilled enemies, but even tomorrow's technology will have difficulty destroying skilled operation at standoff ranges.
To lose today's skills in the pursuit of overkill would be a bad bargain, and if better skilled enemies do prove better than the Iraqis at providing standoff engagement, then losing the mass needed to destroy enemies at close quarters would be dangerous, even if we get newer technology in exchange. A transformation agenda based on trading speed for mass and substituting standoff precision for close combat capability would thus be a dangerous prescription and a serious misinterpretation of the events of 2003.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Biddle can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Biddle, thank you very much, and, gentlemen, you have all given us some outstanding statements and I think some very provocative statements, and let me just start off with something, just a general observation.
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First, with respect, Dr. Krepinevich, with your assertion, I think rightfully, that we should take this, the lessons from this, from this engagement, as well as our last several, and look forward to a potential problem in the Korea theater and other places—we did that incidentally with this committee early on this year, and we put it in an initiative for awhile. It was not called the Bomber Fund, we put 100 million into Deep Strike because there is one school of thought that goes toward unmanned deep strike systems, as well as hand, so I believe we do need to start a new bomber program, but we put a good solid piece of money against Deep Strike. The appropriators had followed us on that. I think it is very important.
We also plussed up command, central, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), looking at the same theater and the same problems that you have seen and tankers before the tanker battle began to rage. This committee put a solid slug of money against the tanker requirement because obviously projecting air power is going to be critical. I think we can presume that the tactical aircraft (TacAir) bases on the Korean Peninsula could take a steady diet of gas and engagement, probably rendering them inoperable.
We put another slug of money against precision munitions, because if you look at the levels that are classified, it is obvious that we need a lot more than we have right now.
Having said that, though, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a young Marine who had been shot up at the Nasiriyah choke point, and his remarks and how they reflect the combination of systems that we had in this engagement. He was blown out of his—the Marine equivalent of the armored personnel carrier (APC), the light armored vehicle (LAV), and they were taking heavy fire, they were pinned down, firing up from about 60 to 80 meters away from the buildings. He said a couple of tanks swung in, they had a couple of Marine tanks that had been off on the other flank. These tanks swung in, and they were pinned down, literally, and the tanks started, as he said, to take down the walls of the buildings. He said, within ten minutes of taking down these walls, the Fedayeen, who had had them pinned down, came out with their hands up.
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Now, if you looked at the exchange ratios of dismounted soldiers having to work door-to-door and stairway-to-stairway in an urban situation, the casualty rate is extremely high. With the best technology we have it is still a pretty crude operation, and the U.S. casualty rate and all of our gains is extremely high. The best way to take down people who are in a building firing up is to take them down with long-range fire with heavy artillery or tank fire.
The other factor that I, looking back, think is important is I do not believe we lost a single person who was in a heavy tank from gunfire. We had one tank go off a bridge. We had one tank that was struck at the seam on one of the thunder runs in Baghdad and disabled, but I do not believe the crew was injured, so you have—you look at the old. The old is heavy armor, and it was combined with the new, that is precision munitions, and together they did very well.
Now, we are going to have to live with the RPG from here on out, and two people can get up on a roadside in a major artery in the Baghdad theater and blow off RPGs at Humvees going by and can set them afire and can kill people. Probably the only thing that can stop that is lots of steel, and you have a number of different species of RPGs, but the species that they are using right now in most of these theaters is something that can be stopped by tanks, by heavy armor, so you have this interesting situation where we have an enemy—and you have, all three of you have, talked about the capability of our enemies in conflicts past to devolve down into small elements, which are able to produce casualties, and they think casualties are important to Americans and they are right. And yet one of the defenses, the best defense, the best practical defense against these guerrilla type weapons is the old conventional weapon with plenty of steel.
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So what do you think, first, about the need to balance this force that we are shaping. And, second, everything you have talked about—all three of you have stressed, directly or indirectly, the need to have intelligence as our enemies worked the periphery of this spectrum of warfighting; that is, they understand that when they are down in ones and twos and threes, in small groups with weapons systems, they are able to do us damage.
How do we handle that?
And, so, Dr. Krepinevich, and I guess the threshold question on that is, do we spend more money on intelligence, because the implication that you and General Scales have given is there is no substitute for having somebody in the room when they make the decision to ambush you or blow a land mine or do something else, and that seems to be one area where we haven't spent much in terms of resources.
I think it has been easier for us to engage somebody who has got a new widget or a new technology than it is to go back and do some old ham and eggs work in terms of building up a human intelligence apparatus that can work in a theater like Iraq. And I think we have a very inadequate system obviously in other theaters, like Korea.
Dr. Krepinevich.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Krepinevich.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would agree with you in terms of a need for increased focus on intelligence, and as you point out, Mr. Chairman, a different kind of intelligence; much greater emphasis on human intelligence in terms of education, much greater emphasis on area studies. We need to get smart about nations such as the Islamic Nation, certain Arab terrorist groups, the way we got smart about the Soviets during the Cold War. There are rising great powers like China that we need to understand, not because they are our enemies, but because we need to understand how to avoid making them our enemies or them becoming our enemies.
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In terms of low-end military operations, human intelligence is extremely important in trying to understand the culture and the disposition of the population of a country. Our lack of experts, not only language experts as General Scales mentioned, but just experts on cultures and peoples is rather pronounced compared to where we need to be.
In terms of ISR assets, I mentioned that I think in the future, we are going to need a different mix than we saw in Operation Iraqi Freedom. If we want to continue that kind of persistent surveillance that keeps enemies from concentrating——
The CHAIRMAN. Elaborate on that a little bit.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Again, if you look at Operation Iraqi Freedom, a lot of what gave us persistent surveillance were things like satellites, but also Global Hawk, Predator, U–2 manned aircraft, and, of course, Special Operations Forces that were operating well inside of Iraq, well in advance of our ground forces.
They did so, as Dr. Biddle said, against a very competent enemy, an enemy that didn't have an integrated air defense or if it did, didn't use it, and also in an environment where we still had fairly robust access to forward bases from which to operate.
If you were to fast forward even to Korea a few months down the road, again, as you pointed out, the ability to operate from forward bases those assets, whether you are talking about Predators or Global Hawk or U–2s, could be problematic.
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In terms of the insurgence of Special Operations Forces, that could become more difficult. In terms of the ability to fly, nonstealthy systems that fly the Lazy 8s to give you persistent surveillance, Global Hawk is not stealthy. Predator is not stealthy. These systems are going to be vulnerable because of the risk of access to forward bases and also the risk of operating against integrated air defenses. And so what you are going to need, I think in those areas, is to focus on more longer range platforms and also, quite frankly, stealthy platforms.
Now, again, a lot of the stuff we have may be very good in a benign environment for many years to come, an environment like Afghanistan; but if you are worried about places like Iran or Korea, over time I think you may need to think more about these kinds of capabilities.
And then, finally, intelligence about just where some of the emerging challenges that Secretary Rumsfeld talks about are headed. Where is the challenge, for example, in terms of information warfare operations? It is shrouded very much in secrecy and uncertainty. We don't really know much about it. To the extent that countries do see themselves competing in this area, certainly if you look at the Chinese military literature, they are emphasizing this area of warfare very heavily, and yet we are at a severe disadvantage. Because when you build new aircraft, when you bid an aircraft carrier and you have to take them out for tests or sea trials, there is an indication that a military is moving in a certain direction.
Here you are talking about primarily human intelligence and very little in the way of physical evidence that a country may be moving in this direction. And so, I think we need intelligence in those kinds of areas, as well.
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Final point I will make is that historically speaking—and I think Congressman Skelton would agree—your comment that typically what you see even in pronounced changes in the form of warfare is a mix of the new and the old. Aircraft carriers supplant battleships, but they don't supplant cruisers, destroyers, submarines, tankers. The tanks supplanted the horse cavalry, but they didn't supplant the infantry, the artillery and the engineers.
And so, I think what we are going to see is a mix of the new and old. The danger, though, is that we misidentify where the competition is headed, and so we don't calibrate correctly what that mix of new and old is.
The CHAIRMAN. General Scales.
General SCALES. Yes, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. And incidentally, General Scales, I agree with your comment about Ike Skelton as the father of joint operations, or at least from this committee's standpoint.
General SCALES. A couple of points. First of all, soldiers fight better and lose less when they are mounted. In small wars that we fought since the end of World War II, 80 percent of those soldiers killed in action in those wars had been light infantrymen, 80 percent. They represent less than 4 percent of the total force, less than 11 percent of the army and the Marine Corps, but 80 percent of the—now, that is not accidents and disease. Those are people killed in direct contact with the enemy.
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Soldiers killed when they are mounted in anything, whether it is a Humvee or tank or anything, decrease by an order of magnitude.
So the first lesson, Mr. Chairman, I submit to you is that it is important that the army develop the materiel to be able whenever possible to fight matter. It is also interesting to note how thin a line that is. I mean, all of the infantry soldiers in the American Army today, if you collect them together, that totality is about the size of a New York City Police Department. So you have a very small number of people suffering—or with the possibility of suffering a higher casualty.
The second point is, if this is such a small number of men in the close combat arms—by that I would include infantry, armor, special forces, the usual suspects—then we need to do all we can to make that close combat force, those who go eye to eye to the enemy, so-called warriors, as good as we possibly can. They are superb today, but emphasis on selection, bonding, unit-based rotations, improved leadership training and education and programs that improve the survivability of soldiers in what you refer to sort of as the two block war is vitally important.
It is even more important, if you believe what the enemy believes in us, and that is that our center of gravity is casualties. So if close combat forces are suffering a disproportionate casualties, then we need to do all we can to keep those young men alive, particularly in a close fight.
So there is—people have talked recently about more and more of the Army becoming more ''SOF-like.'' I would argue that close combat function is increasingly becoming more dispersed and many of those skills will migrate over into the regular force, but we still—there is a lot we can learn from the special operating community, but they really are two separate functions.
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On Andy's point about intelligence, I agree to a point, but, you know, in combat even in Iraq today, your best source of actionable intelligence, intelligence that you use to maneuver against the enemy, to this—just as it was in World War II—is the eyes of the soldier on the ground. It is a culturally savvy, tactically proficient, smart young man or a woman who can sense the environment around them, determine where the enemy is, report back and build that body of evidence that you need to make key tactical decisions.
And so, while I think overhead systems are good and the idea of an unblinking eye is spot-on, I do believe that training in intelligence at the front-line level and dispersing and distributing the intelligence function further and further down—you know, it doesn't do any good to have an intelligence function that gives great briefings in Kuwait. You want to have close-loop actionable intelligence that gets back to the fighting men very quickly so he can react to it.
And finally, the point about—and, again, I agree with my colleague. No army in the history of the world has ever gone to war as a homogenous force. Armies are made up of different elements of legacy and cutting-edge systems, and that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I will give you one quick example. Sure, you need light forces that are able—being delivered by air, armored forces to take the enemy down. It is what we used to call operational maneuver from the inside out. That is this inkblot approach to maneuver where aerial delivered forces like Stryker or Future Combat System will go into an area and—to give an analogy, it would be like having two or three brigades that could land directly into Baghdad International Airport and then start to collapse the Iraqis from the inside out.
