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| Changing Course: A New Military for a New World |
February 21, 2001 |
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Remarks prepared for delivery at the 2001 Defense Reform conference sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
I’d like to share some observations about America’s defense as we enter a new administration and a new century. Some of my comments are about the direction I think we should go; others are about where we are likely to go based on my understanding of this city and how it works. Some of this will seem self-evident. But at times of great change, it is sometimes useful to articulate the self-evident.
The Starting Point
We are at the end of years of decline and wallowing without a clear sense of ourselves as a nation and our role in the world. We’ve had a foreign policy that has too often been vague and irresolute. The incoming President takes command of a military that has been downsized and over-used. We are short on spare parts and on ammunition. Our operational tempo has been far too high, reducing readiness and contributing to the loss of highly trained mid-level personnel. Deployment rates are higher than at any time during the Cold War.
End strength is below the targets not because we’re failing to recruit, but because we are not retaining our people. And one of the biggest reasons is what one of my friends in the Congress calls the “birthday factor”. If you’re away on temporary duty for five or six birthdays in a row on missions that are unclear, it becomes harder and harder to explain why when you come home – to your family and to yourself. When there are jobs on the outside that demand less and pay 10-15 percent more despite Congressional increases in pay over the last two years, it’s even tougher to find a reason to stay in.
Restoring and refocusing the American military is not going to happen quickly. This is not going to be a one-year effort. It’s going to take a considerable amount of time and a lot of hard work. And, like most efforts in this vigorous democracy, there will be arguments and dissension and compromise, and probably a fair amount of parochialism too.
I believe that over the next decade we will transform the American military. We won’t just build it up; we will transform it. And we will because we must.
One of my criticisms of the build-up under President Reagan was that we didn’t learn as much as we should have from the skinny years. This time, we need to get a dollar and ten cents of value out of every dollar that we spend. And the task will be harder than it was under President Reagan because we must first come to grips with a changed threat.
The threats that we face today are profoundly different from those we faced during the Cold War and I don’t think that we have yet adjusted to that change. But the change of administrations offers an opportunity -- to face the threats of the 21st century and transform the American military to face new realities. This year will set the tone and the direction.
So what do we do? What are the boundaries that should guide us?
Here are a few rules that make sense to me.
Rule 1. First Things First.
On January 29th, there was a story in the New York Times describing the new team’s approach to American defense policy, and it has been confirmed over the last week. The President has told the Defense Department, in effect, “Tell me what are our national interests, what are the threats to those interests, and what are our strategies for meeting the threat.” This is a wise decision if we’re going to significantly change direction. It forces the Pentagon to disassociate its justification of its current programs and decisions it’s already vested in from a very clear evaluation of basic principles.
Ideally – and I know this is not an ideal town -- this will allow threats and strategy to drive force structure, organization, procurement and R&D.; At least, it will make it more likely that strategy can influence programs and force structure.
Think about it: hundreds of majors and colonels and generals and their civilian counterparts are writing and arguing not about how to justify the F-22 or the Osprey but about interests, threats, and strategies. That’s a good thing to have them do for a new President at the start of a new century. Large bureaucracies have momentum. It takes remarkable force and determination to change them from their planned course.
But there is a problem with this “first things first” approach to reshaping and restoring the American military. On Capitol Hill, pro-defense Republicans and Democrats have spent years spitting into the wind, trying to strengthen and reshape the nation’s defense. We have ideas based on our own experience and, while we are eager to work with the new team, we are an impatient lot.
We’ve been told that the initial budget request won’t contain a significant increase for Defense, but that we may see adjustments later in the summer. I’m glad the Administration recognizes that the FY02 budget will not stand still as the top-to-bottom review proceeds.
The fact is there are some things that we need to do now, no matter what reshaping takes place. The Army has said that they are 5 billion dollars short on ammunition. If something goes wrong in Korea in the next 90 days we don’t want to be short on ammunition. There is, I think, no chance that, whatever changes to strategy and force structure we make, we would pull back from forward deployment in South Korea.
Likewise, there are quality of life priorities and increases to pay and benefits that we cannot and should not ignore. But I expect we will work with the administration on major procurement and force structure decisions so as not to prejudge the outcome of the top-to-bottom review.
We will also work with them, and with you, on acquisition reform to make the needed transformation possible.
Rule 2. Match Means and Missions.
We need to better match our means and our missions and I hope that the administration will begin to take steps in that direction. One of the things that is hurting our readiness so terribly is an operational tempo that just can’t be sustained. We have too many missions for the force structure that we have. We’re over-deployed and under-resourced. It’s burning out our people; it’s hurting the reserves and the Guard. When a superpower is overextended it creates opportunities for regional powers to take advantage.
There are a number of ways to better match means and missions. One is to reduce the number of missions we undertake, particularly those where the purpose is unclear and the end point is undetermined. That doesn’t mean a precipitous and destabilizing withdrawal from deployments like the Balkans, but there are some missions, like peacekeeping, that should fall more heavily on our allies leaving American forces to undertake things only America can do.
Rule 3. Power Matters.
I spend a lot of time with kids. When I wrote that rule down – power matters – I found part of myself reacting as they would: “Well, duh!”
I wish it were as obvious to everyone. Over the last eight years there has been a reluctance to embrace or accept this reality. Parts of the previous administration sometimes acted as if the only legitimate use of power was in defense of somebody else’s interest or when a multi-national authority somehow legitimizes its use. I disagree. Diplomacy is most effective when backed up by the ability and the will to protect our vital interests if we must.
