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| Speakers: | Max Boot, Senior Fellow, National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Author, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, And The Course Of History, 1500 To Today |
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| Michael Vickers, Director of Strategic Studies, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments | |
| Presider: | Thomas D. Shanker, Pentagon Correspondent, The New York Times |
October 27, 2006
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
THOMAS SHANKER: Good morning, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I’m Tom Shanker. I cover national security and foreign policy for The New York Times. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see so many members here this early on a Friday morning, and I see some of the council’s new term members here, as well. Welcome to all of you. I guess the secret’s leaked out about how good that council coffee is. So, welcome.
I do want to thank the council very sincerely for all of its terrific work and for organizing two of the best thinkers today on these very important issues.
One of the reasons the council likes to have me moderate these things is because I spent five years in Moscow and thus learned how to run a meeting with Stalinist efficiency. (Laughter.) So I will ask all of you at this time to please silence your BlackBerrys, cell phones and pagers. When it comes time for questions, I’ll ask that you ask those questions in the form of a question, as they say on the TV show, and not make speeches. And we will end very promptly at 9:30.
This session is on the record, for academics, thinkers and journalists here today.
And with that, we’ll begin with a quick introduction of our guests, both of whom, of course, to risk the cliche, do not need an introduction at all.
Max Boot is senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Anyone who’s been to the book store or picks up a newspaper certainly knows his writing and his thinking. It will be great to hear his thoughts today about his new book.
As someone whose profession requires me to round up the usual suspects, I can tell you that when I read the work of others, there’s lots of good usual suspects in town. When anybody quotes Michael Vickers, I know they’re really doing their homework. He is director of Strategic Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments here in Washington. So much of what he’s done he can’t talk about, or only carefully. And I guess the most important question for him is, when Tom Hanks stars in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” who’s going to play you?
MICHAEL VICKERS: It’s a guy named Christopher Denham, supposedly, who’s on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” And it’s ended two years of suspense for my daughter. (Laughter.)
SHANKER: Well, to begin, we couldn’t be trying to wrestle with a more important question at a more important time. And Max, I’d like to start with you, if I could. Your book discusses with such depth and intelligence the importance of technological domination, but as we look at the real problems facing American national security today, they strike me as not being capital-intensive technology questions but labor-intensive questions. Boots on the ground. Linguists. Intelligence officers.
What did we do right and wrong? And what do we need to do to get it right as we move ahead?
MAX BOOT: Those are very good questions.
And before I answer, let me just extend my own thanks to all of you for showing up this early; and to the council for sponsoring this event, to Nancy Roman, who’s doing a terrific job running our Washington program, and just to the council in general for being such a wonderful place to research and write, as I’ve been doing for the past four years in producing this book; and thanks to my co-panelists for coming out here on this Friday morning.
Tom raises, I think, kind of the crucial issue that we all have to confront as we think about the future of American power, which is sort of the limits of technological domination, which we certainly have. I mean, we clearly have the best military technology, but the question is, can we use it effectively against our enemies?
And this is something that—I mean, what I try to do in the book, War Made New, is to try to put some of these challenges into perspective by looking not only at the impact of the current information revolution, but at four other revolutions that have reshaped the world over the course of the past 500 years, starting with the Gunpowder Revolution around 1500, the first Industrial Revolution in the mid-19 th century, the second Industrial Revolution in the early 20 th century, and now the Information Revolution, which has been driven by advances in microchip technology really since the 1960s.
There are a number of themes that emerge from this study that are pertinent to the question Tom asked. One of them is that it’s never enough simply to have the best technology. It’s great to have cutting-edge weapon systems, but the key to military domination usually is not just having the right weapon systems, but having the right organizational structure, the right leadership, the right training, the right human factors to take advantage of that technology better than your adversaries.
And the classic example of that is the Blitzkrieg in 1940. You know, why was it that the Germans were so successful in overrunning France so quickly? It wasn’t because they invented the tank or the airplane. It wasn’t because they had better tanks or airplanes than the allies, or more tanks or airplanes. It was because they figured out how to make better use of tanks and airplanes than the allies. They came up with plans for a fast-moving war of maneuver, whereas the allies were still stuck in the static mindset of the trench warfare of World War I. That was the key difference, what do you do with commonly available tools.
And the challenge we face now is—part of the challenge is that some of our technological advantage is slipping away. For example, the kind of satellite reconnaissance photos that were highly classified 15 years ago are now available to anybody on Google Earth. You know, GPS systems, night-vision goggles, a lot of the—you know, even guided missiles are all proliferating around the world, eroding some of our technological advantage.
But the real issue we face is, we do we have the right organizational structure to take advantage of our technology against the enemies that we face? Because we have all this wonderful technology that can be incredibly useful in combatting all sorts of enemies, but what we still have in charge of that technology is this very industrial-age bureaucracy over at the Pentagon and other parts of the U.S. government—the CIA and State and others that are not really set up for the kind of warfare that we face.
So the issue—I think the big issue that we face is, can we take all this wonderful technology and apply it to the problems of the military challenges we face now from the likes of al Qaeda and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups who are becoming more and more powerful, or are we going to be fixated on the traditional mirror-image conventional adversaries that we’re not able to adjust our tactics, techniques and procedures to tackle these new enemies? I think that’s—in a very broad-brush way, that’s the challenge that we face.
SHANKER: Do you have any specific prescriptions? I mean, if you were appointed a senior DOD position tomorrow and could sort of look at the organizational chart that’s still leather conveyor belts and not electrons moving over wires, what would you do?
BOOT: Well, I would probably throw up my hands in despair. That would be the first thing that I would do.
SHANKER: That’s that Rumsfeld thing we always see, right?
BOOT: Right, exactly. Well, you know, I mean, Secretary Rumsfeld talks a lot about changing the bureaucracy, and he’s done a few things at the margins, but I haven’t seen any kind of sweeping changes occur during his tenure, and I think that speaks to how difficult it is. I mean, I think there have been some changes that are occurring, and I think if there’s one silver lining to the horrible experience that we’re having in Iraq now, it is that defeat—or at least the prospect of defeat has often been a great spur to innovation, much more than success. I mean, success can make you complacent, whereas if you’re losing out, it makes you do things in a different way.