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But, you know, there comes a time when you face an adaptive enemy who has a will to win, whose object is not to achieve victory, but to avoid defeat; who will hunker down and go into cities with complex terrain, and when that happens, then speed and agility and knowledge give way, as you say, to mass weight-of-shell protection and the ability to go against the enemy face to face and take him out into close battle. We have done that very well in the past, but I will submit to you that with proper emphasis, with issues that I have just mentioned, we will be able to do it better in the future with fewer casualties, and I think ultimately that is why we are all here.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Biddle.
Dr. BIDDLE. I think your emphasis on balance is exactly right. I mean, long-range precision engagement is clearly a very powerful capability. It is important. We want to have it. We want to modernize it. We don't want to go to war without it.
I think there is a certain tendency, though, in the debate over the future of warfare toward what might be called ''strategic monism'', or such an emphasis on the potential power of new technologies and especially new technology's ability to kill at standoff, that people will advocate restructuring the U.S. military in a way that could make it dependent on standoff precision engagement for its effectiveness.
And I think as the fighting, for example, in Afghanistan suggested, if we were fighting against opponents who are capable of exploiting complex terrain for cover and concealment, who are capable of reducing their exposure to surveillance, reconnaissance and long-range precision strike, we will need more than just long-range precision in order to prevail, and that balance between an ability to destroy targets at long standoff and an ability to complement that with the ability to close the close quarters through maneuver on the ground is what provides the unique strength that the American military has brought to recent warfare, certainly all the way back through 1991.
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The CHAIRMAN. Yeah. The 10th Mountain Division actually killed a lot of people in their rifle pitch at 10,000 feet elevation at close range.
Dr. BIDDLE. That's right. Absolutely. And they would not for a moment have wanted to do that without the kind of standoff firepower that the Air Force was providing them, but neither would the Air Force have been able to do in the Sheepcote Valley what was done without the 10th Mountain on the ground.
With respect to intelligence, I think again the point is absolutely right. The intelligence is critical, and we ought to do everything we can to improve the quality of our intelligence. And I agree with my copanelists that human intelligence has been underemphasized and is probably the key to doing better.
I think in that context, it is important to keep in context, though, both the opportunities and the potential in the improvement of intelligence, but also the limits and constraints on what we will ultimately be able to do. I think one of the reasons why balance is so important is because balance is a hedge against limits on the ability of our intelligence to provide perfect situation awareness.
Again, I think opponents like Al Qaeda have already shown us they are capable of reducing their exposure; perfect situation awareness isn't available now and it isn't coming any time soon, and balance in our force structure and training in our people is the central hedge that enables us to prevail even when our situation awareness is limited by our enemy's ability to exploit complex terrain.
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So we need to do better in finding out as much as we can about our opponents, both the mechanical part of where they are located and with what they are equipped, and also the cultural element of how they think and how they are likely to behave. But, by the same token, we need to keep in mind the constraints on how perfect that intelligence can ever get and what the implications of those inherent imperfections are for the way we structure the military.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman who was first in the room today in honor of the time constraint that we have.
Mr. Turner.
Mr. TURNER OF OHIO. Thank you very much, Mr. Skelton, for yielding, and I appreciate our three witnesses being here today with us.
When we think in terms of preparing for the war on terror, I think the closing paragraph, General Scales, of your written statement describes for me what I view as the front line of the war on terror. You said—and I am only reading an excerpt from it—''Only a soldier can describe the gut-churning fear that accompanies the moment when the search and clear team kicks in a door to confront whatever is inside.
''Within the confines of a tiny room, the soldier looks through the two-dimensional grainy green image of his goggles to determine if his welcome will come from a Fedayeen fanatic or a child huddled with its mother in fear. Dripping with sweat, gripped with anxiety and fear, the soldier has only an instant to determine whether to shift his finger into the trigger well or reassure the occupants inside.
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''Today this scene is repeated daily in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as other places too secret to recount. These young soldiers man point for a thousand dollars a month in the promise of a trip home to a nation that hopefully understands and appreciates the true meaning of sacrifice.''
General Scales, it strikes me that that is the kind of warfare that we are preparing for in the future. That is the warfare that does not involve heavy bombers, long-range missiles, divisions of soldiers on the battlefield, and it seems to me that we have got to get better about fighting that battle that you described in the closing paragraph of your statement.
That does seem to involve a new effort that training Special Forces operators, the importance, as you suggested, of gaining a cultural awareness of that battlefield and that setting, understanding what it is and what it takes to get into the inside, into the mind of the enemy.
I just returned from a congressional delegation (CODEL) with Chairman Saxton, and we spent two days in Iraq. We had the chance to visit with a Special Forces team just the night after an operation very similar to the one you described. It seems that that is the kind of battle that we need to prepare for better.
To understand the enemy seems to require a much higher degree of international cooperation and participation in those kind of operations, and when we visited with some of the Special Forces teams in Iraq, one of the things that came up over and over again is that we need more intelligence. They needed to know who was inside of that house. They needed to know what they were going to—where they needed to go to root out the enemy.
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And so, indeed, we are engaged, I think, in a new warfare. It seems that in addition to precision-guided missiles, we need to have precision targeting, and one of the things that I wish you would address for us—and perhaps this is kind of a thinking out of the box, but I know in passing it certainly crossed my mind prior to our invasion to Iraq, and I think it crossed the minds of many other members, is what would happen if our approach to taking on the terrorist threat, the bad guys, involved more targeting of that terrorist threat rather than a massive invasion to change the regime, which we believe to be hiding and harboring those terrorists in Iraq? Could we perhaps, if we had the capability, have targeted 50 leaders and taken them out and achieved a victory over a regime that we thought planned and plotted to do us harm?
It seems to me that that kind of warfare is the kind of warfare that we are going to have to be prepared to fight in every corner of the globe, and it is going to require a lot of cooperation, assistance and joint special forces type of operations. So give me your views on that vision of——
General SCALES. Well, obviously, Congressman Turner, you are preaching to the choir here. A couple of points. First of all, it is important to understand the value of trust. Trust is a—I am talking about trust between soldiers from other nations and our own. I am talking about trust between national security elements of our country and others, particularly in America's security perimeter. Trust in many ways is like a commodity.
It is like owning—having a checkbook, and you write checks building trust not just two months before you go into a country seeking to find bases, but you build trust patiently, methodically, over time by treating the armies and allies in other nations as equals, by building a sense of bond and commandeer, a sort of international band of brothers approach. That then when a conflict occurs in this region, you can then start writing checks on that. You can build that—you can begin to draw back the benefits of that trust.
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This is something that takes enormous patience. You simply can't just set up a policy that directs a series of international sales or perhaps contact teams to these nations and expect that trust to be built over time.
Second is the idea of—and I think you said it very, very well, is the idea that increasingly the center of gravity, the hard part of this war on terrorism is beginning to devolve to an ever smaller group of men and women. And I mentioned earlier in my statement that these forces make up a very small percentage of our total force, and it is important—and you have seen this yourself—it is important to understand how hard this really is. It is very, very hard, and the price of failure is not only your own death but the death of your buddies.
It is enormously taxing, and it is physically debilitating, but most importantly—and I think the point I tried to make earlier is critical to emphasize here. War is an intellectual, a thinking man's game as well as a—you know, many of the people you saw, I think you would probably testify, weren't Rambo-like figures. These were very introspective, pensive, brilliant young men who were—as I said in that piece—operating for $1,000 a month and serving something greater than just, you know, their own paycheck.
So my point to you is, yes, you are right, war in the shadows has to be fought by an elite. All I suggest to you is a couple of points. Number one is that the lead can be made larger. Right now I think there is something like 13,000 Special Operating Forces in all of—ground forces in all of the American military. I think the war on terror is going to demand that that be expanded, but it has to be expanded carefully, because as I said, this is sort of like drafting for the National Football League (NFL), you know. You are drafting a professional team that is made up of very, very exceptional men and women, and it takes years to develop individually and develop collectively.
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The second thing I would suggest to you—again, agreeing with you, is the importance of any time a person is put into harm's way, they have to go in knowing about what is there. They have to understand not just the strategic environment, where the buildings are, where the fences are, you know, where the mine fields are, they also have to have a sharper exquisite tuning of their ability to understand their enemy.
Look, there is a big difference between fighting the 5th Corps around Mosul and fighting the Fedayeen on Najaf. And the difference isn't the weapons they carry. It isn't the appearance on a roadside. The difference is what is between their ears and understanding your enemy, and having this fingertip-feel for who you are about to go against is the surest way to save lives.
So, yes, I would agree with you that war in the shadows demands a very patient type of conflict. It demands an immersion in the culture, long-term association of the building of trust, and then when the direct action occurs, it has to be done by exquisitely trained, carefully selected, tightly bonded, superbly well-led young men and women who play at the NFL level of proficiency in the future. That is how you save lives.
Mr. TURNER OF OHIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman. And the Chairman of the committee that oversees Special Operations, Mr. Saxton.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First, let me thank you, Mr. Chairman, for continuing the effort to look at the recent conflicts from as many different perspectives as we have been able to, and this morning's panel has been very productive in that regard. So thank you, and thank the panel members for being here this morning.
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As I sat and listened to your presentations, it was, I think, very instructive for those of us who are—who have the responsibility of trying to figure out what it is we need to do going forward based on what we have seen in the past and what we see currently. So thank you for your perspectives. It has been most beneficial.
As I sat and listened to you each, I came to maybe an inevitable conclusion, or at least I believe that we, looking forward, need to be very much aware of two kinds of things. One was just pointed out by my good friend and colleague, Jim Turner, who expressed a belief that I have as well, that certainly the kinds of enemies that we face in the future will be the same as enemies that we face in the past and also much different.
On the one hand, we are going to have to continue, as you have all pointed out, to face whatever is defined as conventional at the time, a set of enemies that will develop—continue to develop technologies and will be nation-states. Korea was—North Korea was mentioned a couple of times earlier, and certainly the capabilities to address those types of potential conflicts will remain very important for us to keep an eye on. But at the same time, as Mr. Turner points out, there is a different kind of warfare that has manifest itself in the last decade or two. And Dr. Krepinevich has noted that the Iraq war is a datapoint, and it obviously had a conventional element, and it has an asymmetric nonconventional element that Mr. Turner was talking about.
Another data point is provided by recent experience in Afghanistan. Another data point is provided by the Russian experience in Chechnya. Another datapoint was provided a decade or so ago by the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan. And certainly, those datapoints point to a trend in warfare that we are experiencing today.
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So I guess my question is this: Given the broad range of potential threats that we face, I can, at least for myself, divide them into two categories. One category a conventional kind of a threat that continues to evolve, and another set of threats that were defined on a trend line by the datapoints that I just mentioned. And I am wondering, I guess, what is your advice; what is your guidance to us on how we keep a balance in meeting those two different sets of threats?
General SCALES. I think, Congressman, you have the right word, and that word is balance. It is interesting to note that in 1940, the Germans built one army for one purpose, to fight one enemy in one theater, and they did it brilliantly, first against the Poles and then against the French. But then when they went against the Russians nine, ten months later, suddenly they were fighting in an entirely different environment against—fighting an opponent who had an entirely different set of rules and in terrain that was totally different. And they failed. And the lesson from that is that if you are just a regional power and you are only looking at fighting on a single front, then you can afford to take risks and go on a single sort of model, if you will, of warfare; but if you are a great power as we are, you have global obligations that run the whole spectrum—not only the spectrum of the globe, but the spectrum of conflict, then you have to build a toolbox with many, many different tools in it.