America must be willing to use power collectively or alone to protect our vital interests, and we must maintain sufficient forces to do so if needed. That doesn’t mean we should rely only on the use of force in world affairs or that we should be reckless in its application. The maintenance of peace and stability is one of our most vital interests. But we shouldn’t shrink from the exercise of power when needed, or look to others to justify our actions. Power matters.
Rule 4. Remain Engaged and Strengthen Alliances.
At different times in the last century there were underlying tensions between the appeal of isolationism and the necessity for engagement. While we probably all remember the calls for “burdensharing” with the Europeans as recently as the 1980s, we have not seen a significant pull to isolationism in the post-Cold War era. I don’t sense any of these strains in the American Congress at the moment, and the Congress would probably be the first place for it to show. I don’t hear people asking on Capitol Hill whether America should lead in the world or be engaged in the world.
There is certainly some inattention to the military and of foreign affairs, and I can understand that. When my constituents tell me what they are worried about or what the Congress needs to do – and they tell me a lot -- they talk about education and utility bills and the cost of prescription drugs and taxes and the economy. Even in New Mexico, with our long tradition of service to the nation, it is the exception for someone to mention the needs of the military as the most pressing problem we face.
It is only in a time of crisis that foreign affairs and the strength of our military worries people. Of course, by then, it is too late to fix. In a time of peace and prosperity, where there is no immediate visible foe, the Congress and the President must steward our nation’s defenses even though it’s not on the public’s mind. And perhaps, if we do our jobs well, it will be less likely that young men and women will taste the fear of combat.
Rule 5. The Nuclear and Biological Threat has Changed. So Deal With It.
In every speech and article about defense it seems that everyone has to say this, these days. But we need to do more than simply acknowledge that it’s changed, causing people to worry and muddle along.
For a little over a decade, two administrations have touted nonproliferation and counter proliferation initiatives that have been successful only where we don’t need them. Regional great powers are acquiring weapons of mass destruction and rogue non-states may soon have access to weapons of mass destruction if they don’t already.
This is a new reality that creates a different kind of threat than America had to face during the Cold War. We must prepare to defend ourselves and our allies against that threat. That is a completely new approach that may require changes in the way we structure and equip our military forces for homeland defense and, obviously, in the kind of weapons and intelligence capabilities we need.
So, those are a few of the rules that should guide us as we transform the American military. I’m sure we could quickly draft some others. I started with about a dozen, but those five seem to me to be particularly important as we review threats and strategy.
These ideas aren’t big news to those of you who spend your lives in this industry, not to mention two days at this conference. But there is one thing I want to add that may not have been said here, in the last two days, but is worth saying.
The greatest threat to America in the 21st century is not weapons of mass destruction or terrorism or the rise of China. The greatest threat to America is not from without; it is from within.
The threat is that we will not educate our children well enough to be prepared to work for your companies and develop the technologies, the information systems, the materials and the chemicals and the medicines that will meet any external threat.
Those of you who are CEOs who listen to your Vice Presidents for Human Resources despair about recruiting engineers and technicians know this is true.
If the 21st century is to be as much of an American century as the 20th was, we need to strengthen public education, and give every child from every neighborhood wings for their dreams.
Perhaps the best way for me to explain why this is so is with a story.
My grandfather was born in 1897 in the granite city by the sea, Aberdeen, Scotland. His name was Scotty Wilson. He did not have a high school degree and was an apprenticed marine engineer when, in 1914, he lied about his age and joined the Royal Flying Corps. He flew DH-7s and DH-9s, unreliable craft built of wood and fabric with engines lubricated with castor oil. He helped to find a way to synchronize machine guns with the arc of propellers.
And after the war he came to America and helped open airfields, was a barnstormer and an instructor pilot.
His son, my father, started flying at the age of 13 trading his services as a line boy for flying lessons. He got a high school degree and, like many at the time, enlisted for a few years after high school and was a crew chief. He was a pilot for the airlines, flying DC-7s and DC-9s. He built and rebuilt experimental airplanes in our 2-bedroom house, using C-clamps and hand made jigs and tack hammers similar to the tools his father used.
My grandfather was a very smart man. He could tell you the gear ratios on his bicycle and the torque on his wrenches. We were playing chess one day when I was a senior in high school and I drew a curve on a piece of paper and asked him if he knew how to find the area under that curve. He thought he would draw it on a piece of graph paper and count the squares. I remember that moment clearly, because it was the first time in my life that I knew I had a tool that my grandfather did not have. It was called calculus.
I was the first person in my family to go to college -- at the Air Force Academy. And while I did not fly for the Air Force, I have had the privilege of flying in a few that my grandfather probably would hardly recognize.
Scotty Wilson’s great-granddaughter was born almost exactly a century after him, in a river valley that winds through the desert southwest far from Aberdeen, Scotland. She’s 4 years old now. On one side of the town where we live, the Intel plant stands on a bluff with its new Fab under construction making Pentium Processors. At the other end of town is Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base with its pulsed reactors, supercomputers, micro satellites, airborne laser and directed energy research, and where we steward the weapons of the nuclear age.
I tell you this story not because it says anything about me, but because it shows the change a century brings. One third of the children who live in our city of Albuquerque don’t graduate from high school. What was good enough for our parents and our grandparents is not good enough for our children.
Education is everyone’s business, and it will be the key to our success as a nation in the 21st century. My grandfather was born before the Wright brothers flew and lived to see a man walk on the moon. I don’t know what kind of a world his great granddaughter will help to build. But I know she will need a first class education to do so.
That’s the threat from within that all of us need to attend to.
Thank you. |
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