And in fact, when you look, for example, to the early years of World War II, part of the reason why the Germans were so successful was because they lost World War I, and they had to innovate and come up with new ways of doing business, whereas the allies became very complacent because they were the winners of World War I.
Well, right now, it’s hard to say that we’re the winners. I mean, we’re clearly coming out on the losing end right now in Iraq, and I do see some important changes going on, whether, you know, it’s the Army and Marine Corps coming out with a new counterinsurgency manual or changing the training regime at the National Training Center or doing more—changing the curricula at military educational institutions. I mean, I think there is ferment happening, but the question is, is it going to be enough? And that’s a huge issue, because it’s very easy to issue these lofty edicts from on high, as the Defense Department did about a year ago when they said, okay, studying foreign languages is now going to be a top priority for the military. Well, that’s really good, but I’m still waiting for the implementation of that. Are you actually going to free up officers from having to do 300 other things that they have to do in the course of a day to give them the time to actually study languages or live abroad and soak up foreign cultures? I mean, these are the areas we’re most efficient, but in order to address them, you’re going to have to make some major organizational changes, changes in the personnel system especially, which are some of the toughest things to do.
SHANKER: Mm-hmm. Michael, if I could turn to you. I’m thinking about your experience, especially going back to Afghanistan the first time around. You know, all of the applications of new technologies in transformational ways seem to work in the newest Afghan campaign. I mean, a tiny number of Special Forces—your comrades—using, you know, GPS devices and laser designators, you know, fought a war with very small loss of life, brought down the Taliban government, ousted al Qaeda very rapidly. They got that right. How can those lessons be applied correctly—because some argue that it was that victory that drove the Iraq planning to be a new battle laboratory that hasn’t worked so well. So what are your prescriptions, how to apply technologies to make this whole process work?
VICKERS: Well, first, the United States really faces three broad challenges as you look out over the next 20, 25 years.
One is the rise of China.
A second is the irregular warfare challenge, principally dealing with radical Islamists, but perhaps not exclusively—which includes state failure and a range of other problems.
And the third is the movement toward a proliferated world, the acquisition or use of weapons of mass destruction by state or non-state actors. And one of the—the Department of Defense just completed a major strategic review, the Quadrennial Defense Review, I think the best since the end of the Cold War. And one of the central findings, although not explicitly stated, was that one solution doesn’t fit these three problems. These are three very different problems, and there’s high uncertainty about which will dominate or be the most serious.
Now, some will say we will never fight China, but we certainly want to deter them and dissuade them to the extent we can.
Others say irregular warfare is a passing fancy, and you certainly wouldn’t want to bet the farm on that and be wrong in either case.
That required really shifting the Defense portfolio in a number of ways. And so some portions of this may be more capital-intensive. For example, it’s hard to imagine China being anything other than an air and maritime and space and information problem. It’s not a ground force problem. The irregular war is more labor-intensive.
But this is real departure from the Defense planning of the ‘90s, and I just want to start off with that.
The second point, on Afghanistan, is that OEF, Operation Enduring Freedom, really did demonstrate some of the powers of the new technologies, combining mass and precision with our bombers, for example, and then having an opposition force that could act as a ground force with our Special Forces. And it surprised military planners. I mean, people are kidding you if they’re telling you that we knew we were going to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in two months. It was thought it would take much longer. And so it was dramatic success.
The war in Iraq is something quite different. It is qualitatively different. It is far more of a direct approach. It was a small force by comparison to Desert Storm, but it was still a much, much, much larger force and had great success in the invasion. The problem, then, is the direct occupation and the irregular warfare and how does one win these kinds of wars. And that’s something the department is wrestling with. And again, some technology can be applied to that area, but less so than some of the other areas.
And the final point I’d like to make, just to put out to the discussion is, there’s not one form of irregular warfare. There’s counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, large-scale stability. They all require different concepts, different forces, different technologies, in some degree. The idea that one force does all that is just wrong.
And so there were a number of decisions recently—to expand the Special Operations forces enormously—that will pay a very high dividend. Some believe most of our effort, post-Iraq and -Afghanistan, will be in countries with which the U.S. is not at war, and that’s how we’ll be fighting most irregular warfare, if we’re successful, over the next 20 years. That’s very different than what we’re doing in Iraq today.
SHANKER: The 9/11 commission proposed moving all of the CIA’s paramilitary operations over to the Special Operations Command. Is that a good idea?
VICKERS: No, that was a(n) absolutely abysmal idea.
SHANKER: You know, we’ll call Lee Hamilton—
VICKERS: Yes. Well, I mean, I’ve testified about this before. But you know, periodically we have these silly debates about why do we have four air forces or two paramilitary forces. Well, you know, at least the argument about four air forces has some capital intensity and dollars to it. Paramilitary forces are small change. You can’t even find it in loose drawers at various places in the CIA or in the Pentagon.
Both bring very different things to the table. I mean, looking back at my experience, you know, the—I believe the CIA’s support for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s played a major role in ending the Cold War. It is inconceivable to me the Department of Defense politically could have pulled that off, that we would have done that using that instrument. It’s not that they wouldn’t have the technical skill to do it. It’s just that the Pakistanis would have said, “No way, Jose,” adjusting for Urdu, and—(laughter)—and you know, I think American decision-makers would have paused a little bit about doing that.
And so I think both capabilities are really essential, and they’re actually converging more in the intelligence realm right now. Even though CIA is still the dominant agency, the Special Operations Forces are getting more and more into that field.
SHANKER: A question for both of you. It seems that the pendulum has swung so far that the Army in particular is not even doing high-end conventional warfare training out at the National Training Center. And there’s some concern among the battalion- and brigade-level officers down range, who I spent time with, that while they’re getting better at counterinsurgency, which is the mission today, that they’ve really lost their high-end conventional skills, and it could be some years before, you know, the squad leaders and those get back into that.
How can you—I mean, what should be done? How do you train for counterinsurgency while protecting the other skills? Then we’ll talk about the budget problems next.
VICKERS: Well, our ground—our general-purpose ground forces, the Army and Marine Corps, are fully engaged right now. And so if their readiness is slipping a bit in the other areas, that’s the price of war.