Another point I would make to you is that I agree with you—you have to prepare for two different sets of wars, sort of the conventional and the irregular nonconventional war, but particularly what we are seeing, particularly in Iraq lately, is that even the wars themselves meld together so that you may find a phase that is very conventional, and then the ships in the plains all go home and suddenly you find yourself in the same war, oftentimes against the same enemy, who then decides to take a different option and adapt himself.
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The second point I will make to you is you need balance, and you need adaptability. You know, in many ways, it is like a foot race. You have an enemy who is starting to get—we have allowed him now, what, 11 different opportunities to watch the American army in action since the Second World War, and they are starting to pick up on it and they are starting to adapt. They are finding ways to offset our technological advantages by using advantages of their own.
You know, we have precision, speed and knowledge, and he has got mass and will. He has got owning the home court, and he has got proximity to the theater of war. And so, what it comes up to is sort of a foot race, if you will, between two different opponents, both of whom want to adapt. And my concern is—not now, but in the years ahead, I hope we have the flexibility and the adaptability to change our style of war and to change the way we look at war to keep up with the pace at which our enemies appear to be adapting.
And I think it is important to realize that technology can work for the enemy as well as us, another cautious point. I was in China a few years ago, and I remember a Chinese general saying to me that we have our own transformation, and the use of the Internet and cell phones and modern communications and satellite will allow us to fight our style of war better, you know, to disperse, to go to ground, to focus on area control, to win tactical battles, to defeat you one soldier at a time.
In many ways, technology works for us just as—so he said, your ability to see, track, sense and kill us is offset by our ability to use technology to disperse, to go to ground, to deceive and to fight a distributed battle.
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So just because you have overwhelming technology doesn't necessarily mean that the ball is always in our court. It may very well mean in the future that our ability to adapt to, go beyond technology or to use our technology in new and imaginative ways will allow us to keep up with the enemy's decision loop, which I believe, and I think all in this room would agree, is becoming increasingly more tight and more efficient and more threatening.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Let me just add to what General Scales said. Like he, I agree with your point about the need for balance. As I mentioned earlier, I think, quite frankly, if you look at where the competition is heading, it doesn't look very much like Gulf War I or Gulf War II, for the very obvious reason that to oppose us that way ensures a rather spectacular defeat.
A century ago, we were faced with—at least what we thought at the time was a similar level of uncertainty about who our next adversary might be, how they might come against us. And at the time, the American navy developed something called the color plans. Plan black was for Germany. Plan red was for England. Plan orange was for Japan and so on. And they looked at different contingencies so as to have a balance, because after all, militaries are designed to protect us against the threats to our security.
And certainly, if you look at the situation today, I think, again, there are a number of candidates for what might be a 21st century set of color plans. There is, as was mentioned by Congressman Turner, the Global War on Terrorism, which I think is really a misnomer. I think it is a theologically-motivated transnational insurgent movement that may have access at some point to weapons of mass destruction, which is the reason for the strong link to unstable third world regimes that seem to be acquiring these weapons.
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But as I mentioned before, Korea—there is a contingency there. Taiwan—I was struck by the fact that when the Chinese tested their missiles off the coast of Taiwan in 1996, they launched them near the only two ports in Taiwan that are capable of handling oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers, and, of course, if Taiwan's energy sources were held at risk, that would perhaps lead to the Finlandization of Taiwan.
Indonesia—how would we—as the world's really only blue water navy, support the movement of commerce through the Indonesian Archipelago if a country like that became unstable, critical to east Asian economies and perhaps to our own economy, as well.
Pakistan, I talked about the failure of a nuclear state. Iran—we have run a number of contingencies looking at Iran. One of the things that was particularly striking at the large field exercise millennium challenge 2002 was the extraordinary difficulty our maritime forces had operating close to the coast against even a third-rate power armed with high-speed antiship cruise missiles. We lost over a dozen ships in that exercise, something that hasn't been very widely publicized.
Stability operations in the Global War on Terrorism. Space—a number of issues there. Information warfare, homeland defense against the covert use of weapons of mass destruction. There are a number of fairly clear problems, I think, for us that we need to address, and they do involve a balance of forces, because obviously, as General Scales has said, a homogenous force is not going to be optimal for this range of challenges that we face. You are going to need a balance. You are going to need a mix, and the difficult part of the question, I think, is identifying what that mix is when you have so many significant threats.
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Dr. BIDDLE. To expand very briefly on a couple of the points that my colleagues have raised, the particular role that we can balance to play in the future of warfare and this melding of the conventional and the unconventional and the trends we see in threat behavior, one of the things I have always found interesting about irregular warfare or, if you like, low-intensity conflict, is that traditionally it has not involved an attempt to hold ground on the part of the enemy. They raid, they harass using some combination of cover and concealments and intermingling and dispersionist tactics.
One of the things I think is most interesting about the recent fighting in both Afghanistan and in Iraq is we see combatants who are trying to take and hold ground, who have fairly traditional geographic objectives, and they are trying to deny them to us or secure them for themselves; but they do this using some of the tactics of traditional irregular warriors who weren't trying to hold territory. Both Al Qaeda and the paramilitaries in Iraq dispersed, sought cover and concealment with mixed effectiveness, especially in Iraq, and sought intermingling with civilian populations as a way of concealing themselves from our technological advantages.
If you think that trend is going to continue—and I think there is good reason to suppose that it will—that then brings us back to the question of, how should we respond and what kind of balance are we looking for in doing that, and I think one of the things that a balanced military provides for you is the capacity, once you discover what the new problem is, to deepen and strengthen yourself in a relatively efficient way to get good at the problem you now face, because you are generally pretty able to do a pretty wide range of things.
By contrast, if we were to reoptimize the military around some particular conception of the future threat. The future threat is terrorism or the future threat is WMD, and we are going to design the military to solve that problem. If we get surprised or if the trend in the future is different in degree, a melding of the conventional and the unconventional rather than the emergence of the unconventional to supplant the way we always thought wars would be fought before, then we end up in a situation where now we are extraordinarily good at one thing and not real good at much else, and our ability to shift, once we find out where the future lies and build on some existing capacity in other areas, could go down.
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And, again, I think balance is one of the more important themes to draw from our recent experience in warfare, and I think one of the important things it does is it allows you to adapt more readily once you discover what the future holds.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
Dr. Snyder.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for being here. Your statements and you comments this morning are, I think, really overwhelming in terms of the—I guess it is reflecting your years of experience in thinking about these kinds of issues and pointing out that this thinking needs to continue to go on.
Mr. Krepinevich—or Dr. Krepinevich, you brought up the point about leading an independent analysis, and I think, General Scales, I saw you nodding your head in favor of some kind of independent review. I haven't really thought so much about an independent analysis. We have had a bit of a skirmish in the Congress in the committee over Mr. Skelton's efforts to try to get a draft, apparently, of lessons learned from the joint chiefs that was released to the Washington Times, and yet we can't get it. And I have to—I will confess here personally; I called the reporter and said, please, oh please, since, you know, high-ranking members of this committee can't get that report, would you be interested in sharing with us? And he said he wouldn't because of concerns that there would be something in it that could trace the source back.
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But, to me, that really brought home—if we needed any kind of a strong argument about the need for an independent analysis, it is the fear that whatever was in that report was fairly harsh toward the administration. I give them credit toward looking at, you know, where weaknesses were in the planning process, but now you have this fear that that is going to be watered down, and I think it really makes the point for having an independent group.
But do you all have in mind a specific way of doing that? I mean, is there a—I hadn't really thought about what that would look like. Would it be something the military would do to say, here, we need to have an independent group? Does it need to be done by legislation? Is it something the President would put together?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. There are several ways you could do this, Congressman. One would be to follow the model of really the last large independent review, which was the Gulf War Air Power Survey back in 1991. At that time it was the Secretary of the Air Force who set up an independent group. It was headed by Dr. Elliott Cohen, who is an academic, but there were members of the Air Force staff who worked with Cohen and his group, along with a number of prominent civilians. One was Wick Murray, who worked with Bob Scales on his book. Another was Barry Watts, who recently completed his tour as Director of Program Analysis & Evaluation (PA&E) in the Pentagon——
Dr. SNYDER. So you are saying it doesn't require a statute; it just requires a commitment——
Dr. KREPINEVICH. It required a commitment by a senior Defense Department leader, but, obviously, Congress back in Gulf War I required that a lessons-learned study be undertaken. Essentially, they directed the Pentagon to undertake it. I think you could have legislation, as you have in the past—for example, I served on the National Defense Panel back in 1997. It was established by Congress for a particular purpose, and it was done in conjunction with the Defense Department so that we could draw on people an expertise in information to be provided by the Defense Department as part of our deliberations, and I think there is the possibility of going that route, as well.
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Dr. SNYDER. I think most of us have been impressed with the joint reviews that are going on.
I want to ask you, Doctor, another question. You mentioned in your statement, I think in both your oral and written, about—well, you specifically say, emerging challenges—how might a collapsing state's weapons of mass destruction be secured before it falls into the wrong hands?
One of my concerns about what is happening now in Iraq over the last several months and even ongoing is personnel. I mean, I am inclined to want to add on to that how might we secure the weapons of mass destruction and the scientists who made them before the scientists get in the wrong hands? I mean, if I had to choose between securing 20 chemical warheads or keeping that scientist from going out of the country and selling his services to someone else, I think I would take a chance on securing the scientists and take my chance on the 20 warheads not falling into the wrong hands, because the brain power behind the weapons can be more dangerous than the weapons themselves.
Do you have any comments about that? Should that be part of our thinking as we go into this?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think, quite frankly, you have to look at both. At the end of the Cold War, Congress and the administration began to focus very intently on scientists in the former Soviet Union and trying to identify ways to make sure that they continued to be employed, because, again, the Soviet economy was collapsing, to make sure that you didn't have that brain drain going to the wrong countries to help on projects that would be injurious to our own security.
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I think one of the problems is—and I think it was former Defense Secretary Schlesinger testifying before this committee that once said, if you have the knowledge to run a baby formula factory, you probably have the knowledge and the capability to fabricate chemical weapons. And if you have the knowledge and the ability to run a microbrewery, you can probably fabricate biological weapons.
So one of the problems is that this knowledge is becoming ubiquitous, that many of the secrets are out of the box. And when it becomes—I think in the case of nuclear weapons, it is getting the fissile material and then getting the manufacturing process so that you can fabricate a workable weapon.
And, again, I think it is those areas that we need to focus on, and quite frankly, I don't think it is an either-or issue. You get the weapons or do you get the scientists. I think you have to work both ends of the problem. And that gets back to, I think, what a number of members on this committee have alluded to, which is the critical importance of intelligence, not only in terms of identifying countries that have them and don't, but where they might have them. And that is an awfully demanding proposition, I think.
Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. My time is up, but Dr. Biddle, your comments about speed—I suspect you did a true-false question for Members of Congress about speed being the key to avoiding the oil fields being detonated and all the bad things happening. I think most of us would say yes, that is what it was and that would shape our behavior on the future. So I think those comments will develop as you study this more. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. SAXTON [presiding]. Mr. Schrock.