Over the longer haul, I think the correct direction with them is to move the—to take advantage of some of our technological skill and move the meter a little bit, if you will, more toward the irregular spectrum—that is, in terms of equipment, in terms of the vehicles that provide force protection, in terms of the training and skills sets and organization—because irregular warfare is probably going to be the dominant business for ground forces, but they still may have to project large-scale land power against a conventional adversary. And if that adversary has nuclear weapons, which more likely as we look out ahead—now, we may choose not to do this route because they have nuclear weapons—then you’ll need very skilled ground forces at that. And it’s exactly the opposite—you know, if you’re faced with weapons of mass destruction, you have to disperse and do all sorts of things to protect yourself that are not a good idea facing a regular threat, you know, where then you can have a lot of ankle-biters attacking you.
And so it will be a significant challenge for the ground forces to manage these two tensions over a couple-decade period.
The one big lesson, I think, that’s come out of the Iraq experience is that the notion that you can just have a fenced portion of the ground forces to do these kinds of irregular warfare—say, one division or two divisions, as we talked about in the 1990s and, some still argue, just is not sufficient—I mean, the Iraq war is consuming our entire ground force, and if you look at other countries where we could get involved, the population is larger, territory is larger. And so what the size of the ground force should be and how much risk one should be willing to take is a central issue for debate. But the idea that you could just specialize in some area, I think, is a non-starter.
BOOT: I—you know, I basically agree with Mike’s points. I think it’s a question of getting the balance right, because you don’t want to have a force that’s exclusively designed to fight only conventional high-end wars or one exclusively designed only to fight low-end counterinsurgencies.
I mean, you have to do some of both, but I think right now we have such dominance at the high end of warfare, we can afford to, as Mike suggests, to move the needle a little bit and increase our competences in irregular, which is our greatest weakness at the moment. We don’t need as many troops to defeat a conventional adversary as we once did. I mean, to this extent the kind of technological vision of defense transformation that we heard so much about in the 1990s is right to this extent, which is that you can go to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 with very few troops. You don’t need that many tanks to defeat a Republican Guard because we have all of this precision firepower you can pull in from all these different long-range platforms, many provided by the Navy and the Air Force. So you don’t need as much of the Army and Marine Corps devoted to regular conventional high-end combat. They can still get the job done even with a smaller force structure.
Were you need boots and where you have a desperate need for boots on the ground, we don’t have enough, is in policing a country like Iraq or Afghanistan because you can take Baghdad with 140,000 troops. You can probably take it with fewer than 140,000 troops, but you can’t hold a country of 26 million people with 140,000 troops. And we’ve never had enough boots on the ground in part because I think the Department of Defense bought into this very technological vision of transformation, where you would get—where you would use capital instead of labor, that you would get rid of soldiers or not increase the number of soldiers and do more with less by using information technology. And now we’re seeing the limitations of that because information technology cannot pacify a country, cannot run a counterinsurgency campaign, for that you still need people, and you need not only a lot of people, but you need the right kinds of people. I mean, you need people who are skilled in foreign languages and cultures that understand counterinsurgency, human intelligence, state building—all these skills that have been in such short supply in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I think it’s an urgent matter for us to increase the number of people on the armed services and at other agencies of government who have those skills. And if that means giving up some of the expertise that we have on the high-end of warfare, I think we can afford to do that at the margins and not take a huge risk going forward.
SHANKER: But the administration came in really talking about a revolution in military affairs. They were going to not invest against current risk to buy weapons against future risk. I hear you saying that’s the wrong strategy.
BOOT: I think it is a wrong strategy, and what I’ve seen over the course of the four years that I’ve been writing book is sort of a transformation of the idea of defense transformation. Because when I started writing this book in 2002, defense transformation was a very techno-centric concept, as I was just explaining a second ago, of using capital instead of labor and thinking about how we were going to utilize these wonderful technologies coming down the road 20 or 30 years from now to face possible future adversaries.
Well, right now we’ve seen the limitations of those technologies, and we realize that we can’t make do with as few troops as we have and that to wage war successfully in the information age, the different kinds of wars, you still need a lot of people as well as a lot of technology. You have to combine the two, and you have to make use of both. And it’s in the people area that we’re weak because we have tremendous men and women in the armed services, but we don’t have enough of them, and they’re not necessarily trained in the right kind of competencies that we have, that we need to have. And now, I think there’s much more of a recognition within the Department of Defense that transformation has to be cultural transformation, organizational transformation, transforming the kind of skill sets that we have.
But right now what I see is largely the sort of intellectual realization that we have to do this. I’m not sure that I see it actually being carried out to the extent that it ought to be. And I mean, Mike is absolutely right to commend the QDR, which I think was a very good document, but it’s completely at odds with the actual budget that the Department of Defense has, which is all going into, you know, F-22s and Virginia Class Submarines and new nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and all this other stuff. And I’m not saying we ought to cancel all those systems, but we need to do more to implement some of the recommendations in the QDR about increasing our competency for irregular warfare.
SHANKER: Well, in fact, if you walk the halls of the Pentagon today, you see lots of hand-written algebraic equations, which are the demands of the global war on terror are greater than the requirement put out in the QDR and that both of those are greater than the money available today. And that puts down some very tough choices.
VICKERS: That’s why I think it requires a new approach to the defense portfolio. But there have been competing ideas in transformation. One of them is that it is really—and it was technology-centric and focused against high-end competitors; I mean, Max’s charges are correct. But the dominant school has really been Network-centric warfare, and that is that you take precision, information technologies, and you just make everything better in the force and you wire it together.
Well, one of the realizations is not only does that not help you very much in this irregular warfare quadrant, but it’s probably the wrong force to deal with a rising China. And so it’s not an issue of skipping a generation or the current generation, it’s do I have a long-range Air Force or a short-range Air Force? And around the world, when I look at these problems—and do I need really different Air Forces for the war on terror problem versus the China problem? And I would argue, clearly, you do. You need stealth in one case; balloons will do a real good job—or very cheap UAVs for ungoverned areas in another case. It’s just the sensor that matters. And so thinking about the portfolio in that way really, really does matter enormously.