Mr. SCHROCK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you the three of you for being here. I am just sorry that more of my colleagues aren't here to hear what you have to say, because this is very important information that they need to have.
The discussion we were having on intelligence—and the last time I was in Iraq, every single general, every commanding general made it very clear that what he needed most was intelligence and Special Operations Forces. That is when the debate was going on whether we need hundreds and thousands of more troops——
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Schrock, could you give that microphone——
Mr. SCHROCK. Usually I can be heard. I am sorry. When the subject was going on whether we needed hundreds of thousands of more troops on the ground, commanders over there were saying, intelligence people and Special Operations Forces. So I agree with that.
General Scales, I have not read your book. I probably need to read your book. But I am wondering in there if you talked about the issue that seems to be cropping its head more and more every day, and that is the Reserve and the National Guard. In the last couple of days we have heard some—we have seen some rather compelling stories on the nightly news.
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In fact, I saw one twice this morning on the Fox News about—first of all, the length of tours; second, disturbing story out of Fort Stewart, where many, many of the Reservists are going after they leave Iraq with injuries, and they showed some today in casts and on crutches and that we are so told they are not getting the treatment that they should be getting down there.
And then I would like to ask, Dr. Krepinevich, Dr. Snyder took the one question—I was going to ask that one—but you mentioned that there is a serious disconnect in transformation. I am fascinated by that, and I would of course—with the transformation command, Giambastiani, being in the district I represent, I am very interested in what—if you could expand on that. But General Scales.
General SCALES. Well, Congressman, I think you are spot-on. I don't think that in the mid 1970's, when General Abrams built the formulation of how the Army National—or the National Guard and the Reserves would play in a future campaign, had any idea that by 2003 they would have become so committed—and I use the word maybe so professionalized—that we are at a point now in our history where when you go into a theater and you walk around a headquarters or a field unit, there is literally no difference between either the performance or the job description or the qualifications between, you know, regular soldiers and Reservists and National Guardsmen.
And so what that means is you have taken a part of the Reserves, not all but a part of them, and you have sort of—in many ways over a period of time you have professionalized them.
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Well, if you are going to professionalize a force like this and put them into long-term deployments, then the traditional means of—fill in the blank—family support, training, equipping leaders in leader development—all those different things probably will have to go through some review in order to accommodate these new realities. You can't take a mid 19th century concept of what the reserves should be in our country, this militia tradition, and apply it to 2003 whole cloth without making some serious accommodations. And I think what you have seen and what you have mentioned to us is nothing more than perhaps just some indicators that this sort of thing needs to be reviewed.
And then finally, I guess I would say that, you know, if you are a part-time soldier, the word is part-time, and if you are going to ask that soldier to do something that is full-time for an extended period of time, that has enormous implications to his family, to his business, to his well-being, to his professional development and so forth. So many out there somewhere is a middle ground, but I absolutely believe, sir, that we must take a look at it, we must study it to make sure we don't just continue as we have in the past.
Mr. SCHROCK. I think this is probably the first war where it has really been—my son and my chief of staff are both reservists. They understood when they raised their hands what the commitment was, but as you said, it was part-time, and some of the reservists now I know are going out—there was a story on NBC the other night—I don't usually watch NBC news. It was a fluke, but I watched it anyhow. And they had a family on from Westerville, Ohio. He was a 45-year old reservist and he would been there for 7 or 8 or 9 months. He got there actually in March, was going to be there till April next year.
He wasn't complaining, but they are going to go under financially because they are independent business owners, and I don't believe the active duty folks are doing that. The reservists were told when they went there they would probably be there six months. I don't know why anybody told them that.
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When I went to Vietnam, I knew it was 13 months, period, and I think that is probably part of the problem.
General SCALES. Two weeks ago, I went to visit one of my colonels. When I was a brigade commander. His son, Shawn Kelley, was a reservist who lost his right leg below the knee. Look, if that is not—if that is not professional sacrifice, I don't know what is, and he was in the civil affairs battalion and is a great, great kid who was going to college at the time. So you are absolutely right.
Mr. SCHROCK. And you are right; at the time I was in Afghanistan, both times in Iraq, active duty and reserve, you couldn't tell them apart.
I know my time is up, but I would love to hear Dr. Krepinevich's comment on the transformation disconnect.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, like you, am an admirer of Admiral Giambastiani and the efforts of Joint Forces Command.
By way of giving you a fairly brief answer, let me allude to something that was conducted shortly before he arrived to take command last year, which was the exercise Millennium Challenge 2002, and it was designed against a low-end—that is, second, third-tier military power adversary—within an anti-access area denial environment. And it showed up the things that a good field exercise should show up. It showed up areas of advantage and also problem areas that we need to address.
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For example, they deployed some Stryker units to a forward operating base. Well, the forward operating base was at risk of attack by regular forces and also regular forces using, potentially, chemical weapons. That was one area identified.
It would have been under threat of missile attack, quite likely, unless one assumes that the Strykers, which are supposed to be able to deploy a brigade in 96 hours, were going to deploy after the Air Force after only 96 hours had destroyed all the mobile ballistic and cruise missile forces that might have held that base at risk.
The Strykers deploy with three to seven days' worth of supplies. When the maritime forces began to move aggressively into littoral, they were attacked by coastal vessels masquerading as commercial ships, but which were armed with high-speed anticruise ship missiles. And following the exercise, a number of people in the Navy said, if that is the problem, we are going to start at the edge of the littoral, which is 200 nautical miles out and begin to work our way in.
So what do you do with that Stryker unit that deploys with three to seven days' worth of supplies? How do you get supplies to that unit?
So what I am saying is, we are in the initial period of trying to work our way through those challenges, and I think what we are seeing is that there are a number of disconnects. There are things, for example, that the Army is assuming that its sister services, the Air Force and the Navy can do, to enable its transformation vision, but there are things they may not be able to do or may not be able to do them along the time lines that are envisioned by the Army. And I think this is an effort that needs to continue. I think it is going to have to continue with the prompting of the Congress, because we wouldn't have Joint Forces Command and there wouldn't have been the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise without pressure from the Hill.
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Mr. SCHROCK. There was an interesting scenario with the afteraction report with a particular three star Marine Corps general who had fascinating——
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Paul VanRiper.
Mr. SCHROCK. Paul VanRiper. And to this day, I am not sure exactly if he was right or if he was wrong, but it is something we certainly need to look at, that is for sure.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Absolutely.
Mr. SCHROCK. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Schrock, and thank you for bringing up the subject of lessons learned with regard to the Reserves. There are some good lessons that we have learned, some things that we need to do, and the Secretary of Defense is focusing on one of them, and that is the length of time necessary for mobilization and whether we are resourcing the Reserve component correctly in preparing them for mobilization and how long we can cut—how we can squeeze down the period necessary for mobilization by resourcing perhaps differently. It is a big subject and something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.
If a guy is going to get called up, and we are going to tell him that he has got to put his boots on the ground for some number of months, but he has to spend 45 days getting ready for that, it is not really some number of months he is going to be away from his family and his job. It is going to be some number of months both on the ground plus the mobilization period which makes it that much tougher.
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Mr. Larsen.
Mr. LARSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First question is for Dr. Krepinevich, and you talked about the U.S. being in the regime change business, based on the last 15 years, and I think you are probably right, but I want to ask a question about that. The regime policy seems to be a military policy alone as opposed to a national security policy, and I want to explain that a little bit.
We had a hearing earlier this year on worldwide military commitments, and the basic conclusion of that hearing was, we have enough people in our military for our military commitments, but what we didn't focus on was our post-military commitments. That is, we have enough people to do what we want militarily, but it seems that Iraq—Operation Iraqi Freedom or post-Operation Iraqi Freedom, has shown that we may not have the people in our active duty military to do what we need to do after we take a military action. And the implications that has for doing something else somewhere else as well.
You quickly mentioned post—I think you called it stability operations or post-stability operations. Could you talk about that—about stability operations, what you mean by that, the implication for our post-military action commitments and, as well, what that means for our future military—you know, not proposed, but theorized, I guess, theorized military actions in the future?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Certainly. What I mean by stability operations is, when you depose a regime, unless there is a regime that is from that country that is ready to take charge—we haven't seen that yet—what you are left with is essentially an induced failed state, and you need to impose order. And whatever new regime is going to be put into place—I think particularly this holds true in places like Afghanistan and Iraq—you are still fighting against the remnants of the old regime, whether it is the Taliban or the Ba'athists or Islamic terrorists. And in that case, you are, in a sense, left with operations that are designed to provide some level of stability. And what you are hoping, over the long-term, as part of a traditional counterinsurgency, is that you will win over the hearts and minds of the people, which is to say that the people will voluntarily agree that they like the outcome that you propose, that they like the new order that you propose to put into effect.
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And then winning their minds is convincing them that, in fact, you can succeed, that you are, in fact, going to prevail, because even if they like your agenda, if they feel you are, over the long-term, going to lose and can't provide them with physical security, then they are going to be much more reluctant to support your efforts.
What this means traditionally for the United States is it is typically a very land power-intensive operation. I am not one for rules of thumb, but the traditional rule of thumb is 3–to–1 advantage to conduct offensive operations in a conventional war and a 10- or 15–to–1 advantage in force levels to conduct counterinsurgency operations effectively. This is a light infantry war, and these kinds of conflicts tend to be protracted, because it takes quite some time for people to build up confidence to the point where they are willing to provide you—this is often the critical element of intelligence when the population of a country actually begins to point out who the leadership is in terms of the insurgence, where their infrastructure is and who comprises it.
If we are going to be in this business and if, in fact, we can't withdraw precipitously or over a few years as we did in places like Haiti or Somalia, then this gets to the problem that General Scales was just talking about—the fact that you have to deploy fairly sizable numbers of forces over a protracted period. And right now we only have 33 active brigades in the Army, and in order to recruit and retain people, the Army says you need about a 4-to–1 rotation base, which leaves about eight brigades available for these kinds of operations; but we have 16 in Iraq, 2 in Afghanistan, and 2 conducting unaccompanied tours in Korea. That is 20.
A 4-to–1 ratio would give you an 80-brigade Army. Obviously we are not going to see an 80-brigade Army. So we are going to have to find some way of dealing with this problem, and I think, quite frankly, there are three possible solutions. One is the importance of allies. Allies, not so much in a traditional sense that we need them to win the big battles as you point out; but rather, we need allies to help legitimize our operations in the international community and also allies to provide support for the operations that follow major combat.
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Second, training indigenous forces. And I think, quite frankly, this is where the administration is placing a lot of its effort right now to train up indigenous Iraqi forces that are loyal to the people we want to support so that they can begin to provide for their own security.
And third, of course, is to—the Army uses the word reroll, but essentially to restructure our forces so that they are more effective in these kinds of operations, so that they are more oriented for this kind of conflict.
And in the future, I think, quite frankly, that we are going to have to rely on all three of those elements if we are going to be in this business, as I said. And given the administration's advancement of preemption as a possible course of action, and given that the Global War on Terrorism is likely to be protracted, and given continued concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, I think that this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. And so we will have to make a greater effort in this area.
Mr. LARSEN. So we are not there yet?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Not hardly.
Mr. LARSEN. Anybody else?
General SCALES. One quick caution. History has shown that if you—if an Army devotes itself to constabulary—type of missions, whether it is counterinsurgency or stability operations—whatever you call it—over time the fighting fiber of that organization will atrophy and suffer. So the idea of rerolling or rebuilding an army or parts of an army strictly for the purpose of constabulary missions, in the long term, ultimately will work to the detriment of the service. They use as an example, of course, the two divisions that were in Japan, 1946 to 1950, and I think it was the first cavalry division and the 24th division. The Korean War breaks out, they go to Korea. Task Force Smith. And they perform in combat like a constabulary division. It is just a warning.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Franks.
Mr. FRANKS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen. You know, General Scales, I have to say to you, when you first opened this meeting without any flattery whatsoever, I was very impressed with what I saw to be a profound insight. You know, most of the time when a general speaks, people consider their expertise in battlefield tactics and military strategies, but you spoke of the enemy's intent, their will, their motivation and their mindset, and I would just suggest to you that that is a profound insight that I think is critically important to this entire debate.
Mr. FRANKS. Because indeed, you know, it's the mindset, the intensity of conviction, if you will, that is really at the heart of terrorism, because people who are willing to do almost anything at great risk to themselves outside the canon of generalized ethics in the world—you know, to change into asymmetric tactics that would be considered completely outside, military generality. Indeed, that is the great challenge that we face, because you know, I suppose any terrorist out there today of any noteworthiness could find a, say, 50-caliber quad machine gun.
That is no longer a big deal with us, but yet 200 years ago that could have ruled the world in a properly equipped 50-caliber quad machine gun, a Quad 50; and I will suggest to you that the day will come when terrorists will be able to access nuclear weapons or weapons of profound capability that will take and change this paradigm so profoundly that it will compel all of us to consider what you are saying in terms of the mindset, in terms of being able to win the war of ideals.
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You know, our terrorist opponents here have considered this a holy war; in other words, their religious conviction is what has motivated some of them, and sometimes that is difficult for us in the political environment to really face directly, but I think it is important.
You know, Osama bin Laden has made this statement that obtaining nuclear weapons is a religious duty, and that is great motivation; that is great mindset; that has great intensity, and is something we need to be extremely aware of.
General SCALES. Yes.
Mr. FRANKS. And I would suggest to you that the military forces at the end of World War II recognized that they had to deal with some of these religious factions and they, after letting the politicians of the day try to encourage the people of Japan or the leaders of Japan to write a constitution with a religious freedom clause in it that would turn some of these expressions of religiosity internal to where we debated them with words, rather than with bombs.
General SCALES. They understood the importance of that, and finally it was General McCarthy and people like that, really your predecessors, that said to the world, we need to, if necessary, impose some constitutional provisions that require religious freedom so that these outgrowths, or these expressions of religious fervor, can be turned in toward debate rather than war, rather than flying airplanes into ships or flying airplanes into buildings today.
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And I think it is pretty profound and I ask you a difficult question: Will there be any effort on your part or your contemporaries' here to begin to encourage the political leaders to make sure that we have a religious freedom clause in the coming Iraqi constitution?
There's an article in today's Washington Times, Bruce Fein—I hope everyone reads that—the difficulty of that, but also the critical nature. And I just believe that, number one, the military forces that are losing men and women on the battlefield have the greatest motivation to do that, because if we fail to have that, I am convinced that we will be fighting the same thing 20 or 30 years from now; and it may be, rather than having to deal with the asymmetric RPGs or something along those lines, that we will be dealing with weapons of much greater destruction.
Now, I almost made a statement, more than a question, here, and I apologize for that, but I wanted to try to, first of all, recognize that I think that you were on the right track, sir—and I would hope that the rest of the panel could comment, as well—but do you think that this religious freedom clause in the new constitution is important? I mean, I would like to think that the conversations we have had in this committee have played—and I believe they have—a significant role in making sure that which was required in our last supplemental.
General SCALES. Well, two questions here: First of all, a 19th century military philosopher said, war is ultimately a test of will. And when someone asks me about asymmetric warfare, how do you define asymmetric warfare?
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In my view, asymmetric warfare is essentially an asymmetry of will; and the surest way we can win this war in the long-term, in my mind, is to convince our enemies who believe we have no will, who believe that their great strength on the war on terrorism isn't RPGs or Kalashnikovs, but it is this willingness to die, this issue of will.
There are two things we need to do to win it in the long term: One is to demonstrate a solid will on the part of the people, not just of the people in uniform, but the population in general to prevail; and second, to take the offensive. If you do not demonstrate your will to prevail, you know, after 18 casualties you remove yourself from Somalia, that has long, long-term implications in the judgments of the people we wish to defeat about our tenacity and our willingness to fight.
And, to your point, spot on.
If you are fighting an enemy who is, in essence, grounded in theocracy—in other words, the essence of his will is based on religious fanaticism—the more you can—the more you can do to deflate that, to remove religion from the equation of war that becomes, in a way, often a weapon in itself; it becomes a weapon. To factor out religion as a testimony to our will ultimately, I think, attacks his center of gravity, which is that his will is greater than ours.
I think you are spot on.
Mr. SAXTON would any other members of the panel——
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Dr. KREPINEVICH. Just what General Scales said about religious tolerance, certainly. And you are probably starting out a bit ahead of the game in Iraq, which is a more secular society than some of the others in the Middle East, but you do have different faiths there, different versions there.
If you can institutionalize that, certainly I think that would go a long way toward addressing some of the root causes of the problems that are associated with Islamic radicalism.
Similarly, you mentioned Japan after World War II. One of the remarkable things that was done after General MacArthur's leadership was giving women the vote in Japan, and certainly women remain a great untapped resource in much of the Islamic world, much of the Arab world, those sorts of things; and I think if you could bring them about, it would be extremely helpful. The problem, or the challenge perhaps, for us is, of course, we are still in Japan nearly 60 years after the end of that war.
We are very fortunate in this country that we see our security in terms of institutions, our government, our courts, and so on.
In Iraq, those people for many years see their security in terms of arms, in terms of arms strength. And I think for us to be able to help them along to the point where they do see their secure institutions is going to require a very long military presence; and I think we are kidding ourselves if we do not face up to that.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Franks.
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Mr. Biddle, do you want to?
Dr. BIDDLE. I would just add the thought that your point highlights again the changing nature of the intelligence challenge. Whether it was ever a good idea in the Cold War to focus our intelligence on how many tanks, how many missiles, it is clearly not sufficient, now.
One of the more salient features of the debate after Vietnam was the degree to which, however well or badly we understood military problems per se, we had failed to understand the society we were fighting against and their culture; and that posed military problems for us in an environment, in an era now where we are fighting increasing culture in and against cultures that are terribly different from our own.
It is terribly important that we understand them deeply.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Cooper.
Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
To follow up on that cultural point, what are we doing now to train our E–7s and others to be more aware, including our top Pentagon officials? We talk a good game, but we are doing almost nothing.
General SCALES. If I could answer that, I sat on a promotion board in 1991 to select officers to the grade of colonel, and there were 19 prospective FAO, foreign area officers, who were up for promotion. And they were 0 for 19; we selected none of them for promotion because they hadn't followed the—you know, the normal progression.
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Boy, if we could just have some of them back right now, particularly those with Middle Eastern specialties, people who had lived in the region for decades in some cases, spoke the language, but most importantly, knew people in power and understood their structures and were familiar with them. Think what a difference that would have made.
Or another analogy: What if we would have had a few good FAOs in Iraq in July or August of 1990? Perhaps that may have gone differently because the war was precipitated in a large measure because of a misunderstanding on both sides about intent—back to my point on intent.
I really believe, sir, that if we are going to find ourselves in a new era of cultural wars, if the center of gravity of the enemy is focused on culture, rather than technology, then we really need to focus—in addition to improving our technology, improving our knowledge and our ability to apply that knowledge to warfare. And I agree with you, with your hypothesis, which is, we are not doing enough right now.
My fear is that as we increase the need for knowledge and become more culturally attuned to the theater, we are also becoming busier, which then presumes that there is less opportunity to do this type of learning, which is essential to be successful in the first instance. So I just see it as something in the future that we have to address, and I think, if I could recommend anything to the committee, it would be to take a good, hard look at that and make sure we are doing all we can to make sure that we are intellectually, as well as physically, prepared to fight a war.
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Mr. COOPER. If you could supply the committee—any of the witnesses, with cultural, sort of ''benchmarks'' that we can try to be looking for, because we are good at buying weapons systems here, but we are not necessarily good at promoting the right sort of officers and training them—and enlisted personnel as well—so they can be culturally aware.
General SCALES. I would be glad to do that.
Mr. COOPER. I believe a noted historian, Bernard Lewis, has said that democracy is going to be very difficult to transplant to the Middle East, and yet so many of the speeches we hear around here is about bringing constitutions and democracy to those countries. If one of the greatest living scholars of the region says it is nearly impossible, you wonder, you know, if we have perhaps set ourselves a goal that is a little ambitious. Some sort of, you know, representative government might be appropriate, but not necessarily a fully fledged democracy. If Bernard Lewis is to be believed.
But I wanted to ask a more military question: In the early stages of the war, what the American people heard most about was ''shock and awe.''
Can you gentlemen describe—did shock and awe work? Did it work as planned? What lessons can we draw from that?
General SCALES. As one who was on television commenting on shock and awe as it was going on, I will tell you that increasingly—back to our point about cultural wars, increasingly as the motivation for fighting a war is more and more embedded in the population and more and more intrinsically a motive of the culturally elite, then simply using explosive power to change attitudes becomes more and more difficult just because of the nature of your enemy.
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If you could have—if we perhaps could have decapitated the regime early on, that may have made a difference, but you know, looking back, I don't think so.
So oftentimes you reach a tipping point, don't you, where the damage that you do by strategic bombing gets to the point where your efforts to decapitate or to demoralize shift over into the realm of resentment; and what you have to do is, again, you know, targeting. Right now, targeting is a scientific function; it is, pick the building you want to strike and select the weapon, the munition, the pilot, the system, to attack that target.
Really, as part of this process of cultural transformation, maybe what we ought to be doing is taking a good, hard look at the softer implications of a bombing campaign and what that means for our ability to leverage precision killing power to the long-term benefit of our mission, rather than simply striking a series of palaces and putting on a demonstration.
Oftentimes it had the opposite effect where the man standing on the street corner said, they are not going to harm me, they are going to bomb palaces only; these people have no will, no resolve.
Interesting isn't it?
Mr. COOPER. Doctor.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. To an extent, shock and awe is the latest manifestation of what began in the early 1920's with the dawn of air power, with the hope that you could, by striking a certain set of targets, induce collapse of either the enemies' capability and/or his will to resist; and the latest iteration of this is through the use of precision weapons or precision aerial bombardment.
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There are a number of terms for this effects-based operation, rapid, decisive operation. General Dave DiTolla of the Air Force, one of their leading thinkers on strategic bombardment, has spoken to this. But, essentially, the idea is, very early in a conflict if you can strike targets on a massive scale and precision weapons enable you to do that, you do not need massive planes; because you have these precision weapons, you can somehow hit targets that will induce an enemy to collapse.