I don’t think—and again, now, on the size of the armed forces—one can’t fight the last war under regular warfare just as much as you can’t in conventional warfare, and so you got to look out ahead at what might happen. Now, clearly, there are some circumstances at the extreme end of things where we would mobilize our Reserve component and keep them mobilized as long as we needed to if something really horrific happened in a big country—we were hit by weapons of mass destruction in the United States, and we were going to purge that country of that and change the government—that might require a huge force.
Look around the world. There are some countries seven times the size of Iraq in population—you’re not going to get there by a hundred thousand increase in the active force or anything else. And some are two and a half times the size; some are more than that. And so the question is, if I’m going to do that on a sustained basis, (on an irregular ?)—those countries start to come apart. They don’t hit the United States with a smuggled nuclear weapon, but they just have state failure. Well, am I going to mobilize the National Guard forever, then, for that kind of war or am I going to rely on the locals a lot? I think we’re going to rely on the locals a lot to fight these civil wars. That doesn’t mean you don’t need a big ground force. You do, but you have to bound the problem in some way against real contingencies.
SHANKER: Perhaps the American military, though, to pick up on what you just said, got the concept of net warfare wrong.
Hezbollah fought Israel with net warfare, but they used donkeys to run the messages, they used runners. They dispersed their weapons; they popped up, they fired them, and they held a vastly superior military at bay to at least a political victory if not a military victory by combining the best of a shadowy terrorist cell, the best of a state power with access to state weapons and the best of net warfare. They did it cheaply and well. Why can’t we do it a little less cheaply and better?
VICKERS: Well, we can, and that’s part of the problem here, is to impose costs on this kind of adversary. The Salafi side of it—the al Qaeda or radical Islam—it’s really not a network; it’s more of a franchise or a spreading of ideas these days—but the kind of network and coalition of nations that one would use to fight that has nothing to do with carrier battle groups, large army divisions, unless you have a big state failure in a certain place. It requires advisers, trainers, intel people, working with locals in 90 countries, surveillance, maritime and air surveillance. It’s a very, very different global network, and the QDR is starting to put something like that together in the department—post-QDR. But that’s only one of our problems.
You know, and so again, then you have internal country networks like—we have multiple of them in Iraq, where then you need a different force for that. So—
BOOT: Well—
SHANKER: So you’re going to jump in here? Please.
BOOT: Well, part of—I mean, I think part of it goes to organizational structure. And I was at the Naval Academy yesterday and talking about this with some folks there, and one of the officers was joking that the real disadvantage—or the real advantage that al Qaeda has is they don’t require travel orders to go outside the AOR, that they are—(laughs, laughter)—that they are in many ways much more flexible than we are, because they don’t have all this bureaucracy. They can just go out and do stuff, and they don’t have to get sign-offs and 20 layers of command, appropriations from Congress, authority from, you know, all these different agencies; they just go out and do it, and that gives them tremendous flexibility.
Now, you mentioned—you know, you mentioned the experience in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, and I have a chapter in my book on that. And what really—I was interviewing some of these Green Berets who were actually operating on the ground in Afghanistan, and what really struck me is—I mean, we’ve heard so much about the amazing ways in which they were able to combine high technology, precision air strikes called in with laser designators and satellite radios and all these other things, combining those with, you know, ground forces who were riding ponies. I mean, it was just sort of—you had this high-tech and low-tech combination that was very successful, and that got a lot of the attention. But when I was talking to the Green Berets, one of the things that they pointed out to me that they thought was really key to the success was the fact that there were no plans for fighting in Afghanistan. There weren’t large U.S. units around, there weren’t elaborate procedures drawn up. Everything was done sort of on the fly.
And after 9/11 happened, they were called in by their commanders and said, okay—they were given five PowerPoint slides, basically said, okay, your mission is to clear the Taliban and get al Qaeda. Go out and figure out how to do it. And they get in there, they don’t know anything what’s going on, they just have to improvise. And they had—I mean, these are tremendous men in the Special Forces, of whom Mike was one at one point, and they have tremendous smarts, tremendous improvisational ability. And they were basically just set loose from this bureaucracy, which too often they feel micromanages what they do. And they were allowed almost complete leeway because the country was so fired up after 9/11, they were allowed to do almost anything. And they were tremendously successful because they were improvising, they were taking advantage of this technology, but using their smarts to figure out how to make the best advantage of that technology and not go according to preset war plans or what an elaborate bureaucratic procedure would draw up.
And one of the points that they made to me was, you know, part of the problems that we’re having in Afghanistan since the fall of 2001—obviously, it’s a very different mission where you’re trying to defend a government instead of overthrow one, and that is necessarily more manpower intensive and all that. But, I mean, one of the things they complain about is, you know, the regular military has moved in with the PX’s and the paperwork and all the other support structures, and it’s just kind of slowing down our rate of operation; everything is just a little bit slower than it was. And so it’s very hard to keep up with this very fast-moving adversary when you have all this bureaucracy weighing you down.
So I think, you know, it’s imperative to—when you talk about creating a network, it’s imperative that we try to slim down all the bureaucracy that we have, but it’s very hard to do because it’s taken us, you know, six decades to build it up to the point where it is now, and you can’t get rid of it over night.
SHANKER: In fact, if you spend time in Iraq down range with the combat troops, those who are out in the field on the point edge look with great disregard at all the headquarters units back at the Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs, and they call them “fobbits” and they never go outside the wire—
BOOT: Right. I was talking to one Special Forces officer in Iraq who took me to this giant chow hall at one of these giant U.S. bases where, you know, you go at lunch, it’s as big as an airplane hangar and it’s completely full. And the guy was just saying, “What are all these people doing here? Their only mission is to turn food into”—well, I’ll use the euphemism—“excrement.”
SHANKER: Right. Before I turn the questions over to the audience, I wanted to ask one sort of final question from here at this stage.
For those of us who were covering the Pentagon before Rumsfeld showed up, it was amazing to look at weapon systems and proposals that suddenly had to be redrawn with the word “transformation” at the top. I mean nothing changed, but they had to put the incantation on top of the weapon system or the idea.
Is it time at last to either ban the word “transformation,” ban the phrase, “revolution in military affairs,” either that or say that it failed?
BOOT: Well, I would hate it if you would ban the phrase “revolution in military affairs” because it’s all over my book! So I would hate to have my book censured.
But I think what we need to do is to—I mean, what you’re reacting against, and I think quite properly, is the extent to which transformation became sort of a joke and it became kind of this bureaucratic game. But I think it’s a mistake to fixate too much on that and lose sight of the underlying reality, which is that there is a transformation going on.
I mean, when you think about—one of the biggest transformations, which we haven’t talked about, is simply the vastly increased capabilities of small groups to cause damage. I mean, just think about the damage that was caused on 9/11 by 19 guys armed with box cutters whose entire budget wouldn’t buy you one F-22. They killed more Americans than the entire Imperial Japanese Navy did in 1941. We’re seeing the proliferation of destructive technology to the extent that these insurgent groups are no longer ankle-biters, they can take off your entire ankle, or your torso, too. And they’re able to operate all around the world essentially because of the technologies that we, ourselves, have created, whether it’s the Internet or cell phones, satellite phones, jumbo jets—they’re taking advantage of all of this to wage what to my mind is really the first global insurgency, this jihad that they’re able to wage all around the world.
So it is a growing threat. It is not something we can just consign to a backwater and say, “We’re going to focus on conventional missions. We’re going to keep doing business the way we’ve been doing business,” because this is no longer the kind of threat it was in the Philippines or even in Vietnam or all these previous insurgencies that we faced, this is really an existential threat. And I think we don’t have the right kind of structure in the U.S. government to confront that threat. So it is absolutely imperative that we continue to transform and we think about the ramifications of this revolution in military affairs, this information revolution, because many of the ramifications are working out against us; our adversaries are being more successful than we are in taking advantage of information technology, largely, I would argue, because they have a structure, a setup, an organization that’s better suited for the information age than we are.
I mean, in some ways the U.S. government is kind of the General Motors or the Ford, one of these sclerotic old corporations, whereas al Qaeda is sort of the eBay of terrorism. And that’s the threat we have to face and that’s how we have to think about transformation; not just technology, but the organization.
SHANKER: Love to hear questions from the audience. I know that many of you have worked these issues. I ask that you wait for a microphone and that you identify yourself before you ask your question.
Yes, sir?
Q I’m Hans Binnendijk from the National Defense University. I have a question for Max Boot with regard to sort of the lessons of history. And it has to do with strategic ambition.
If you look at the Sweden of Charles XII, or France of Napoleon, or Germany during the ‘30s and ‘40s, you find that these military advantages that you have written about—and you’re right, it’s technology, it’s organizational structure, it’s operational concepts, and they give you significant advantage, but they’re often short-lived, as you indicated. But the possessors of this military advantage have historically, at least in those three cases, overstretched because they didn’t realize the limits of that military advantage that they had gained at least temporarily.
And so what does that tell us today? If my analysis is correct, what does that tell us about strategic ambition?
BOOT: Well, that’s a very good point. And certainly that is one of the lessons that I draw in the book, is that it’s incredibly important to take advantage of these revolutions in military affairs and to create the kind of military that can harness technology in the right ways and the right period. But then once you’ve done that, you also have to be very wise in how you employ that military, and you have to be very careful to avoid giving it missions for which it is not designed.
And you’re absolutely right that many of the great innovators in history—and I write, for example, about Gustavus Adolphus and the Germans in the late 19 th century. Many of them became overly ambitious. And for example, one of the battles that I write about is the Battle of Koniggratz in 1866, which was one of the pivotal battles in the rise of a modern unified Germany, where tiny Prussia beat the much larger Austrian Empire, largely by utilizing railroads and telegraphs and the other industrial technologies of the day and moving much faster than Austria, being able to mobilize faster, move troops faster and knock them out with a single blow.
Well, that worked very well against Austria, but then in 1914, the Germans tried it against both France and Russia and it didn’t work so well. The Schlieffen Plan failed because they were biting off more than they could chew. And that’s the huge danger that any country confronts.
And I think to some extent we’ve been the victims of hubris since the Gulf War of 1991 because we saw—the Gulf War was obviously one of the most lopsided military victories of all time, in large part because we had been so successful in transforming the military to incorporate information technology, but also all the organizational structures you needed, the all-volunteer force, Goldwater-Nichols, training centers, all the rest of it.
And so we did tremendously well, lost very few people. And we did very well again in Bosnia and Kosovo, where we had these sort of push-button wars with no casualties. And I think it certainly did breed a certain amount of hubris, where we got to thinking that this was the norm, not the aberration. And I think it kind of—with some of the transformation talk in the 1990s, it kind of created the sense of we would have effortless hegemony going forward, simply by utilizing all of our wonderful technology.
Well, what we’re seeing now is what usually happens, which is that competitors don’t stand still. They either copy your technology or find tactics that negate your technological advantage. And that’s exactly what we’re facing, what so many other great powers in the past have faced. And the question now is, can we innovate tactically and organizationally to deal with the challenges that are being presented to us?
SHANKER: You mentioned the Gulf War of ‘91. I noticed with great interest that James Baker last week said nobody asks him anymore why they didn’t go after Saddam.
Yes, sir?
QUESTIONER: Hi. Tom Davis, retired U.S. Army, currently General Dynamics. Just two quick metrics that I think are kind of in the background of all the discussion here.
One, if an Army recruiter has a successful month—this is a successful month—he’ll put one young man or woman on the bus to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The reason that that’s a successful month is that, of the people in the cohort out there that you’re trying to recruit—after you take out those who go to college, those who have other aspirations, those who are not medically or otherwise qualified—you’ve got to recruit, like, one out of three of those people.
So the fundamental problem we face is, if we’re going to have boots on the ground, if we’re going to have large forces and so forth, we’ve got a hard time coming up with that under our current recruitment policies and our current philosophy on doing it, which leaves us with basically a choice between substituting capital for labor, because the capital and technology we have; the labor we seemingly don’t.
So do either of you, based upon what you’ve been saying, see that we’re going to have to fundamentally readdress the ways and the philosophies under which we currently raise the current force? Because I think we’re at the limit of what we can do right now.
SHANKER: As someone who wore green, what do you think?