And I think that—for better or for worse, I think shock and awe's moment has come and gone. We discovered in Iraqi Freedom we didn't have the intelligence. We thought we knew where Saddam was a couple of times, but we couldn't get there fast enough or the intelligence wasn't good enough.
One of the problems you run into is, if you want to induce this kind of parallel warfare-nervous breakdown of a society and a leadership, you have to expand the targets. I think that is a fairly obvious point.
Well, if you are trying to not alienate the population and preserve a country's economic infrastructure, to facilitate the rebuilding of the country after the conflict, there is a real tension here between what you go after to destroy to induce a collapse and what you try and preserve to enable a recovery; and I think there was some conflict between the air power enthusiasts and senior commanders about where that line was.
Third is, I think myself and my colleagues have mentioned the enemy developed offsets. Going deep underground is one of them. You know where the target is, you may want to hit it, but it may be very difficult to hit.
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Fourth, if you want someone to quit, your chances of getting them to yield, to abandon their goal, is probably a lot easier if the war is limited.
Well, this war was not limited. To get Saddam Hussein to quit, it seems to me, would have taken an awful lot; in fact, as far as we know, he is still out there fighting, even though he has lost his country. So, essentially, when you are asking a despot to sort of leave himself to the tender mercies of either you or the international community or his people, it seems to me there is almost no amount of shock and awe that would convince him to do that. And finally, again, adversaries are coming up with antidotes, and the North Korean antidote, and seemingly the one the Iranians are headed toward, is, get nuclear weapons as a trump to shock and awe or this kind of bombardment. And I think, again, despite the allure and the attraction of this kind of warfare, it is still beyond our reach and is likely going to remain beyond our reach.
General SCALES. So one of the ironies may be: Do A, turning over in his grave, but ultimately shock and awe in the future may be directed at armies and not at societies, and that's a complete convolution of the old tenets; in other words, if the center of gravity is Saddam's army and not Saddam himself, then maybe the real way to cause shock and awe is to destroy his military force first, which is a complete convolution of the traditional theories of air power.
Dr. BIDDLE. Yeah, when we are fighting a war, when the stated objective is regime change, we've created maximum stakes for our opponent, and the idea we are going to coerce someone into giving up maximum stakes by something less than the maximum effort on our part, I think, is unrealistic, unless we get lucky and happen to drop a bomb on the autocrat's head. We haven't proven to be very good at that in repeated attempts in the last couple of decades, and I do not know that we are going to get radically better at it soon.
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Barring that kind of lucky strike, for this sort of approach of warfare to work requires truly exquisite understandings of the relationships between objects that we can destroy and the decision-making processes of autocrats embedded in very different kinds of political regimes and very different kinds of cultures.
Speaking as a political scientist on behalf of the discipline that purports to be able to understand cause and effect and political decision-making in other countries, we cannot even figure out why it is that democracies do not go to war with each other. You know, I doubt that you could get any randomly selected group of ten political scientists to agree that our knowledge of foreign politics is anywhere remotely close enough for us to be able to specify that if you hit this building, that power station and this road junction, Saddam Hussein will throw up his hands and say, ''You got me; I surrender.''
I think the knowledge in doing this outstrips certainly anything that modern scholarship has to offer that I am aware of at this point.
Mr. SKELTON. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. COOPER. Delighted.
Mr. SKELTON. I think the best example of a bombing campaign resulting in the determination to stick it out was the September 1940 blitz of London, which, horrible as it was, I think caused the British people, the English people, particularly those that lived in London, to resolve to win this thing. And those were very, very dark days, but probably one of the worst things that Hitler did was to bomb London as massively as he did.
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General SCALES. That is true, very true.
You know, oftentimes fire power, destruction of that sort, coalesces a people around their leaders. You can even make the same argument, Mr. Skelton, that the same thing happened in Germany.
Mr. SKELTON. I think that is correct. This is borne out by a book you may have read: 19 Weeks.
General SCALES. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. It talks about both England and Germany. It caused the Germans to have basically the same reaction, because roughly the same time there was a lot of bombing of Berlin, the other cities.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much.
Mrs. Davis.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you very much.
Thank you all for being here and for waiting while we are coming back and forth during your discussion.
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I certainly enjoyed all that you had to say; I mean, I think that it is very instructive for the future. We had been asking questions about the cultural sensitivities during this war and prior to, and I have to say, I think generally I would feel—I do not know if my colleagues would agree—that it has been somewhat dismissed; and so, I appreciate that, and I guess I would ask whether you have a sense of its being received as an academic exercise or whether you feel people are actually listening.
General SCALES. Oh, would you——
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. We are.
General SCALES. Soldiers, as a general rule, are technicians. Their object is to—is to apply established doctrine and to achieve or to accomplish a task; and in this modern era of technologically centered warfare, that is where they put their focus; I mean, that is how they were trained.
The old saying, you are what you were when, and that is how they were raised; and it is—a good juxtaposition is the certainty with which the first part of this war was prosecuted with the apparent uncertainty with which this part of the war is prosecuted.
On the one hand, you had a technological warfare, very comfortable with that; on the other hand, you have culturally—it seems to me, at least, to be a cultural war, and there is no longer that sense of certainty in how this is being prosecuted.
So I agree with you, but that doesn't remove the necessity of getting on with what I sort of suggested earlier on, which is to put the instruments in place to begin to change those attitudes. And it is not anything that is going to happen overnight. But we are a country—just as we talk about the American society needing to be better accepted in various parts of the world, which is a common mantra we hear today, I would argue there is an equal if not greater need for the American military to be equally accepted—if not accepted, at least trusted—in various parts of the world. And again, that is a soft science, that is art, not science; and that is the ability to—it is the ability to form relationships as well as it is to be able to pick targets and destroy them.
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Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Yeah. I think one way that we certainly would measure our priorities in this regard is through the budget, and while our systems are going to be more costly in many ways, I guess it would be helpful—and I think my colleague asked for this as well, what measures we might see or propose in the budget that would make a real difference in providing the linguistic capability, et cetera.
General SCALES. The great sea change in how America fights its wars is Goldwater-Nichols. That changed the cultural society. Maybe what we need is a training, perhaps an educational Goldwater-Nichols. Maybe we need to step back and go to the next step.
We achieved jointness to a degree unparalleled in the history of warfare because of Goldwater-Nichols and because of the professional military education (PME) reforms that we have initiated. Perhaps now we need to have another Goldwater-Nichols where we take a good, hard look at our educational processes and how we raise our officers. Not how we educate our officers at the War College in their 22nd year, but how we educate them as 2nd lieutenants in their first or second year, or how we educate and culturally acclimate our younger soldiers. This is something I think we need to take a look at, and to my knowledge, it's been a while since we've done that.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. I appreciate that, and I hope that we can do that. I hope that we can perhaps have more discussions and really understand better how to get there.
My other question—and you may have addressed this, and perhaps it is also a sensitive question, but the discussion of two additional divisions that wouldn't necessarily be needed to fight the war. But to make the peace, it is part of the transition and, in many ways, part of our greater cultural sensitivity to being on the ground with people and trying to again understand where some of the opposition after the war might have come from.
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Would you like to comment on that? Is that part of the peace or is that really only seen in a militaristic——
General SCALES. Let me start, and I will hand it off to Andy since he is sort of the expert in structure.
Clearly, ground forces in particular are overstretched. I remember in Vietnam you had a six-month command time in a year, and you were in Vietnam a year and you left, and nothing was left behind, if you know what I mean. In other words, you went into a hostile foreign environment, you hoped to survive a year, then you went home to your family.
What we are talking about now is long-term engagement, and this is what I mentioned earlier, this process of building trust. That is not done over a weekend, it is not done in a year; and that takes—and, as Andy said, this is a manpower-intensive task. It's not anything that you can—technology might be able to help to some degree, but ultimately it comes down to people and their ability to immerse themselves.
The military structure that we have today, that does that function, principally ground power, is stretched to the limit; and my great fear, having lived through the last time that we had a hollow Army, was the fact that we may face that again in our effort to fix the problem that you just mentioned.
Remember now, you are aware of hollowness often six-months to a year after the hollowness happens, and my concern is that in our effort to do too much, and with the realization that we need to stay longer, ultimately we are going to find ourselves a year from now with a hollow force.
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Are more forces needed? Yeah, I think so. Are different types of forces needed? I don't know. Maybe it is divisions. Maybe it is other types of forces.
My only caution is: Be careful when you build a ground power organization that is specifically tailored for constabulary noncombat duties, because that affects the whole organization. You have to be careful about that.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. Again, if you look at the metrics that the Army is looking at—16 brigades in Iraq, 2 in Afghanistan, 2 in Korea—discounting what is going on in the Balkans, that is 20 brigades that are in deployment right now.
According to the Army's discussion with the Marine Corps, their experience with the rotation base, you need to maintain four units, in order to keep one deployed at all times, which means for soldiers you are away six months out of every two years, and they argue that that is what you need to provide for sufficient recruitment and retention, so that people will join and stay in the Army.
If that is the case, then again you would need an 80-brigade Army. We have 33 brigades in the Active force. According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study, you may be able to draw on a number of brigades from the Reserves. The sense is that you might be able to keep 8 Active brigades—33 divided by 4 is 8 and a fraction—and if you look at the Reserves, the argument there, the ratio is closer to 7 to 1, or 8 to 1 which would give you maybe another 2 brigades; so that is 10 brigades when you need 20.
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If you increased the size of the Army by 2 divisions, that would give you 6 brigades; a 4 to 1 rotation rate would only give you a brigade and a half, so that would get you up to between 11 and 12 according to CBO. Also it would take a couple of years to raise 2 new divisions, and we will reach the crisis point with this deployment level long before 2 years, I think.
The final point is, where are the additional funds, because it will cost money to stand up these units, billions of dollars to stand them up, and then additional billions to keep them sustained. I think that is probably the least attractive option. It can be part of the option, but I think we shouldn't kid ourselves about the fact that it is not a panacea.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Wilson.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Thank you all for being here this morning and giving us a perspective on Operation Iraqi Freedom. I had the extraordinary opportunity to be asked to accompany Congressman Skelton to Iraq last month, and I was so impressed by what I saw, particularly the lack of damage that I saw.
The precision bombing was stunning to me. As I show pictures to family and friends, that was the first point they brought up as they saw the bustling cities, the traffic, the bridges intact, and minimal damage.
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Additionally, I was just so proud of our troops, thanks to Congressman Skelton for arranging for the trip.
I had a special interest. I just retired after 31 years from the National Guard in July, and I was pleased to see my fellow Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers playing a big role. And then I have two sons in the Army National Guard and another son in the Navy, so I have a continuing interest, aside from the great opportunities we have here to serve on the Armed Services Committee.
I want to apologize that I have been going in and out today, but it actually relates to a point that was made, and that is that we are in a long-term struggle; in fact, I just left the House floor, telling about how the Agency for International Development has distributed 1.5 million book bags to the children of Iraq, for the schools that have been reopened, with pens and pencils and notebooks without propaganda—and calculators; and I am just really proud of the military's role in that.