VICKERS: I do—I mean, personnel costs with the all-volunteer force is something that is definitely on the minds of Defense planners, as you look at alternative scenarios.
And again, if you just step aside from that, if you thought a draft would be politically feasible or anything else, you just look at some of the contingencies we’d have, and you need different approaches. You know, if you have large state failure, you better take advantage of locals. I mean, you’re just not going to do it yourself.
If you have a distributed global problem, as we do with radical Islamists, again, the best way to fight that is to harness lots of locals and add—it doesn’t necessarily mean technology. I mean, it may be labor and technology that we supply, but in a very distributed and smaller footprint for action, and particularly, again, for countries with which we’re not at war.
And so I do think there’s upper limits on the size of the force, in a number of ways, driven by the realistic appraisal of the challenges as well as the economic incentives we have here at home.
BOOT: If I can just—
SHANKER: Yes, please, Max.
BOOT: I mean, one—I mean, Mike O’Hanlon of Brookings and I had an op-ed in The Washington Post last week that offered one possible way out of this dilemma, at least on a small scale, which is to lift the current requirement that you have to be a permanent resident with a green card in order to enlist. I mean, we already have a number of non-citizens in the U.S. armed forces who have performed very well, and we’ve even had some illegal aliens who got in illegally.
But what Mike and I propose is to enlist some people who are either illegal aliens here now or would like to come here, and want to be immigrants and, in return for a term of service, would get American citizenship, which would fill two pressing needs that we have at the moment. One is simply the manpower need. And this would obviously only be, you know, a relatively limited number of troops, but they could still expand our recruiting base tremendously with highly motivated immigrants who want to be Americans and would be good Americans down the line.
But the other need it would fill, which is also, I think, crucial, is the need for better understanding of foreign languages and cultures, which is one of the huge weaknesses that we face. And you know, anybody who’s spent any time in Iraq will tell you that, you know, when you have Arab-American soldiers, they are worth their weight in gold. They are much more valuable than M-1s or F-16s, because they can communicate with the locals. You know, we haven’t really had a program to recruit people who can bridge these cultural differences that we have with other societies.
And so if we recruit some immigrant soldiers, I think that could solve some of our problems. And you could actually do it, by the way, without any legislation, because under current Title X authority, the secretary of Defense has the right to waive the green card requirement for recruitment.
SHANKER: Two points. One, that’s your only allowable reference to The Washington Post before you mention The New York Times. (Laughter.)
Point two. One of the issues about the draft—there’s no senior military leader who wants the draft to come back. But when you do spend time with the troops down range, as patriotic as they are and as the—their desire to salute and march forward, they are very frustrated when they hear the political leaders back here talk about a nation at war. From where they sit, there’s a military at war and a nation that doesn’t know it’s at war.
Ma’am, you had a question?
QUESTIONER: Yes.
SHANKER: Third row. Right here.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Pauline Baker from the Fund for Peace. I have a question for both of the panelists. Max, would you give us organizationally what your priority top two or three innovations would be to solve this problem? Obviously, it’s going to take decades, but what would you do now, specifically, to really start the kind of transformation that you recommend?
And Michael, you keep saying we have to use locals if you have large state failure. What does that mean? Does that mean contra-type or Afghan-type operations, where you take local people within the country that may be insurgents themselves and try and co-opt them? Or do you mean by that, start really training either U.N. or regional peacekeeping groups, and what would be the priorities on that?
BOOT: Well, I think my priority would be to do something about the cookie-cutter personnel system we have, which forces everybody to move from job to job to job every two to three years within the armed services, which makes it very hard to build up expertise in very complex subjects, especially foreign cultures. I think we need to have some kind of personnel system that rewards people who understand foreign languages and cultures in the same way that we reward people who are good combat leaders today, because right now we do have experts in the U.S. armed forces—for example, the foreign area officers—but traditionally, becoming a FAO has been a fast path to career suicide, and I think we have to change that. We have to incentivize our people in the armed services and really throughout government to spend time on the ground in foreign societies and cultures and really soak up that knowledge because I think that’s one of the crucial deficiencies that we face in the war on terror.
So that—I would say, that would be the number one thing that I would recommend, but it’s very, very hard to do to change this personnel system, which has been built up over the course of a hundred years, and to not have everybody have to constantly rotate is—there have been a few small moves in that direction, but to really shake things up is going to be a massive upheaval within the organizational culture of the armed services.
VICKERS: The use of locals really is very dependent on contingencies. So if you’re trying to find al Qaeda terrorists around the world, you really have no choice. I mean, you may play a significant role in some cases with signals intelligence or unilateral human intelligence, clandestine human intelligence, but you’re almost certainly going to arrest the people and in many cases find them with local police or intelligence forces of some kind or another. I mean, the problem is just too daunting. It’s a 1.2 billion sea that really swims in a larger sea than that, and there’s just no other operational alternative.
Then, if you looked at state failure in larger countries with larger populations—I mean, don’t want to say this—too much, but Pakistan, 150 million people. If we didn’t ally with friendly Pakistanis, it’s just not a workable solution under—you know, unless we mobilize American society to do it.
Now, as far as bringing in others into the fight, that’s very—everybody wants to do that, and you always here this, “Where are our allies and stuff?” It’s very problematic in irregular warfare. The people with the biggest dog in the fight are the locals involved directly in intra-state conflict. Then perhaps a great power like us that wants order in the area and is taking responsibility has the next biggest stake in it. Others—I mean, asking the Indians to go and die on a protracted basis for something where they don’t have a vital interest has been doomed to failure, and I think it will continue to be doomed for failure.
I mean, it’s something that successive administrations keep trying to do. There’s been things like Global Peace Operations Initiative or others, you know. Can we contract soldiers out from around the world? And I just think that it’s rubbing up against that problem, that, you know, they’re not going to—you know, if we’re having a problem sustaining forces to fight and die for that, why would you expect any other country, other than the locals, who have less interest to do that?
SHANKER: But Michael, how do you mitigate the risk when you use indigenous forces? Afghanistan, OEF, perfect example. Our Afghan allies fought very well up to Tora Bora, and then, if the public narrative is true—and Sean Naylor’s (sp) here; he’ll back me up on this—the backdoor was left open by our Afghan allies. In Pakistan today—Pakistan’s been a very important ally, but the Northwest Territories are a safe haven, so how do we get that right?