The Coalition Provisional Authority—it is amazing what is being done, but unfortunately, the media, I think, is covering a police spotter mentality of that which goes wrong and missing out on 1.5 million book bags being distributed. And so I do not want to duplicate questions, but I understand that the Department of Defense has described Operation Iraqi Freedom as an effects-based operation, with military objectives based on regime targets, rather than strictly on Iraqi military.
And I know there was a reference a few minutes ago to London and how that was impacted. Would you please comment on how this type of operation enabled our forces to accelerate the collapse of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and whether this conduct engendered goodwill among the Iraqi people?
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General SCALES. Want me to take that?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. You can start, if you want.
General SCALES. Let me start off.
I do think that effects-based operations work to some degree. I do think that we are better able now to define those—what I guess, to use the phrase, ''critical nodes''—those things which you must strike, that if you strike them will cause the local collapse of a particular entity, in this case, I think, the Republican Guard Divisions and to a lesser extent the Fedayeen units. And so—but the concern that I have is that the object of the effects changed once the war began, and so the supposition or the hypotheses that planners put forward as to what the necessary effects were, those began to change as the enemy changed and adapted his tactics to accommodate what he saw as our effects-based operations.
So it is a concept that is solid. It is the old—it comes from the old artillery term focusing on the terminal end of the trajectory. You do not care where the gun is. What you care about is where the explosion goes off; and that is sort of what we are talking about.
It seems to me, as we move into this new era of warfare, we have to go through this filter full or another degree of the refinement of the calculus to be able to do effects-based operations more effectively. We have to look not only at primary effects, but we have to look at second and, in some cases, third effects, good and bad. In other words, to use Andy's hypothesis, dropping a bridge across the Euphrates in Karbala would have been the right thing to do to prevent a counterattack by the Republican Division, which was the Medina Division which was there.
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In truth, the Medina Division had been abandoned, and had we bombed that bridge, all we would have done would be to deny the citizens of Karbala and of Baghdad their livelihood, because that is the only bridge within 40 miles. So that is what I mean by this new sense of awareness about what effects-based operations really portray.
Yeah, sure, primary effects, absolutely important, but as part of the process, you have to consider secondary and tertiary effects; and you have to think of it not in terms of just winning the tactical fight, but also in terms of winning the campaign, equally important.
Dr. BIDDLE. Effects-based operations can mean many different things in many countries. It can mean anything from the focus of your objective, meaning the effect you are trying to go after all the way down to; it can mean a focus on a particular kind of warfare, heavy emphasis on standoff precision against leadership targets to coerce an opponent, rather than destroying their military.
One of the things I find striking about Operation Iraqi Freedom is that the regime in many senses didn't collapse until, in fact, there were American soldiers in Baghdad. We had hoped, and I think it was a reasonable aspiration, something that made sense to try, to bring the regime down through very carefully delineated destruction of leadership targets; and that didn't work that way.
Hearkening back to one of the earlier themes of the hearings, one that balance provides, is an ability to give it a shot, try effects-based leadership targeting; but if that doesn't do it, still have the capacity to bring about our national objectives by other means if we are forced to. And to hearken back to another theme from the hearing, the whole question of understanding culture and political systems in the context of effects-based operations in particular.
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One of the things I find striking about why it ultimately took American soldiers in Baghdad to really collapse the regime is the degree to which the Ba'athist security and control apparatus had Iraqi society and the degree to which the average Iraqi was afraid that the person sitting next to them on a congressional panel may very well have been an informant and, thus, you dare not act against the regime or you dare not even welcome the Americans until and unless you are positive that this regime is gone and that they will not be back to hurt you and that the unknown security apparatus of secret agents that you have assumed throughout your life is all around you is no longer operating.
It is very difficult to get that level of persuasion across that large a society that has been brutalized that long with discrete targeting of a few key assets from afar.
What ultimately persuaded most Iraqis that the Ba'athists were gone was whether there were American soldiers in visible range, that they could see around and have some confidence that, in fact, this means a new day has dawned and the intelligence officers aren't going to come and get me if I do not toe the line. And again, what that requires is a mix of capabilities, an ability to do close combat if necessary and an ability to try, through standoff warfare, to do that with less if you can.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. As Dr. Biddle said, one of the problems associated with effects-based operations is, there seem to be multiple definitions of what these operations are exactly. If you take General Scales' description, which I think is helpful, which is, it is not a direct effect, it is an indirect effect, it is the second-order effect that essentially you are looking for, then I think we have tried in a number of ways to pursue effects-based operations. One is shock and awe; the other was attacks on the Iraqi command and control so that you rendered them less capable of coordinating their military forces effectively.
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Perhaps one interesting effects-based operation would be the efforts made leading up to the war to try and turn some senior Iraqi commanders—sort of say, you know, it would be a good idea to sit this one out, but again it is not clear. You would have to go interview these people, I would suppose, and they would have to be honest with you. Did they sit it out because they were convinced by the Americans, or did they sit it out because they were afraid their troops would turn on them?
And so I think it is—we are still in sort of a very nebulous world when we are talking about these kinds of operations, and while they are attractive, and certainly I think you ought to pursue them where you think it is productive, I do not think you can take too much confidence in them, at least at this point.
General SCALES. It is interesting.
A quick war story: Dave Perkins, the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT), on his first thunder run, stopped a BMW, and out popped a brigadier general in the Republican Guard carrying a briefcase, and he was on his way to work.
I am talking about the effects of al-Jazeera and local media on the effects of effects-based and shock and awe.
And he said—and they hauled him off and put him in the back of a BMP or in the back of a Bradley. He said, I thought you were all the way down in Basra. What are you doing in Baghdad? So he was not necessarily shocked nor was he awed until someone threw him into the back of a Bradley.
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Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Well, thank you very much.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. I thank the gentlemen for coming and for staying around so long.
I have read all of your statements and I appreciate what you have said about what has happened. I would like to know what is happening now and where you think things will be 180 days from now. I guess my first question is: Do you see any signs of a coordinated effort with the ambushes, or do you think it is a small pocket here of people, a small group there?
I mean, would you venture to guess as to whether or not Hussein has seen Blackhawk Down and whether that scenario is something they would be hoping for.
I guess my last question would be, I would like your opinions as to what happens if the Americans leave before Hussein is either killed or captured, as to whether or not he rises literally from the ashes and makes a comeback.
General SCALES. I can answer those very quickly.
Is there a coordinated effort? Not yet. I would call it a spontaneous effort, that it looks more like an insurrection that has some—a loose hand on it, rather than having someone calling the shots from a central authority. But that doesn't necessarily mean that wouldn't morph into that over time if this is allowed to progress without being, you know, interrupted.
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Did Saddam see Blackhawk Down? Yes, he did and, in fact, he liked the movie so much that he even went so far as to equip Fedayeen units with white SUVs and white pickups, trying to mimic the technicals that he thought were the reasons why the American forces left.
What happens if Saddam is still in place? It will never be—in my opinion now, I do not believe the country will ever be stable as long as the ghost of that man is there in Iraq.
Will progress be made? Of course, it will be made.
And stability come? To a great degree, it will, but there will always be in the back of everyone's mind the image, the shadow, the illusion of this man out waiting in the wings to turn things back to the way they were. So I would view that ultimately as a condition for withdrawal of American troops.
Mr. TAYLOR. In your opinion, to what extent do these prolonged hostilities end with his death or capture?
General SCALES. I think it will have an influence. Clearly, it will deflate this spontaneous sense among the disaffected, particularly in the Sunni Triangle and in Baghdad, and will cause it to deflate, and perhaps even turn it into a very, very low-key insurgency.
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Will it go away completely? I do not think so, because many of those who are committing the worst atrocities over there now aren't even Iraqis, and they still view the triangle as a battleground and a means of taking on Americans. And so, even if Saddam is gone, I think there will still be something there, but nowhere to the degree that it is now.
Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think you were looking at essentially two threats. One is the residual Ba'athist threat. The other is Jihadist, coming in from other parts of the world, elements perhaps from al-Qaeda, from Hezbollah, Hamas and so on. They are looking at this as an opportunity to continue their struggle against the United States.
I think one challenge we have is trying to convince the Sunnis that somehow it is in their interest for us to succeed. If you look at a precipitous withdrawal of American forces, I think the Sunnis see that as a real danger to their security. I do not think they have much confidence in the ability of institutions to provide for their security.
I think they see themselves being left perhaps at the mercy of the Shi'ites, so one important point is, how can we convince the Sunni Arabs in that country that it is in their interest; and quite frankly, part of that may be, ironically, a protracted presence of U.S. forces in that country, to ensure that they do not become the new persecuted group, just as they persecuted the Kurds and the Shi'ites under Saddam Hussein.
It would appear right now that the majority of the population is at least on the sidelines or passively supporting the United States. In a recent public opinion poll in Baghdad, which is in Sunni country, nearly 70 percent of the population said they liked the fact that the Americans were there.
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Certainly, I think the costs we have incurred so far—people like to make the comparison to Vietnam—are, quite frankly, trivial compared to what we bore in Vietnam. And quite frankly, considering the stakes of what happened on 9/11 and the perception, as General Scales said, that you send when you withdraw from a place like Somalia, it appears that you are being kicked out of town, I think the stakes are perceived as being quite a bit higher if we leave this time around.
I think there is certainly a concern or a danger that the—to the extent that groups that are hostile to the Israelis, like Hamas, Hezbollah and so on, that are supported by countries like Iran and Syria, begin to infiltrate into Iraq and begin to engage in operations against us, particularly on the side of some of the Arab world. The possibility that these two different conflicts will begin to seem as one conflict is something we should be concerned about.
And finally, I guess the point I would make is that we have been sending, quite frankly, mixed signals. We are going to stay there as long as we need to stay there, but we are certainly touting the problems with maintaining an adequate troop presence; and I think at the end of the day, if you're going to convince the people of Iraq that you are going to stay the course, that you are going to prevail, you have to, as General Scales said, make some clear commitment that you have the will to persist for as long as it is going to take in order to succeed. And I think right now we are sending quite a few mixed signals about that.
Mr. TAYLOR. I thank you again for sticking around.
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Mr. SCHROCK [presiding]. I agree it would be wonderful to find Saddam Hussein. Psychologically, I think it would do everybody much good. But they have not, in my mind, found Adolf Hitler and things were going pretty well in Germany for a long time. But frankly, if they could find this guy, the better.
Mr. Meek.
Mr. MEEK. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the witnesses for being here. A lot of conflicting meetings going on since we are only in town for 24 hours a week, but that is another meeting.
I guess one of my concerns, especially—I was excited about the fact that thinkers and educators were coming before us today, as relates to our future efforts and what we should do as we go through this series of lessons learned. One of my major concerns, and I want to say Dr. Andrew, because I am not going to attempt to try to say your last name, is your description of our soldier brigade resources that are around. And I must say that I am somewhat concerned because I know, as it relates to air superiority, we do not even need to go down that track of where we stand in the world, as relates to that.
And one of my major concerns in even going into Iraq was the guerrilla hand-to-hand, door-to-door, with what they call a search warrant kind of policing and warfighting.
And, General Scales, I see in your statement that you talked about the fact that we have to go to a smaller—smaller, leaner brigade-size unit to deploy more quickly and fight independently. I think, as we look at that and as we look at the effort against terrorism, in my opinion, we are not fighting—or our future is not fighting state-sponsored terrorism, and I think these are the kind of individuals that kind of leap at our ankles. These are individuals who do not have nuclear capabilities.