VICKERS: Well, again, I mean, I don’t believe—I have to say, I don’t believe the Tora Bora myth. I mean, it took us three years to find Zarqawi in Iraq, where we had 140,000 troops, and we were hunting him day and night and it’s flat as a pancake, and there’s urban cities and that’s it. So the idea that you’re going to do this in the white mountains of—you know, and it was simply because someone let him get away, I just don’t subscribe to that. We have a hard time finding people in North Carolina; you know, it takes us five years. So I just think that’s a big myth that’s been perpetuated, but just operationally not credible.
Again, Pakistan is a critical ally in the war on terror, but life’s not perfect. But again, what’s the alternative—invade the Northwest Frontier Provinces? Good luck. You know—and so there’s a—you know, there’s a time and place. But the question is: If we’re going to rally a lot of the world in—against Islamic terrorism, we’re going to have to rely on the locals. There simply is no alternative. And I mean, anything else, I think, is just wishful thinking.
BOOT: If I could just quickly put in a plug for my immigrant soldiers idea, because I think it actually addresses some of the concerns being raised here about the dependability of locals and whether you can even get foreign troops to support you, because it’s obviously very hard to do if you’re asking foreign governments, but it’s actually a lot easier to do if you’re just recruiting foreigners directly into your own armed forces. And I think we need to think about that model, which is one that all great powers in the past have followed and which the British still use, for example, with the Gurkhas, who are a tremendously valuable part of the British Army. That’s something we need to think about, I think, importing into our own system.
SHANKER: And you can’t enter the Green Zone without—in Baghdad without seeing the Nepalese.
BOOT: Right.
SHANKER: A question here in front. And I guess I should ask again whether we should ban “revolution in military affairs,” right?
QUESTIONER: Thanks. I’m John Hillen, and I work at the State Department. What role should Congress play and what role could Congress play? In the past, they’ve spurred some innovation or taken a—you know, or some parts of Congress, like in your experience, Mike, have taken an entrepreneur role that made something possible that might not have otherwise been—Defense Reform Caucus of the ‘80s, Goldwater-Nichols, all those sorts of things. Do we see that there’s a similar zeitgeist out there on the Hill to help—and I agree with all of you; you know, working in one of these large institutions which are not structured for self-reform, can they help? And do you see any of that coming?
VICKERS: Do you want to—
BOOT: Well, I certainly think, obviously, Congress could help. I mean, the question you have to confront is, are they going to help? I mean, that’s the big issue. And they have helped in the past.
I mean, just a couple of general observations. One is that, I mean, my sense is—I mean, obviously you know, with the campaign Mike was involved in in Afghanistan, you know, Charlie Wilson was a tremendous driver of change, at least according to George Crile’s book.
But by and large, when I look at kind of defense reformations of the past and transformations of the past, by and large, the most successful pressure has not come from the outside. And it has not even come from those who are the most maverick rebels within the ranks of the armed services. I mean, for example, look at the ‘20s and ‘30s, where you had folks like J.F.C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart and Billy Mitchell running around, basically screaming bloody murder about how stupid the defense establishment was and how they were a bunch of troglodytes and had their heads in the sand. And sorry for mixing all these metaphors, but I mean, that was the charge that they were making.
And they got a lot of publicity and are still very famous, but as agents of change, they actually weren’t that effective. I mean, Billy Mitchell managed to pretty much alienate the entire U.S. military establishment along—towards—by the time he got court-martialed.
A more successful model of change and one that I look at a little bit in the book is Admiral William Moffett, who is not very well remembered but was the architect of the U.S. naval air arm. And he wasn’t somebody who was making front-page accusations about how the leadership was treasonous and how everything had to be transformed and all this kind of stuff. He was working for change very effectively behind the scenes with Congress and with the naval establishment, lobbying and pushing through aircraft carriers, but he wasn’t saying in the way that Billy Mitchell was that, you know, the airplane is going to replace every other branch of the armed services; you can just get rid of the Army; bombers are going to win the next war. He wasn’t saying that about aircraft carriers. He was selling the aircraft carriers to the admirals by saying they’re going to be a complement to the traditional battle line, they’re going to help the battleship, they’re not going to displace the battleship.
So he was very skillful in how he was able to push change within the system without alienating too many people. And he was able to use powerful allies on Capitol Hill to reinforce that message.
So I don’t know exactly how that applies to the challenges you face now, John, and others in the administration. But I think that’s something to think about, is that it’s very often not the most outspoken outsiders and rebels who are the most influential, that you can get change kind of by working smoothly within the system.
SHANKER: A question in back. All the way to the back, please.
QUESTIONER: Michael Gillette, retired World Bank and a Vietnam veteran. We killed a lot of our troops in Vietnam because their platoon commanders and company commanders were perennially undergoing on-the-job training. Why? Because Westmoreland and McNamara made a strategic choice to limit the tour in Vietnam to one year.
I believe that Abizaid and Rumsfeld have made the same choice in Iraq. The question to you is, is leaving our professional armed forces in theater for the duration a strategic question which is on the table?
VICKERS: I think you hit the nail on the head, which is “strategic.” And that is, would we have a different outcome right now if we had just said, you know, you’re in Iraq till we win, and so three and a half years later, the same force is there. I’m not convinced we would. And so I don’t think in that sense it’s strategic.
Now, in cases of transformation, which play out over longer periods of time in irregular warfare—which tend to be very protracted—you know, if you got a good horse, you like to keep it in terms of a commander or—Admiral Moffett, for instance, had his job for 12 years, and that’s very rare in today’s military. But even there, if I can say, okay, I’ve found my good general, I’ve found my Grant, as you hear pundits talk about a lot of times, you better get the strategy right. And you better get the—and first and foremost in irregular warfare, you better understand the politics. If you don’t understand the politics, everything else flows from that.
And so no great general, no keeping foreign legions there for 10 years is going to change that outcome if you screw up those first two things. And then, of course, there are serious hardships that occur from doing that. You know, you can do some things for World War II, and irregular warfare doesn’t usually rise to that level, and so—
SHANKER: And we have an all-volunteer force today, which you have to sustain.