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In the future, I am wondering how we are going to be able to deal with this because, honestly, as the independent member on this committee, I do not feel we have the necessary resources economically to have such a big effort, effort of terrorism, in focusing on mouth-to-mouth or face-to-face intelligence that will help us weed these individuals out.
Eighty-seven billion dollars, $90 billion, $50 billion in supplemental appropriations, or what have you; that is fine. We can build those schools, we can do those things, and I think we should do those things to a certain extent as relates to our efforts and our, hopefully, being in the light of goodwill in the world. But I think it is also important for us to realize that we are going to need the help of others, that we are going to have to train others. We have trained them in the past, and I think that it would hurt recruitment as relates to our Armed Forces if we continue to send red-blooded men and women into foreign lands where we do not necessarily understand a lot of the culture.
Are there any—is there any thinking on the outside, in the education field, in the future field, of looking at training other forces, getting them to put together some sort of task force against terrorism for hand-to-hand combat, for that leaner force that you talk about, General.
I am more interested in that. I know that our troops are ready, set, go; but we talked about Blackhawk Down. We have talked about many things here since I have been on this committee. But I think it is important that we understand, the American people may not understand how long we need to be there, what we have to do, and be willing to pay the price; and I think it's going to hurt our recruitment in the long-run.
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Any comments?
Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think you hit the nail on the head on two issues, Congressman. One, which I think is what the Pentagon is trying to do right now, is to train indigenous Iraqis to help provide for their own security. We enjoyed a certain amount of success in this in the past, in a few cases in Vietnam. In the Balkan war in the late-1990's, we actually subcontracted to former military officers and people in this country to train Croat, the Croat army, up to a good standard of effectiveness and proficiency.
So I think that is, quite frankly, the track that needs to be pursued most aggressively right now. I think that is our best chance of achieving the kind of ends that you are looking to achieve.
The other, quite frankly, is the point you made about intelligence, which is to say, this is not a formidable adversary we face in terms of numbers or in terms of military capabilities. We could smash this resistance if we only knew who they were and where they were, and that is where intelligence comes into play. And I think—as General Scales has said, one of our problems is the fact that we have allowed a lot of these human intelligence skills to erode over time. They are not only in the military, they are also in the intelligence community; and that is a problem.
As Dr. Biddle said, in order to give people, the people of Iraq who have good intelligence about who some of these people are, the confidence to come to us and provide that kind of information is probably going to require a fairly prolonged presence. They are going to have to be convinced that the terror that they lived under for the—at least the last 20 years is not going to be revisited by them—upon them, excuse me—and that takes a lot of courage and that takes a certain level of confidence that, in fact, the Americans are going to prevail.
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Mr. MEEK. Terrorism is, Mr. Chairman, if I may just make a closing comment here, and you do not have to respond to my opinion: Terrorism is a minority function. Iraqi, 70, 80, 90 percent can say, I am glad that Americans are there, ho-hum; but when it comes down to the final analysis, you still have individuals, be they Iraqis or Syrians, whatever the case may be, that are still shooting upon the troops and continuing to prey upon them one and two and three at a time, seven a day average being injured.
Culturally, I am just trying to figure out—not culturally, but the culture of terrorism; put it that way—I am just trying to figure out, and I do not know what thinking has gone into this or if there are publications going on, something at the War College, what have you, to really look at how we are going to find our way safely in this effort of dealing with terrorism.
Lives will be lost and they are preying upon individuals every day, Coalition fighters. And I understand that war is not pretty. I understand that, too; but I think that it is very, very important that we work on that intelligence end.
I do not think that we can occupy ourself out of this, because we are fighting an institution that really doesn't have a capital or a place where it resides; or—like you said, finding the enemy, where do we destroy; destroying the power plant—what does that mean—these sort of things.
So I think it is important that we look at that and understand that terrorism is a minority effort in any population. It is almost like crime; I mean, you see a community. There are very few individuals; five, four percent that are preying upon the masses, and that is making the community a bad place to live; and I think that is what we find over in Iraq, and I think that is something that definitely we are going to have to look into as relates to our efforts in the future.
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But I appreciate all of you staying for so long, and thank you so much for coming before this committee.
General SCALES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SCHROCK. We will conclude our questioning today with questioning of the ranking member from Missouri, Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. First, I must tell you that this is one of the most interesting hearings that we have had, and I thank each of you for this. I have no crystal ball or prophetic powers, but I did send a letter to the President September 4 of last year and again on March 18 this year, predicting the problems of the aftermath of conflict, so let me look ahead in this fuzzy crystal ball that we just placed up here.
To ensure defeat in our next conflict, wherever it may be, we will have a stretched or hollow Army which will be, second, more geared toward constabulary efforts than battlefield efforts, and third, that we have no cultural awareness of our enemy. Those are three areas we must avoid, and the Congress can help do that.
I was intrigued by your comments on educational Goldwater-Nichols, and I mention to you that our panel on military education back in 1988, created the phase one, phase two of the joint education and the various intermediate and senior War Colleges.
I would appreciate, General Scales, your thoughts in a different time expanding on that and going down to the second lieutenant level, if you wouldn't mind doing that.
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General SCALES. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. Cultural awareness, I think, is something that is inherent in our Nation—or cultural unawareness is inherent in our Nation, and I think that that has to be addressed. And how we sustain it, I do not know, but I agree with you.
All of the questions that I could ask have been asked, but I do have one. There is a recent book; I think it is entitled Road to Rainbow. Are you familiar with it, Road to Rainbow? The Association of the United States Army printed it.
General SCALES. Yeah. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. And it reflects the fact that the Army War College was studying, beginning in 1934——
General SCALES. That's right.
Mr. SKELTON [continuing]. Fighting the Nazis.
General SCALES. That is true.
Mr. SKELTON. And, Dr. Krepinevich, you mentioned that the Navy War College had a series of colored plans, the most prominent being that of the orange plan.
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Are we doing that today, is my question. Or are we just looking at the past and hoping the students can apply it? Or are we sitting down in the War Colleges in a very classified manner, as they started in 1934, and thinking of the potential enemies 5, 10, 15, 20 years out? Are we?
General SCALES. Could I address that, sir?
Mr. SKELTON. Yes, sir. You were there.
General SCALES. Boy, you are really hitting close to my heart, Mr. Skelton.
The answer is yes, to some degree, but nowhere near like we should. And let me explain this.
Mr. SKELTON. Or nowhere near where we did.
General SCALES. Or where we did.
Here is the issue to my mind. Understanding warfare and getting a perspective on the future course of warfare is—requires a certain chemistry for the people who do it. There is nothing wrong with think tanks around the people who are inside the Beltway for doing that, and they do a wonderful job, and it is fine that they do that, but they are at least one generation removed from actually doing it, and there is no real equity in it for them. There are few consequences in getting another study from another think tank.
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The people in the field can't do it. They are too busy. They are focused on, you know, the next major inspection or the next patrol in Baghdad. You can't really rely on them to do it. So really it comes down to institutions like the War College that have that balance. First of all, they have recent combat experience, recent experience in the field, and they have equities in it. There is something in it for them when they come to their conclusions and they publish their results.
And the other side is you have an institution that allows time for reflection. You know, it is one thing to have an after-action report, as we mentioned earlier, but it is something else to have an after-action report that is filtered through a disciplined academic mind, someone who has a bit of a soldier and a bit of a scholar built in that is able not only to put intellectual rigor into what they see, but also to be able to provide the perspective of a soldier, and then to have a dog in the hunt. If you are at the War College, and you are a student or a faculty member, your next assignment may very well be going out to implement some of the recommendations that you just made, perhaps even with people shooting at you.
So having said all of that, I really believe that increasingly the War Colleges need to be centers of excellence that allow measured, introspective research and study to be done, but at the same time study and research that is directed toward the art of war, and that is one of the reasons, as I think you know, that I started the so-called ASAP program, the Advanced Strategic Arts Program at the War College, in an effort, on my part at least, to build some acolytes, to build some—to build disciples who would be able to immerse themselves in the study of the art of war and to be held accountable for the quality of their study, and then immediately after that to be sent out to be able to apply it.
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So it is this whole idea of application and introspective study, having—so I really think there is more that War Colleges can do, sir, and I don't think, frankly, that we do enough. My opinion, of course.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
Anyone else have a comment on that?
Dr. BIDDLE. I have a completely unbiased observer opinion.
When you look across the intellectual community, and you ask where can the kind of serious, rigorous, scholarly studies of cause and effect and the use of force that the Nation needs to make good policy, where can that work be done, there are very few places. I came to the War College from civilian academia at the University of North Carolina, and civilian academia is moving further and further away from——
Mr. SKELTON. You are obviously very well educated under Dr. Richard Cohen.
Dr. BIDDLE. Quite so. Absolutely.
The think tank world, where I also spent some time, has some advantages in working in the subject area, because, I mean, relative to civilian academia, they are more comfortable working on questions involving the use of force and defense policy and military affairs. They find it difficult because of their structure to do underlying cause and effect research as opposed to short-term decision analysis, 10 divisions versus 8 divisions, C–5 versus C–17. That is what they are good at.
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The number of places in the United States and an enormous intellectual community and an enormous defense analytic community like we have that have the capacity to do searching analysis of underlying cause and effect relationships, the kind of thing on which defense policy ultimately has to be built, are very few in number, and I think one of the very few places where that can be done is the War College system, and potentially to some extent the service academies, because you are allowed——
Mr. SKELTON. I don't think you are going to get it there.
Dr. BIDDLE. Not in the near term certainly.
General SCALES. One point, it is an interesting point that Dr. Biddle makes. I am a student of civilian academic training, as well, but the civilian academic community has walked away from the study of war. Even those who write dissertations——
Mr. SKELTON. From North Carolina.
General SCALES. Yeah, but I went to Duke, big basketball rival of this guy over here; but even at Duke, if you look at the papers that are written, the dissertations that are produced by people in the military studies program, for the most part they don't really deal with fighting wars. They deal oftentimes with social issues or political issues or economic issues related to the military. Rarely do you get anyone who tries to peel the onion back on what goes on on the battlefield, and, you know, Mr. Skelton, that is something——
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Mr. SKELTON. Do you feel at some future date we will pay a huge penalty for that?
General SCALES. Oh, I think maybe we are all—maybe we are at the cusp of doing that already, Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. SCHROCK. Thank you, Mr. Skelton.
Let me identify myself with one comment Mr. Skelton said, and that is this hearing—in my three short years here, this has probably been one of the finest and probably most informative that I have experienced, and I thank you for that.
Of all the things that were said, let me comment on one thing. One thing that is going to stick with me is when General Scales talked about the nonselect for the 19 FAOs. We have been doing all the—I was in the Navy for a career, and all the services do that, and we need to focus people in one arena and let them stay there.
I notice there is a public affairs officer here who is wearing wings, and I think, would she rather be flying, or would she rather be doing the PAO thing? We all have to go through the wickets to get to the point where we become flags, and I am not sure that is a good thing, and I think the services are going to start addressing that in a more realistic way, and that is probably a good thing.
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Again, thank you all for being here. We really appreciate your time. Thank you. This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:05 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]