VICKERS: And we have an all-volunteer force—right.
BOOT: Right. I agree with all that. And it’s very hard, obviously, to ask volunteers to stay indefinitely, because then you’re perhaps seriously impacting your retention and recruiting.
But at the same time, I think we need to have greater flexibility to ask for volunteers who might be willing to serve a little bit longer, and there has been some of that. I mean, General Casey has been there certainly longer than a year.
But one of the things that strikes me about the current way we’re fighting the war is we still have very much the peacetime personnel system, which is that you do your tour and you leave. And some commanders are incredibly successful in Iraq, and some are not so successful, but whether you’re successful or not, you still leave.
And so—for example, we had General Petraeus, who was one of the most successful division commanders we had. He was very—he was doing a good job with standing up Iraqi security forces, but now he’s over at Fort Leavenworth. And I mean, he’s doing a valuable job over there, but it’s sort of my sense that we don’t have the same sense of urgency about this war as we did about the Civil War or World War II, where you would have, in the Civil War, for example, brevet promotions, where you would have people who have shown themselves to be outstanding combat leaders instantly vaulted up the chain of command or, you know, given greater responsibility—or in World War II or the Civil War with those who weren’t so competent being fired and new ones being promoted in their place. We haven’t really had any of that. We still have the very much—the peacetime personnel system, and I think it makes it—going back to my issue of organization and structure and bureaucracy, it’s very hard to be successful in wartime with that kind of peacetime model.
SHANKER: And Petraeus may still get another chance.
VICKERS: Yes. I just want to—the one critical personnel issue that I really think there is in Iraq, and that is, is the incentive system and the numbers that we can put between those in an advisory role, working to help the Iraqis win the fight, and those that are in main force units. And if—you know, you’re a Vietnam veteran, you certainly may remember that trade-off.
We actually did a better job in some cases in Vietnam on that score, particularly late in the war, than we’ve done to date. And, you know, I believe we need twice as many advisers as we have there right now. I think one of the reasons we have with the police—I mean, other than the reflection of the politics of the society—is our advisers are very underrepresented with the police compared to the Iraqi army, and then the incentive systems. If you look at—God bless our advisers. They’re doing the best they can in Iraq with the job they’re given, but these aren’t the water walkers of the U.S. military that are getting these jobs. And a friend of mine cynically said—a Vietnam veteran—said, “Well, when are we going to get our best people in Iraq as advisers?” And the answer is when that’s the only game in town. And that’s how you—if you want to get promoted, this is the great job to have because it’s the only way to go to Iraq and see—and make a decisive difference, and then the incentive system will shift. Well, that’s kind of a sad commentary on our bureaucracy and our ability to adapt to change.
SHANKER: But the other problem with the trainers—it’s an end strength question. To fit General Dempsey’s current requirement for training teams, they had to break apart a full combat brigade of the 1 st Infantry. And if they want to increase trainers, they have to break apart another combat brigade at a time when they barely have enough to sustain the mission.
VICKERS: Well, I hate to be, you know, brutally honest here, but that suggests we weren’t prepared for this mission that we have. It’s clearly a terrible idea to have to—you know, what do trainers and advisers require? They require experienced people—NCOs and officers.
If you don’t have them when you start, you either dip into the Reserve component or you break up units—you take the leadership away, and you leave the privates behind. That’s a terrible solution. If you think you’re going to be in this business longer term, you ought to start fencing this. We’re starting to do this. The Marine Corps just stood up a foreign military training unit, but we’re really at the infant stages. I mean, Iraq is just a response to a problem right now; it’s not institutionalized.
SHANKER: But the best trainers have always been in the Special Forces. There aren’t enough of them.
VICKERS: And there are not enough of them, and we’re trying to expand them.
SHANKER: Yeah. Again, all the way in the back.
QUESTIONER: Umit Enginsau—with NTV Television. I think when we talk about unconventional warfare, we still spoke a little bit about a distinction between the attacking and the defending sites. In today’s conference in Iraq and Afghanistan possibly, the United States is on the offensive, while the insurgents are on the defensive side. And unfortunately, irregular gives an advantage to the defending side because, after all, the United States, as the attacker or on the—the one on the offensive side, it needs to root-out or defeat the insurgency, while the insurgency on the defensive side needs only to resist. Because if they continue to resist, if they do not lose over a long time, they could at least win the psychological war.
So given the examples of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the given situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, do you think that no matter what you do to improve your irregular warfare capabilities, do you think it’s at all possible to destroy an insurgency against a determined enemy without resorting to major atrocities against civilian populations supporting that insurgency?
Thank you.
VICKERS: Yes, it is possible. I mean, the aphorism that all insurgents have to do is stay in the game to win also applies to counterinsurgents, and insurgents lose more often than they win historically. The U.S. faced a very formidable insurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s—El Salvador was on the brink of collapse in 1980-1981—and defeated that insurgency. It took 12 years, it took changes in the Cold War, it took changes in government in Nicaragua to finally to make it peter out. But the U.S. and Salvadorans, more appropriately, actually defeated, and then brought the insurgents into the mainstream political process.
These are protracted affairs, but they’re very dependent on politics, I mean, and that’s really what determines whether an external power gives up the ghost and then that’s the catalyst that causes the change in the war or the government just stays—you know, stays. I mean, again, all you have to look at is recent insurgencies. Why did al Qaeda go to attacking the United States? Because they got beat in Egypt and Algeria and other places. And so then they became a bunch of expats who—you know, and why Zawahiri would go on vacation to Chechnya after getting kicked out of Egypt is beyond me, but there you have it.
SHANKER: Well, the number of hands that are still up as we end our time today shows the importance of our topic. I want to thank everyone for coming and for interest, and before we adjourn, I wanted to give our speakers a chance to—for a final summary comment.
BOOT: Well, I thank all of you for coming. I mean, I think these are incredibly important issues, and I’m delighted to have been on this panel with Mike who’s done such wonderful thinking on all these subjects. And that’s my summary.
SHANKER: All right. Great.
VICKERS: Buy Max’s book. It’s a great book. (Laughter.)
SHANKER: Right. Thank you all very much.
BOOT: Thank you, Mike. (Applause.)
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